SOURCE: Wellek, René. “The Early Romantics in Germany.” In A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950: The Romantic Age, pp. 74-109. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.

[In the following excerpt, Wellek discusses the critical perspectives of Schelling, Novalis, Wackenroder, and Tieck.]

SCHELLING

Kant is usually considered the fountainhead of German aesthetics, but one could argue that the German romanticists never adopted Kant's main position; certainly they do not share his cautious temper and his conservative taste. When in 1796 F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854) drew up his program of a new philosophy, he completely ignored Kant's distinction between epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. He put forward the grandiose claim that the idea of beauty, taken in the higher Platonic sense, “unites all other ideas.” “I am convinced,” he says, “that the highest act of reason is the aesthetic act embracing all ideas and that truth and goodness are made kindred only in beauty. The philosopher must have as much aesthetic power as the poet. Poetry thus assumes a new dignity; it becomes what it was in the beginning—the teacher of mankind: for there is no philosophy or history any more; poetry alone will outlive all other sciences and arts.”¹ “Poetry” is used here in the all-embracing sense of human creativity, derived from Plato's Symposium. This claim for poetry is then linked with the demand for a “new mythology which would be in the service of ideas, a mythology of Reason.” Ideas must become aesthetic, i.e. mythological, in order to be acceptable to the people, to be effective in the civilizing mission of art which Schelling conceives in terms of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education. This claim for the preeminence of art must not, of course, be confused with later 19th-century aestheticism: it is rather an attempt to abolish all distinctions between art, religion, philosophy, and myth. While Kant was at great pains to distinguish between the good, the true, and the beautiful, Schelling enthrones beauty as the highest value. But his beauty is actually truth and goodness in disguise.

This strange early scheme remained in manuscript until 1917; nevertheless, Schelling's published writings of the next decade expound the same claims for art in a number of crucial passages which impressed the age as the most ambitious formulas for the view of art as revelation, philosophy, religion, and myth. One can distinguish at least three stages in Schelling's views: the conclusion of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) differs from the passages in Bruno (1802); and there is further change (partly a return to the earlier views) in the 14th lecture of Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803) and in a speech, Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur (1807). Meanwhile, however, Schelling had developed a concrete and very full system of aesthetics and poetics in the lectures he gave first at Jena in 1802-03 and repeated in Würzburg in 1804-05. Only a small fragment from them, Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung, was printed in 1802.² They circulated widely in manuscript but were not published until 1859, after Schelling's death. They must be counted as the first speculative poetics, though we must realize that Schelling had access to the Berlin lectures of August Wilhelm Schlegel and drew much of his concrete information from them. For our purposes the MS lectures are clearly the most important document, but something must be said about Schelling's general aesthetics, since his published pronouncements were most influential not only in but even outside of Germany—directly for Coleridge and Cousin, indirectly for Emerson and others.

In principle, Schelling revives neo-Platonism; art is vision or intellectual intuition (a term derived from Giordano Bruno). Both the philosopher and the artist penetrate into the essence of the universe, the absolute. Art thus breaks down the barriers between the real and the ideal world.³ It is the representation of the infinite in the finite,⁴ a union of nature and freedom, for it is both a product of the conscious and the unconscious,⁵ of the imagination which unconsciously creates our real world and consciously creates the ideal world of art.⁶ Schelling's views on the exact relation between philosophy and art shift: at times philosophy and art and truth and beauty are completely identified;⁷ at other times they are conceived of as related like archetype and image,⁸ art being “real” and philosophy “ideal,” despite the fact that art has just been defined as the complete fusion of the “ideal” and the “real.”⁹ Especially in the oration “Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur” Schelling expounds his central conception of art as an analogue of nature and of nature's creative power. Art constitutes an active link between the soul and nature.¹⁰ Art does not imitate nature but has to compete with the creative power of nature, “the spirit of nature which speaks to us only through symbols.” A work of art expresses the essence of nature and is excellent in the degree to which it shows us “this original power of nature's creation and activity, as if in a silhouette.”¹¹ On its lowest level art faithfully represents the “characteristic,” the peculiar nature of the individual object, but it should rise beyond this to true grace and beauty, to the complete reconciliation of all mental powers, to the “certainty that all antithesis is only apparent, that love is the tie between all beings and pure goodness the foundation and content of the whole of creation.”¹² In Nature itself Schelling can see a “poem that lies enclosed in a secret marvelous cipher,” an “Odyssey of the Spirit.”¹³ The poet is, as it were, the liberator of nature and as Novalis said of man in general, the Messiah of Nature.

Only the MS lectures on Philosophy of Art make these conceptions more concrete and relate them to actual literature. In them the role of mythology in Schelling's conception becomes clear. Mythology is the subject matter of art. Just as ideas are the subject of philosophy, so gods are the necessary subject of art.¹⁴ These gods are accessible not through reason but only through imagination.¹⁵ Schelling, of course, thinks primarily of the Greek gods, yet he exalts mythology in general terms as the subject matter of all art. While all art must present the absolute, it can do so only symbolically: mythology is a system of symbols and is therefore art itself. Schelling distinguishes between schematism (the general signifying the particular, as in abstract thought), allegory (the particular signifying the general), and symbolism (the union of the general and the particular), which alone is truly art. This union is achieved in mythology,¹⁶ because in it there is a complete “indifference” of the general and the particular. Venus is beauty; she does not merely signify it. Mythology is the product not of an individual but of the race. True mythology seems to be only Greek mythology, inasmuch as Schelling elaborately argues that Christian mythology is either allegorical or historical. Only Christ is a God, “the last of the ancient Gods,”¹⁷ yet Christ is not a good subject for art because pure suffering is not poetic.¹⁸ Angels also are useless for poetry, for they are unreal, incorporeal, and unconcrete.¹⁹ Only Lucifer is a concrete individuality and he alone comes near being a mythological figure.²⁰ But then, of course, his origins are pagan.

One would think that there is no hope for poetry in the modern world, but actually Schelling does not adhere to a complete exaltation of ancient mythology. The historical elements of the Christian myth are recognized as usable: the apostles, the saints' legends, even the mythology of chivalry. The summit of Christian poetry is in Calderón, whom Schelling ranks above Shakespeare.²¹ Protestantism and modern rationalism are, of course, inimical to mythology and hence to poetry. Milton is condemned as abstract and Klopstock as empty.²² Catholicism is recommended as a necessary element of modern poetry and mythology.²³ By giving a slight shift to the meaning of the term “myth” Schelling is able to grant that some poets have overcome the modern handicaps. Dante, in some cases, has made his historical figures (e.g. Ugolino) mythological.²⁴ Shakespeare has created his own world of myths, and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are truly mythological persons.²⁵ In Faust (then unfinished), the Germans will have a genuine mythological poem. “Mythology” thus does not mean an actual assemblage of Gods: Sancho Panza and Falstaff are not gods, they are true “myths,” for they are universal and concrete, characters meaningful in themselves while remaining eternal symbolic types.

Schelling has hopes for a new mythology: he thinks that the truly creative individual will be able to fashion his own mythology,²⁶ that a new Homer will arise. He will apparently draw on the new physics, i.e. Schelling's own speculative Naturphilosophie, as a source for the final great epic that will realize the identity of philosophy and poetry.²⁷ While Schelling's hopes for the future are distressingly vague, his conception of the close relationship between symbol and myth, his distinction between symbolism and allegory, and his recognition of the mythic in the great figures of modern imagination are insights of striking originality and enduring value.

The discussions of the forms of art which follow are much less valuable. The new distinction between poetry as internal vision and art as external creation is arbitrary and confusing, and the discussions of the corresponding distinctions between the sublime and the beautiful, between the naive and the sentimental, between style and manner are unilluminating because Schelling always decides in favor of the first member of the dichotomy and thus actually dissolves it into a distinction between art and non-art. Naive art is the only good art, the sentimental is pseudo-art, and so with the rest. Nor do we need to follow Schelling's discussions of sculpture, painting, and music, which contain such famous fanciful analogies as the view that “music is a form of sculpture”²⁸ and architecture is “frozen music.”²⁹

Schelling's ingenious genre theory, however, deserves attention. Poetry itself is not differentiated from the other arts except on the obvious ground of medium: language is “ideal,” while the media of the plastic arts—stone, sounds, and colors—are “real.” The genres of poetry, though they all share the general character of art, the union of the finite and the infinite, are distinguished according to their various leanings toward one or the other of these two extremes. Moreover, by an elaborate scheme of involution they correspond to the other arts: the lyric to music, the epic to painting, the drama to sculpture. In the lyric the finite—i.e. the subject, the ego of the poet—predominates. The lyric is the most subjective, individualized genre, the most particular, and in Schelling's classification the nearest to music,³⁰ which also expresses subjective feelings. Within the lyric, however, Schelling prefers the more objective, more formally precise art of the Greeks and the set, conventionalized forms developed by Dante and Petrarch. The epic rises beyond subjective consciousness to the next power of man, action. It is thus an image of history. A balance between the infinite and the finite is achieved; there is no struggle, no fate, in the epic.³¹ It is timeless, or rather “constant” (stätig), indifferent to time. Its actions are chance events: it may have no beginning or end. The poet is detached from his ego, objectively cool toward his world. In short, Schelling succeeds in working into his scheme all the characteristics of the epic as he knew them from the theories of August Wilhelm Schlegel or Humboldt.

Then come the subgenres of the epic: the elegy, the idyll, didactic poetry, and satire. The high position given to didactic poetry is remarkable in that Schelling envisages a new Lucretius, a new summary of man's philosophy, as an ideal for the future.³² Besides these traditional genres, Schelling recognizes chivalric romances as another subgenre. Ariosto is the great exemplar, though Schelling could hardly have known him well, to judge from a gross error he makes.³³ The novel joins the verse romance. Only Don Quixote and Wilhelm Meister are considered true examples, because they alone show objectivity, the use of irony, chance, etc., which Schelling demands from the genre. The English novel is treated with severity. Tom Jones is a mere picture of manners painted in crude colors.³⁴Clarissa, though it shows an objective power of representation, is vitiated by pedantry and diffuseness.³⁵ The short story (Novelle) is then described as a short novel, written in a lyrical manner, grouped around one center.

Schelling, from his mythological point of view, is worried by the absence in modern history of a single “generally valid event” that would be capable of epic treatment. Such an event would have to be general, national, and popular, as was the Trojan war according to his conception. He grants some epic qualities to Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea but has only faint hopes that such individual epics, if grouped around a center, could by synthesis or expansion achieve some final collective totality.³⁶ The Wolfian theory of Homeric origins is used here, surprisingly, to propose a collective epic of the future.

As the last epic genre, Schelling discusses Dante's Divine Comedy. It is an epic sui generis, not a novel or a didactic poem or an epic in the ancient sense, or a comedy or a drama, but the most insoluble of mixtures, and the most perfect interpenetration of all of them. As a species it is the most universal representative of modern poetry; it is the poem of poems.³⁷ Dante's Comedy, besides being a synthesis of religion, science, and poetry, is completely individual; yet it is also universal, generic, timely (in the sense of being characteristically medieval), and eternal. Dante's figures, Schelling admits, are both allegorical and historical, but by virtue of the eternal place in which they are put they assume eternity. Thus not only events and figures which Dante drew from his time (such as the story of Ugolino) but also purely fictional events (such as the end of Ulysses and his companions) assume in the context of the poem mythological certainty. Schelling distinguishes the three realms sharply: the Inferno is dark, sculpturesque, material; the Purgatorio colorful, pictorial; the Paradiso musical, full of bright, white light. But Schelling emphasizes that the three realms collaborate toward a total effect: the work is not plastic, or pictorial, or musical, but all at the same time; not lyrical or epic, or dramatic, but a fusion of all three. It is thus prophetic of modern poetry, since modern poetry is also individual and generic, topical and universal.

Every age, according to Schelling, could and should write its new Divine Comedy: a recommendation which is probably just another version of the hope for a new universal philosophical epic. No wonder that with this conception of Dante, Schelling indignantly rejects³⁸ the view of Bouterwek (in his Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit) that Dante's Comedy is only a gallery of pictures, a series of beautiful or “tasteless” passages. Croce is one of the few critics who have defended Bouterwek,³⁹ since he also wants to distinguish between system and poetry, theological scaffolding and art. But “totality” is Schelling's and the German romantics' watchword, and in the context of earlier Dante criticism Schelling has great merit in dismissing the discussion of what genre the Divine Comedy belongs to and stressing the general structure and unity.

Drama, we can easily anticipate, is in Schelling's scheme a union of the lyric and the epic, a struggle between freedom and necessity in which both come out victorious and defeated.⁴⁰ Necessity triumphs without freedom perishing and freedom triumphs without necessity perishing. Actually this final synthesis of necessity and freedom explains only tragedy. The tragic hero must necessarily be guilty of a crime and at the end he must accept punishment freely. Genuine tragedy is not the punishment of a conscious, deliberate crime but rather the acceptance of punishment by the guiltless guilty; it is the sacrifice of the individual which both asserts moral freedom and restores the moral order. Schelling's theory of tragedy thus differs widely from Kant's, Schiller's, and the Schlegels', and prepares the way for Hegel's. Schelling, of course, has mostly Oedipus Rex in mind, just as, in discussing the Greek tragedians, he clearly prefers Sophocles to the other two. Euripides is severely, though somewhat inconsistently, rebuked for altering the Greek myths too freely.⁴¹

Comedy is seen then as a reversal of the scheme of tragedy: while in tragedy necessity is objective (i.e. in the order of the universe) and freedom subjective (in the moral revolt of the hero), comedy turns the relation around. Necessity is now the subject, freedom the object. If I understand this rightly, Schelling means merely that in comedy, character is fixed and fated, while the world and its order are treated with freedom and irony. Obviously, Aristophanes is Schelling's great example.

Modern dramatic poetry is viewed as a mixture of tragedy and comedy and thus something like a return to the epic. Shakespeare is Schelling's example, and like August Wilhelm Schlegel he decides that in Shakespeare character replaces ancient fate, character becomes fate for the Shakespearean hero.⁴² Shakespeare appears as the greatest inventor of the “characteristic,” and is thus considered deficient in beauty and too close to realism. Schelling shares the view of the Schlegels that Shakespeare was a highly conscious artist, and supports it by a reference to Shakespeare's poems in which he finds tender subjective feelings, clearly and consciously elaborated. There is nothing left of the Storm and Stress view of Shakespeare as a divine savage.

Schelling puts Calderón even higher than Shakespeare: especially the Devoción de la Cruz which he read in A. W. Schlegel's translation. Everything there happens through Providence, through Christian fate, according to which there must be a sinner to demonstrate the power of Divine Grace.⁴³ The fall of man is the involuntary fault of the hero: he must be sacrificed in order to be saved. Likewise in form and execution Calderón seems perfect to Schelling. Only Sophocles is his equal.⁴⁴

Faust is treated, surprisingly, as modern comedy in the highest style. Schelling recognized that Faust (though he knew then only the fragment of 1790) must and will be saved and raised to higher spheres.⁴⁵ Schelling ends his lectures expressing hope for a union of the arts, for a revival of the Greek drama, of which modern opera is only a caricature.⁴⁶ He points, like many Germans of the time, toward the ideal proclaimed by Wagner. But generally speaking, Schelling's ideal of poetry is by no means a romantic confusion of the arts: rather it is a highly stylized collective art, Greek in its austere taste for sculpture and the sculpturesque. In practice, however, Schelling's Hellenism is modified by his appreciation of Dante, Cervantes, Calderón, and Goethe, by his praise of Christian tragedy, by his hope for a new philosophical poem, and his constant recognition of man's continuous myth-making power.

Schelling's Philosophie der Kunst is not always organized with due proportion and shows signs of haste, understandable in writing for lectures. Unfortunately it was not published until 1859, when it could no longer have any direct effect. Yet it had circulated in MS and a Schellingian, Friedrich Ast (1778-1841), in his System der Kunstlehre (1805) gave currency to his ideas. Though Hegel may not have read Schelling's lectures, he starts from Schelling's position and in their different ways so do Schopenhauer and Solger. Coleridge, for a period, was a Schellingian and considered himself chiefly an expounder of Schelling. Emerson sometimes sounds like Schelling, and so does Bergson, who apparently drew on Ravaisson as an intermediary.

NOVALIS

Saintsbury called Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801) not only the “greatest critic among the German romantics,” preferring him to the Schlegels, but also, “in a sense the greatest critic of Germany.”⁴⁷ But this seems extravagant, for Novalis in his theory of poetry is clearly dependent on Schelling, and his concrete criticisms hardly ever go beyond mere aphoristic statements of opinions. Saintsbury, as usual, confuses well phrased pronouncements of literary taste with criticism—forgetting that criticism always demands analysis, explanation, and substantiated evaluation.

Still, Novalis has something personal to say also on poetry; he gives a more mystical twist to Schelling's theory and connects it more clearly with the special conception of poetry as dream and fairy tale. Poetry in Novalis is virtually identified with religion and philosophy, and the poet is exalted beyond any other human being. A sense of poetry, he recognizes, has much in common with a taste for mysticism.⁴⁸ It is thus, like the mystical state, undescribable and undefinable. “Who does not immediately know and feel what poetry is cannot be taught any idea of it.”⁴⁹ At the same time Novalis identifies poetry with free association and with play⁵⁰ (evidently in Schiller's sense) as well as with thinking—since both thinking and writing poetry are the free productive use of our organs⁵¹—and ultimately with truth itself. “Poetry,” he is able to say, “is the truly, absolutely real. That is the core of my philosophy. The more poetic, the truer.”⁵²

If we accept these identifications and expansions of terms, we can understand why Novalis (through the mouth of his poet Klingsohr) can deplore the notion that “poetry has a special name and that poets make up a special guild. It is nothing special. It is the peculiar mode of action of the human spirit. Does not man poeticize and aspire every minute?”⁵³ Poetry, then, is thought, play, truth, aspiration, in short, all of man's free activity. Novalis can then say that “love is nothing but the highest natural poetry,”⁵⁴ and that “the best poetry is quite near to us and an ordinary object is frequently its favorite material,”⁵⁵ and even that “poetry rests wholly upon experience.”⁵⁶ But it would be a total misunderstanding, of course, to interpret these passages as a defense of realism. They merely mean that everything is poetry, that everything can be transformed into poetry and assume poetic and thus cosmic significance. Actually, Novalis expressly condemns “imitation of nature.” His view of poetry is just the opposite.⁵⁷ In practice he exalts the fairy tale as the highest poetic form and wrote totally unrealistic prose himself.

The poet is a priest. “The genuine poet … is always a priest” and the original union of priest and poet should be restored in the future.⁵⁸ The poet is the servant of man's first gods, “of the stars, spring, love, joy, fertility, health and happiness.”⁵⁹ He alone deserves the name of sage. The “genuine poet is omniscient—he is a real world in miniature.”⁶⁰ We should understand that the division of poet and thinker is deceptive. “It is a sign of disease and a diseased constitution.”⁶¹ The poet is the voice of the universe,⁶² and the representative of the genius of humanity.⁶³ These are all old themes of the Platonic tradition, fervently and extravagantly phrased.

Novalis' views seem to me more interesting and more distinct when he defines his conception of poetry and of genres more concretely. Poetry is conceived of as thoroughly symbolical, dreamlike, musical. We must not be deceived by such pronouncements as “the more personal, the more local, the more temporal, the more peculiar a poem, the nearer it is to the center of poetry.” “A poem must be as inexhaustible as a person or a good proverb.”⁶⁴ He refers here only to the peculiarly exact ritual of poetry, the individual and multiple meaning of its symbols, and does not defend local color, realism, or mere personal idiosyncrasy. It is a protest against neoclassical abstractionism and generality. But Novalis speculates that there might be and suggests there should be “stories without connection, but with association, like dreams—poems merely euphonious and full of beautiful words, but without sense and connection. At most, single stanzas would be comprehensible. They must be only fragments of the most diverse things. At most, true poetry can have a broad allegorical meaning and an indirect effect like music.”⁶⁵ Might poetry, he asks, be nothing but “inward painting and music, modified of course by the nature of the mind”?⁶⁶ This idea must not, however, be confused with the poetic music and painting in Tieck and Goethe,⁶⁷ for these poets want descriptive poetry and poetry to imitate music, while Novalis asks for a poetry that would be somehow more musical and more pictorial in the peculiar manner of poetry.⁶⁸

This obscure idea becomes clearer when we examine in detail what Novalis thought the central genres, the fairy tale and the novel, should be. “The fairy tale is, as it were, the canon of poetry … everything poetic must be fairytale-like. The poet worships Chance.”⁶⁹ A fairy tale, as he defines his notion of it, is actually like a dream picture without connection, an assemblage of marvelous things and events, e.g. a musical fantasy, the harmonic sequences of an Aeolian harp, or Nature herself.⁷⁰ After saying “I believe I am able to express my mood best in the fairy tale,” Novalis adds ingenuously that “everything is a fairy tale,”⁷¹ since the world is obviously a mystery and a dream. The poet of fairy tales is also a prophet of the future, because in the fairy tale the original world, the world before time and history, the age of freedom, the golden age of the past, foreshadows the golden age to come.⁷²

The novel (Roman) is only a variant of the fairy tale (Märchen), as Novalis' own novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen shows. The term romantisch, apparently not yet stabilized in the Schlegelian sense, is derived by Novalis from Roman, a “kind of fairy tale.” Romantic poetics is thus the “art of making an object strange and yet familiar and attractive.”⁷³ Since everything is strange, he can say that “nothing is more romantic than what we usually call the world and fate. We live in a colossal novel [Roman].”⁷⁴ The novel is also free history, as it were, the mythology of history.⁷⁵Romantiker (Novalis seems to have coined the word) is used by him as synonymous with novelist.⁷⁶ The novel must be poetry through and through.⁷⁷ “Romantic,” in Novalis, can assume even a mystical sense, as when a “personal God” is called a “romanticized universe” or personality the “romantic” element of the ego.⁷⁸ If we interpret these baffling shifts of meaning in the light of the whole system, “romantic” here means the essential, the truly real, what today it has become the fashion to call “existential.” We see why Novalis declares the annihilation of contradiction “as perhaps the highest task of the higher logic,”⁷⁹ since in his dialectics everything turns into everything else just as things do in a fairy tale. Poetry is metamorphosis in the sense in which the poem “Die Vermählung der Jahreszeiten” (“The Marriage of the Seasons”)⁸⁰ prophesies the fusion of future, present, and past, spring, autumn, summer and winter, youth and age. “Philosophy is the theory of poetry. It shows what poetry is, that it is one and all.”⁸¹ The En kai pan of mystical pantheism is here directly invoked for poetics.

While holding such extreme monistic views, it is surprising that Novalis can make any distinctions at all and that he is quite aware of the part the rational and the linguistic play in poetry and the poetic process. Poetic creation is described as a “double activity of creating and comprehending, united in one moment; a mutual perfecting of image and concept.”⁸² Especially “the young poet cannot be cool, cannot be conscious enough.”⁸³ “Nothing is more indispensable to the poet than insight into the nature of every trade, familiarity with the means to reach every goal, and presence of mind to make the most appropriate choice according to time and circumstances. Enthusiasm without understanding is useless and dangerous, and the poet will work few miracles who himself is surprised by miracles.”⁸⁴ “Poetry must be practiced as a strict craft.”⁸⁵ We may well imagine that Novalis felt no contradiction between this view of the poet as craftsman and his view of the poet as magician and prophet. He is both, just as a humble medieval painter would ply his craft and at the same time feel the inspiration of religion.

Novalis is also perfectly aware of the difference between “real, perfected, achieved art, working through outer organs, and imaginary art.”⁸⁶ He can say, and Croce would support him, “We know something only insofar as we can express, i.e. make, it.”⁸⁷ This emphasis on the union of the conscious and the unconscious and on the role of language and expression needs to be interpreted in the context of Novalis' general philosophy. Consciousness is certainly not Cartesian rationalism but rather a state which must have passed through the unconscious; it is in fact identical with “irony,” which he defines as “genuine consciousness, true presence of mind.”⁸⁸ This highest consciousness is not reason, ratiocination, but illumination. Similarly, language is not merely the tool of the poet's craft which he must know and cherish⁸⁹ but a world of signs and sounds,⁹⁰ of hieroglyphics, which allows us to read the great book of nature, to decipher its mysteries.⁹¹ Words to Novalis are not general signs,⁹² but “magic words,” “tones,” “incantations.”⁹³ “As the garments of a saint still preserve miraculous powers, so many a word is hallowed by some sublime memory and has become almost in itself a poem. For the poet language is never too poor, but it is always too general. He needs frequently recurrent words, played out by use,”⁹⁴ presumably in order to revive them, to make them over into magic words. “The world is a universal metaphor of the spirit, its symbolic image.”⁹⁵ Thus Novalis can wish for a “tropology that comprises the laws of the symbolic construction of the transcendental world.”⁹⁶ Language is magic, just as poetry and science are magic; they are all to “raise man above himself,” reconcile him again with nature, lead him back to the golden age, transform the world into paradise. “Through poetry arise the highest sympathy and cooperation, the most intimate union of the finite and infinite.”⁹⁷

One can understand that in such a view of the world there is really no room for criticism. “Criticism of poetry is monstrous. The only possible decision (and that is difficult) is whether anything is poetry or not.”⁹⁸ This is a reasonable attitude if poetry is actually divine and revelatory. At most, Novalis would admit “productive criticism,” the “ability to produce the very product to be criticized.”⁹⁹ But this makes the critic a poet and at the same time abolishes criticism. Actually, there is still some hope for criticism. Novalis concludes that we should

censure nothing that is human. Everything is good, but not everywhere, not always, not for everybody. In judging poems e.g. one must beware not to censure anything which, taken strictly, is not a real artistic mistake, a false tone in every connection. We should assign to every poem, as exactly as possible, its precinct, and that is enough criticism for the vanity of its author. For we must judge poems only in this respect, whether they should have a wide or narrow, near or distant, dark or bright, high or low place. Thus Schiller writes for the few, Goethe for the many. Today we have paid little attention to advising the reader how to read a poem—under what circumstances alone it can please. Every poem has its relations to all kinds of readers and diverse circumstances. It has its own environment, its own world, its own God.¹⁰⁰

Criticism thus seems a strategy of finding the place of a work of art, discovering its proper readers, defining its position in the world of poetry. A book, Novalis realizes, causes thousands of sensations and activities, some determined and defined, some free. An ideal review would be a complete extract or essence of everything that can be written or said about it.¹⁰¹

In this sense Novalis wrote no review and very little criticism. But he described and defined his own relation to several authors in some detail. His judgment of Shakespeare is not unrelated to what he says of poetry. He protests against the Schlegels' emphasis on Shakespeare's artistry. After all, art in his conception belongs to nature. Shakespeare is “no calculator, no scholar”; his works, “like products of nature, bear the imprint of a thinking mind”; they are throughout full of “correspondences with the infinite structure of the universe, coincidences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of mankind. … They are symbolic and ambiguous, simple and inexhaustible as these, and nothing more senseless can be said about them than to call them works of art in that limited, mechanical sense of the word.”¹⁰² Earlier, Novalis, under the influence of A. W. Schlegel's essay on Romeo and Juliet, saw Shakespeare in terms of unreconcilable contrasts: poetry and antipoetry; harmony and disharmony; the vulgar, low, and ugly next to the romantic, lofty, and beautiful; the real next to the fictional.¹⁰³ The history plays especially exemplify this struggle between poetry and nonpoetry.¹⁰⁴ But Hamlet, strangely enough, is called a satire on a modern civilized age, an expression of English national hatred for Denmark,¹⁰⁵ and Shakespeare's poems are considered similar to the prose of Cervantes and Boccaccio, quite as “elegant, pedantic, and complete.”¹⁰⁶ Late in his short life Novalis expressed puzzlement at Shakespeare, who, he says, is darker to him than Greece. “I understand the wit of Aristophanes, but I am far from understanding that of Shakespeare. On the whole, my understanding of Shakespeare is very imperfect.”¹⁰⁷

Novalis necessarily felt nearer to his German contemporaries and predecessors. He worshiped Schiller as a person and as a moral force, prophesying that he would be “the educator of the coming century.”¹⁰⁸ He endorsed his review of Bürger, finding it even too mild.¹⁰⁹ He made a few shrewd remarks which show that he recognized some of the limitations of the Schlegels and Tieck. But his reaction to Goethe and especially to Wilhelm Meister is more fully stated and most characteristic. At first he saw in Meister the ideal romantic novel: its philosophy and morals are romantic, everything is presented with romantic irony.¹¹⁰ But then he discovered—and he wonders that he could have been blind so long—that the novel is pretentious and precious, unpoetic in the highest degree, a satire on poetry, religion, etc. It is a Candide directed against poetry.¹¹¹ It is throughout prosaic and modern.¹¹² The romantic perishes there, as well as natural poetry and the marvelous. Nature and mysticism are forgotten. Novalis, himself a nobleman, also feels resentment at what he considers its glorification of the hunt for the patent of nobility. One does not know who comes off worse, poetry or nobility, since Goethe considers poetry as belonging to nobility and nobility as belonging to poetry.¹¹³ In contradistinction to the Schlegels, who had exalted Wilhelm Meister as the romantic novel, Novalis feels its prosiness, its Philistinism, its snobbishness. It is “odious,” even “silly” (albern). His own Heinrich von Ofterdingen was, in effect, written against this. It is an apotheosis of poetry,¹¹⁴ which celebrates the union with the universe, with nature, with the one and the all, with death and the dream:

Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt.¹¹⁵

WACKENRODER AND TIECK

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-98) and his friend Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) are usually associated with Novalis, but their aesthetic thought and intellectual background were actually very different. Novalis stems from Hemsterhuis, Schiller, and Schelling. Wackenroder derives from Hamann and Herder. Tieck is an eclectic who reflects, almost year by year, the aesthetic theories of his contemporaries, beginning with Wackenroder and ending with a long attachment to the theories of his friend Solger.

Wackenroder was hardly a literary critic. One could collect some literary opinions from his correspondence or note the rather severely critical paper on Hans Sachs's plays which he wrote for one of the first antiquarian historians of German literature, Erduin Julius Koch. But the aesthetic theories propounded in Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797) and Phantasien über die Kunst (1799), though ostensibly devoted to painting or music, are nevertheless relevant, because in them Wackenroder expresses his attitude toward art in general and his own art in particular, under the mask of his “art-loving lay brother” and the musician Joseph Berglinger. His view of art and indeed the whole tone of his writing are too important and novel to be ignored in a history of criticism.

Clearly Wackenroder thinks of art primarily as serving religion, as being a religion, as being revelation. All good artists are inspired, they wait and pray for “immediate Divine assistance.”¹¹⁶ In his naive style Wackenroder tells a story of Raphael, to whom, in a dream, the finished picture of the Madonna appeared; when he awoke he was able to copy it from memory. In support of this invention Wackenroder quotes an actual letter by Raphael to Castiglione in which he said that “in the absence of beautiful women, he availed himself of a certain idea which came to his mind.” But Wackenroder, ignoring the fact that Raphael was not speaking of the Madonna but of Galatea,¹¹⁷ translates “idea” as “Bild” and “mente” as “Seele,” and thus gives the neo-Platonic passage about an internal idea the quite unwarranted interpretation of a “dream picture.”

Art as divine inspiration is one of the two languages of God; the other is nature. “Art speaks to man through images and uses thus a writing in hieroglyphics, whose signs we know and understand externally. But art fuses the spiritual and the non-sensual into visible shapes.” Art and Nature “move together our senses and our spirit; or rather, it is as if all parts of our incomprehensible being would melt into a single new organ, which grasps and comprehends the heavenly miracles in this double fashion.”¹¹⁸ Ciphers, the double language of nature and art—these are ideas which we met before in Hamann but which appear in Wackenroder in a new context and with a new sentimental fervor. For the same idea he can also use the neo-Platonic and Leibnizian image of nature and art as “two magic concave mirrors … which for me reflect all things in the world symbolically, through whose magic pictures I learn to know and understand the true spirit of all things.”¹¹⁹ Ostensibly, in this conception of art, poetry is excluded, since “words” are expressly disparaged. “It is only the Invisible hovering above us that words do not draw down into our minds.”¹²⁰ But surely words here must mean rational words, everyday words, or the language of science, and not poetry, which is one of the arts, Wackenroder's own art.

With this view of art as inspiration, the proclamation of a mysterious sign language of God, it is not surprising that Wackenroder disparages all criticism and all thought about art. “Whoever with the divining rod of searching understanding wants to discover what can be felt only from inside, will always discover only thoughts about feeling and never the feeling itself. An eternal hostile gulf is fixed between the feeling heart and the investigations of research. Feeling can only be grasped and understood by feeling.”¹²¹ Thus there should not and cannot be any comparison between works of art. “The true touchstone of the excellence of a work of art is if one forgets all other works because of it, and not even thinks of wanting to compare it with others.”¹²²

If works of art cannot be compared, because all genuine works show the same quality of inspiration, universal toleration must be the consequence. While Wackenroder is usually classed as the inspirer of artistic medievalism and the movement of the Nazarenes (which began some ten years after his death in 1798), actually his view of art is broad and eclectic: Gothic and Renaissance painting please him equally well, as does 18th century music, and in theory he recommends universal toleration. “To God a Gothic temple is as pleasing as a temple of the Greeks; the crude war music of savages is to Him just as charming a sound as artful choruses and church songs.”¹²³ Why damn the Middle Ages for not building like Greece? We must “feel ourselves into” all strange beings, shed the intolerance of the understanding. “Beauty: a marvelously strange word! First invent new words for every single artistic emotion, for every single work of art!”¹²⁴ Superstition is better than belief in a system, adoration better than dogmatism. The advantage of our age is our elevation: we stand as if on the summit of a mountain: many lands and peoples lie around us and at our feet. “Let us then enjoy this happiness and stray with serene glances over all times and peoples and let us always try to feel what is human in all their manifold feelings and works of feeling.”¹²⁵ The voice of Herder speaks here again, even more fervidly: each work of art is unique, and good in its place, and we must enjoy the world of art in all its wonderful variety. There is still piety and genuine humanistic fervor in Wackenroder. It was in later historicism and eclectic antiquarianism that they disappeared.

Since art consists in inspiration from above and the communication of emotion, no place is left in it for technique or craft. Joseph Berglinger, the musician who had felt its inspiration like a divine intoxication (the more potent the darker and more mysterious its language), is indignant when he discovers that art is craft, that all melodies are based on a single mathematical law, that “instead of flying freely” he “had to climb around in the clumsy scaffolding and cage of the grammar of art” and learn its laborious mechanics.¹²⁶

Wackenroder thus feels, perhaps more strongly than any of his contemporaries, the alienation of the artist from society and the conflict between art and life, poetry and prose, reality and dream. Berglinger perishes in this conflict “between ethereal enthusiasm and the low misery of the earth.”¹²⁷ He gradually comes to accept “the idea that an artist must be artist only for himself, for the exaltation of his own heart and for one or a few people who understand him.”¹²⁸ But we must not forget that Wackenroder puts these sentiments into the mouth of a fictional figure, that he himself feels a certain distance to them, and that he sees the human deficiency of those who feel so strongly the gulf between reality and art. Berglinger (and possibly this was Wackenroder's bitter self-criticism of his own limitations) was one of those created rather to “enjoy art than to practice it.”¹²⁹ There is, Wackenroder recognizes, a difference between Phantasie and the incomprehensible creative power of the greatest artists. Berglinger perishes in this conflict with the world: he is the “divided” artist, ambitious and finally frustrated and impotent, the precursor of Kapellmeister Kreisler in E. T. A. Hoffmann's stories. The ideal artists are Dürer or Raphael, men who lived humbly in the service of their Maker, in a time when enthusiasm for art and divine inspiration were general, when art and religion were identical, one life-giving stream.¹³⁰

In the last chapters Wackenroder wrote for the Phantasien über die Kunst, shortly before his death in his twenty-sixth year, a perceptible change in his view of art may be observed. His early religious piety and trust seem to have deserted him. He now doubts whether our feelings, “sometimes so sublime and grand that we enclose them like relics in costly monstrances, and joyfully kneel before them,” really come from our Creator, or whether we are not selfishly adoring our own heart.¹³¹ Poetry (Dichtung) is now, by a fanciful etymology common at the time, the art of condensing the emotions (Verdichten) which wander forlornly in life. Art in general is the preservation of feelings, with no hint of any metaphysical significance. At most, art is something stable in the incessant, monotonous alternation of days and nights, in that “uninterrupted, queer chess game of white and black squares, in which no one finally wins but grievous Death.”¹³²

Art lends us a helping hand; it keeps us hovering over the vast, empty abyss, suspended between heaven and earth. Art, the “Oriental Legend of a Naked Saint”¹³³ suggests, is the way to salvation from the incessant deafening roar of the wheel of Time, which the saint had to imitate compulsively with ecstatic mad gestures until he was freed by the sounds of a song. This saint's legend seems almost to anticipate Schopenhauer, who celebrated the effect of art in “stopping the wheel of Ixion” and temporarily and illusorily alleviating the pain of existence. But this hope of salvation through art, especially through music, through its “criminal innocence, its terrible, oracular ambiguous obscurity”¹³⁴ has now a desperate sound, far different from the cheerful piety of Wackenroder's early German artists. Wackenroder died too soon to elaborate his new point of view. Only his identification of religion and art, his simple trust in inspiration and genuine feeling, his sense of the divorce between art and life, of the artist's solitude in an unfriendly society, are remembered today.

Ludwig Tieck is usually considered the head of the German romantic school. As critic he cannot, however, be ranked with the Schlegels. His mind was too loose, too incoherent to contribute to a theory of literature; his taste, though well-defined, was rarely expounded in arguments substantial enough to make him a good practical critic. His work as a literary scholar, however meritorious at its time and place, is now hopelessly obsolete. It would be easy to dismiss him on all three counts. Yet something can be said for Tieck as a critic.

Tieck is an eclectic who reflects the influences of his time and of his friends. He passed through several fairly distinct stages: an early preparatory period which reflects his reading in English aesthetics and in Herder; a period (mainly between 1797-99) in which he adopts his friend Wackenroder's religion of art; a later period (mainly between 1800-03) which shows the influence of the Schlegels; and then, after a pause, a new period (after about 1810) when he accepts the guidance of his friend F. W. Solger.¹³⁵ We can trace all the key concepts of the time in Tieck's writings, though they are used uncertainly and shiftingly. For example, he oscillates disconcertingly between a conception of “genius” as pure inspiration and a Schlegelian stress on the share of consciousness in creation.¹³⁶ So “irony,” which Tieck employed profusely and originally in his satirical comedies, is used in his critical writings sparingly and vaguely. Only much later, under the influence of Solger, does Tieck arrive at distinctions between “lower” and “higher,” and “positive” and “negative” irony. He then condemns “vulgar” irony and accepts an interpretation which makes it identical with objectivity, with the poet's power over his material.¹³⁷ Tieck did much to popularize the term “romantic,” but he himself used it quite loosely, in the old sense of anything marvelous or medieval. Late in life he insisted that all poetry since antiquity is “romantic” and that it is impossible to draw a distinction between the “romantic” and the “poetic.”¹³⁸ Clearly, not much in the way of theory can be learned from Tieck.

In Tieck's many writings we can find, of course, a mass of literary opinions: indeed much of his fiction and drama is literary satire and parody, against the group of surviving rationalists in Berlin, against the tremendously successful playwrights, Kotzebue and Iffland, against many of his fellow romanticists, and late in his life against the Young Germans. From his last years we have recorded conversations in which Tieck pronounces on almost every writer of world literature.¹³⁹ But little of this is elaborated and substantiated, analyzed and argued. It is merely stated, for Tieck wants criticism to convey an immediate feeling of his personality.¹⁴⁰

The mass of editorial labors, translations from Elizabethan dramatists, the translation of Don Quixote, the collaboration and supervision of the German Shakespeare, after August Wilhelm Schlegel had given it up—all this has only historical interest today. Research has shown that Tieck's translations and revisions are often grossly inaccurate.¹⁴¹ Today we would have no sympathy for his enthusiasm for the Shakespearean apocrypha. At one time, at least, Tieck took the extravagant position of assigning as many as 62 plays to Shakespeare. The English who did not agree only earned his scorn: they had not read Shakespeare “in his context.”¹⁴² His praise of such plays as the Pinner of Wakefield or Locrine seems especially extravagant, since he thought Marlowe and Webster overrated. But he praised and analyzed Middleton's Changeling and was an admirer and close student of Ben Jonson.¹⁴³

However, nothing came of Tieck's great book on Shakespeare, which he had worked on all his life. What has been published as its remains, in 1920, is no more than a pathetic heap of notes, annotations, and remarks, most of which date back to about 1794. The two chapters of an introduction (1815) contain merely general reflections on the Middle Ages, Christianity, chivalry, etc. The theory behind the project was the historical approach: not to look at Shakespeare as an “isolated phenomenon” but to “deduce him from his time and environment and especially his own mind.”¹⁴⁴

Of his published papers on Shakespeare the earliest one, written when he was only twenty, “Shakespeare's Treatment of the Marvelous” (1793), is critically the most interesting. It is an excellent exercise in psychological criticism in the English manner. Tieck knows that Shakespeare is interested in theatrical effect, in creating illusion. He shows how this is achieved in different ways in comedies such as the Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream and in tragedies such as Hamlet and Macbeth. In the “romantic” plays a whole consistent world of the marvelous is evoked, while all powerful emotions are toned down in order not to disturb the illusion. In the tragedies the spirit world appears more remotely in the background and hence much more mysteriously and frighteningly. The paper shows traces of 18th-century rationalistic misconceptions: Shakespeare's handling of the marvelous is thought to be an attempt at hiding the lack of rules, at making us forget the laws of aesthetics. Hamlet seeing the ghost in the closet scene or Macbeth seeing Banquo's ghost at the banquet is action supposedly capable of natural explanation, of an allegorical sense.¹⁴⁵ Yet on the whole the piece is full of sensitive observations and is surely superior to earlier discussions of the same topic by Mrs. Montagu and Joseph Warton. Compared with it, Tieck's next published piece, “Letters on Shakespeare” (1800), is rambling and diffuse. He announces bardolatry on principle: one cannot criticize a work of art, just as one cannot scold nature. He boasts that nobody before him, certainly no “printed Englishman,” has understood Shakespeare, but he says little that is concrete beyond praising the advantages of Shakespeare's age (familiar since Hurd and Thomas Warton), the variety of Shakespeare's plays, and the freedom imagination was allowed by the physical make-up of the Elizabethan theater.¹⁴⁶

Tieck was intensely occupied with the revival of Elizabethan stagecraft. He directed performances purged of the usual 19th-century encumbrances; and in a late novel, Der junge Tischlermeister (1837), he described in great detail a fictional amateur performance of Twelfth Night, with close attention to the staging in Elizabethan style.¹⁴⁷ There is much other evidence for Tieck's grasp, rare among his contemporaries, of Shakespeare as man of the theater, and of the art of acting. From his visit to London in 1817 we have shrewd criticisms of John Phillip Kemble, Macready, and Kean.¹⁴⁸ But one can only doubt Tieck's profound understanding of Shakespeare if one reads his paradoxical theories of Shakespeare's characters: Lady Macbeth is called a “delicate and loving soul,” King Claudius is defended and praised as a ruler and as a strong character, Polonius is called a “true statesman,” Hamlet's behavior to Ophelia is explained by her supposed pregnancy, and the monologue “To be or not to be” is argued not to be about suicide.¹⁴⁹

Tieck's failure as a Shakespeare critic seems most clearly demonstrated by the novel Dichterleben (1825, 1829), in which Shakespeare, Greene, Marlowe, Nashe, Florio, the Earl of Southampton, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, etc. appear as fictional figures. The book is curious for being one of the earliest novelistic treatments of the death of Marlowe and of the triangle between Shakespeare, Southampton, and the Dark Lady. As a picture of Elizabethan England, however, it is incredibly sentimental and false. It has no historical accuracy or atmosphere and little narrative interest. Southampton recites “This royal throne of Kings, this sceptered isle” to the tearful father of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare, a sentimental weakling, talks like a German romanticist: through writing Romeo and Juliet he feels himself “created” and his “own essence brought to life.”¹⁵⁰

Likewise, Tieck's interest in Spanish literature leaves us with a similar sense of disappointment. There is hardly any criticism of Cervantes in Tieck's writings, though he translated Don Quixote and suggested that his daughter translate Persiles (1837). Only his defense of the insertion of the novella “El Curioso Impertinente” may be quoted as an illustration of the Schlegelian method of finding organic unity in a great work at all costs. He sees it as an illustration of the destructive folly of a man who wants his ideal verified, contrasting with Don Quixote's own unperturbed illusionism.¹⁵¹

Tieck was the first German deeply interested in Calderón, and was the first to imitate his meters and devices in German drama. He infected August Wilhelm Schlegel with his enthusiasm; but when Schlegel's translation created a vogue of Calderón in Germany, Tieck moderated his earlier admiration. He saw in Calderón contrivance, rigid conventionality, bombast, and cruelty, and developed an opposing interest in the more realistic Lope de Vega, questioning whether he is not the greater poet of the two.¹⁵² Tieck also knew many of the other less known Spanish dramatists of the Golden Age: Moreto, Rojas, Montalván, etc. and engaged in erudite researches which today would be called “comparative literature.”¹⁵³

Tieck also played a certain role in the revival of older German literature. In 1803 he brought out a badly modernized collection of Minnelieder. Its introduction proved very influential. Jakob Grimm tells us that he caught his enthusiasm for the study of German antiquities from it. It is, however, no monument of erudition, but rather a popular rehearsal of some of the Schlegels' opinions. It tells us that there is only one poetry, one art. He praises his age for understanding all kinds of poetry, Shakespeare, the Italians, and the Spaniards. He paints a sentimental picture of chivalry and courtly love and describes the 12th and 13th centuries as the great age of the flowering of “romantic” poetry. As for the German Minnesang itself, Tieck has hardly anything to say beyond commending the poems for their sweet sound, skillful rhyme schemes, and naiveté.¹⁵⁴

Furthermore, Tieck initiated the study of the early German drama by publishing a collection, Deutsches Theater (1817), which reprinted for the first time the 16th century dramatist Jakob Ayrer, some plays of the English comedians, and dramas of Andreas Gryphius.

But all these activities are completely overshadowed, in critical importance, by Tieck's editions of Lenz, Novalis, and Heinrich von Kleist,¹⁵⁵ and by his discussions of Goethe, in which a coherent and original taste emerges. Tieck has a strong feeling in favor of the German Storm and Stress and the early Goethe. He greatly prefers the young Goethe to the later: Goetz von Berlichingen and Werther are extolled. Still, his whole attitude even to the early Goethe is by no means uncritical. He emphasizes the weakness of Goethe's fictional protagonists. Even Faust is passive in his relation to Gretchen. Goethe's plays are undramatic, he has no historical sense, and is not a good critic: especially his Shakespeare criticism finds no favor with Tieck. Goethe's later classicism seems to Tieck an aberration. The association with Schiller was detrimental to both. Tieck finds the second part of Faust repellent and he has no use for Goethe's other writings. Yet he interprets the early Goethe with sympathy and insight. To him Goethe is the problematic artist, not unlike Goethe's own Tasso or Goethe's friend Lenz or Kleist, in their revolt against society and in their nearness to madness and suicide.¹⁵⁶ Thus Tieck could edit the writings of the then almost forgotten Lenz, though he made no claims for his greatness and recognized that he was a mere caricature of Goethe.¹⁵⁷ The same fellow feeling attracted him also to Kleist, whom he had barely met during his lifetime but whose writings he rescued and published. To modern Kleist enthusiasts the introductory essay on Kleist will appear vague in its biographical information and excessively cool in its appreciation of the works. Tieck's interest is clearly psychological and personal. He is attracted by the “dark force” inside Kleist which destroyed him and by his “sudden, baffling desire to leap over both truth and nature and to put the empty and nothing above reality.” He likes in Kleist's writings the German historical element and the romantic fairy tale touches; but he is repelled by the mystical and bizarre and can see in Kleist, ultimately, only a “sublime mannerist.”¹⁵⁸ The same interest in the poète maudit accounts for Tieck's sympathy for Grabbe, for whose Herzog von Gothland he wrote an introduction and whom he tried to help personally.¹⁵⁹ It was inevitable that Tieck should prefer the Robbers to all the other plays of Schiller and that he condemn his later development, especially the Bride of Messina, for its contrived classicism, its operatic lyricism, and its conception of irrational fate. Schiller, who founded the German stage, was also, in Tieck's eyes, the first to destroy it.¹⁶⁰

Later in his life Tieck tried to forget his romantic past. He wrote to Friedrich Schlegel that he had “no pleasure in all the things we have instigated.” He resented being considered the “head of the so-called romantic school.”¹⁶¹ He judged his own younger contemporaries severely and unsympathetically: Brentano and his sister Bettina seemed to him histrionic and insincere, E. T. A. Hoffmann a writer of mere grotesques, a “scribbler.”¹⁶² Tieck also had no use for Young Germany, whose political radicalism went against his grain. In speaking of Heine he gave vent to his anti-Semitism; but he also thought him only a poor imitator of Goethe and complained of his impertinence, vulgar irony, and monotony.¹⁶³

In all of Tieck's criticism the discussions of Goethe, Lenz, and Kleist have the most personal tone. They suggest that Tieck was profoundly involved in the problem of the artist in society, in the danger of poetry to a poet's mental health. Personally Tieck had escaped the danger and could interpret his own evolution as one toward sanity and truth. At the same time he preserved an interest and sympathy for the artist “at the brink” of the abyss, since as a young man he had experienced this feeling on his own pulses. Now, in retrospect, knowing his studies of his fellow artists, the young Goethe, Lenz, and Kleist, we can find added interest in scattered pronouncements of the early Tieck which occur in a fictional context and yet are revealing, not only biographically but also critically, as extreme formulations of problems and ideas which only much later received systematic discussion. Freud could not have stated more clearly the association of art and lust than did Tieck in his early novel William Lovell (1796). “Poetry, art, and even devotion are only disguised hidden lust … sensuality and lust are the spirit of music, of painting and of all art … the feelings for beauty and art are only other dialects and ways of pronunciation; they mean nothing beyond man's urge for sensual pleasure.”¹⁶⁴ In Dichterleben Marlowe, the artist who suffers shipwreck because he could not restrain himself, says the same thing, associating poetry with lust and cruelty, with the desire “both to create and to destroy.” Now, however, Tieck rejects this view. His spokesman, Shakespeare, denies that it is true of the highest poetry and talks romantically and conventionally of the “desire for the Invisible,” the union of “the eternal with the earthly.”¹⁶⁵

The early Tieck, contributing to Wackenroder's Phantasien, found the formula for the most extreme aestheticism, both its dangers and attractions. He wants us to “change our life into a work of art.” The artist is an actor who looks on life as on a part to play. He has no firm convictions. He knows that art is a “seductive, forbidden fruit; whoever has once tasted its innermost, sweetest juice, is irrevocably lost to the active, living world. … And in the middle of the tumult he sits quietly like a child in its baby chair and blows compositions into the air like soap bubbles.”¹⁶⁶ This is Tieck speaking through a fictional mask; yet he is speaking his own deepest mind, characterizing himself and what he feels to be the curse and plight of the artist. Even death should appear as part of a work of art. “Oh you weak, fragile human life! I want always to consider you as a work of art, which delights me and which must have a conclusion in order to be a work of art and to delight me. Then I shall always be content, then I shall be equally far removed from vulgar joy and oppressive melancholy.”¹⁶⁷

Tieck himself had the actor's temperament, the gift of mimicry, the plastic impersonality which made Brentano say that he was “the greatest acting talent who never trod the stage.”¹⁶⁸ Tieck himself recognized this trait in his character, saying, “I am the more an individual the more I can lose myself in everything.” He even admitted that he would act out ideas for a whole year before he actually came to believe them. At times his talent along with his love for poetry seemed to him the most evil thing in him, which might destroy him completely.¹⁶⁹ He is afraid of the dream world which he has tapped in his writings, of the eerie world of the Blonde Eckbert, the Runenberg, and Pokal.¹⁷⁰ Tieck himself escaped into historical realism and irony. But he preserved a taste for the problematical, broken, and antisocial artist, which is only imperfectly overlaid with admiration for the versatility, sanity, and impersonality of Shakespeare. Tieck was no metaphysician like Friedrich Schlegel, no mystic like Novalis, no theorist like August Wilhelm Schlegel. But he contributed importantly to a description and criticism of the romantic artist.

JEAN PAUL

Jean Paul (Johann Paul Richter, 1763-1825) is the author of an Introduction to Aesthetics (Vorschule der Aesthetik, 1804) which deserves attention in our history, since it is not an aesthetics but rather a poetics or, more correctly, a series of chapters on aspects of literary theory: poetry in general, imagination, genius, Greek and romantic poetry, the comic, humor and wit, characters and plot, the novel and style. Though the book is written in a florid, highly metaphorical style, full of recondite comparisons and allusions and unending displays of pedantic wit, it propounds a sane theory of literature and adds something new and personal on questions rarely discussed at that time: the technique of the novel, characterization and motivation, and the theory of the comic, humor, and wit.

It is not easy to define Jean Paul's general position. He is very satirical about Schelling and the Schellingians, “polarization,” “the indifference of the subjective and objective pole,” and so on.¹⁷¹ He attacks the Schlegels for their Fichtean idealism (which to Jean Paul was pernicious solipsism and egoism), their violent partisanship, their self-conceit, and their limited, exclusive taste;¹⁷² he has little use for Schiller's aesthetics, which he considers formalistic and frivolous, misunderstanding the play concept.¹⁷³ His personal and philosophical associations were with Herder and F. H. Jacobi. At times we might think that Jean Paul was simply a good 18th-century empirical psychologist: he could even say that Kames's Elements of Criticism is of a “higher critical school than the high one at Jena,” i.e. Schiller and the Schlegels.¹⁷⁴ The avowed purpose of his book is, in part at least, self-analysis and self-observation in a very concrete way. Jean Paul has most to say about the kind of novel he was writing himself: the sprawling humorous romance, his own strange mixture of the fantastic, dreamy, and sentimental with the odd and grotesque.

But while Jean Paul preserved a considerable independence among the literary parties of the time and also his ties with an earlier past, he agreed with the romantics on fundamental issues of poetics. In spite of his reservations against the Schlegels and Schelling, his main position is the same: the proclamation in the preface to the first edition that “the newer school is right in the main”¹⁷⁵ must be taken as final. Not only is Jean Paul dependent on Friedrich Schlegel for a number of specific points, (E.g. Sämtliche Werke, ed. Berend, ii, 113-4, 233, 56-7, 157, 215. Jean Paul e.g. endorses Friedrich Schlegel's saying that all poetry must be romantic; SW, ii, 113; cf. Friedrich Schlegel, fragment 116.) but their basic views of poetry are identical. Though Jean Paul tried to keep a dispassionate balance between the classical and romantic in his theory, there cannot be any doubt where his preference lay in practice. But as opposed to the Schlegels he kept his admiration for the English humorous novel of the 18th century, for Richardson, Sterne, Fielding, and even Smollett, from whom his own art, at least in part, was derived.

Poetry, Jean Paul argues, does not imitate reality, nor is it a pure expression of personal emotion. Naturalistic art is attacked as “materialism”; too lyrical, emotional, or thinly fantastic art is labeled “nihilism.” The one is too particular, the other too general. Art should be the union of the particular and the general.¹⁷⁶ It does not copy and it must not annihilate the world. Rather it should decipher its mysterious language. Thus poetry cannot be teaching. It offers signs. “The whole world, all time is full of signs; the reading of the letters is what is missing; we need a dictionary and a grammar of the signs; poetry teaches reading.”¹⁷⁷ In interpreting the world in its own terms, poetry creates a miniature world, a second world, reborn by mind.¹⁷⁸

The poet achieves this interpretation by imagination. Like Schelling and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Jean Paul distinguishes between the lower power he calls “Einbildungskraft,” which is only a more powerful, more vivid memory, and the higher “Phantasie” or “Bildungskraft,” which makes all parts a whole, which “totalizes everything.”¹⁷⁹ The great poet has genius which Jean Paul distinguishes sharply from mere talent. Talent is partial, genius requires the whole man: “all his powers are in bloom at the same time.”¹⁸⁰ He depicts all life, not merely its parts. He draws on the unconscious, which is the mightiest power in a poet, since poetry is kindred to dreaming and dreaming is involuntary poetry.¹⁸¹ The poet must hear his characters, not merely see them: the character must tell him—as happens in a dream—what he has to say, not the poet the character. “A poet who has to reflect whether a character in a specific situation is to answer yes or no should discard him. He is a stupid corpse.”¹⁸² But while Jean Paul at times can speak of genius as if it were identical with instinct and writing identical with dreaming, he also stresses the role of consciousness in the creative process. He draws a doubtful distinction between the whole as produced by inspiration and the parts which can be “cultivated in peace.”¹⁸³ Jean Paul very emphatically rejects the “fever of passion” as poor inspiration and constantly insists that all art is and should be self-conscious.¹⁸⁴ He himself prominently used the theme of the “double” in his novels, as he had a vivid consciousness of man seeing himself, doubling, splitting up into two egos, the one acting, the other observing. In his novels a man is terrified by his own image in a mirror, meets his double, makes his wax figure, looks at his own body and asks: “Somebody is sitting there and I am in him. Who is that?”¹⁸⁵ So also in his poetic theory he feels the dualism between the dream life on which he draws and the transformation accomplished by art, which cannot be anything but a conscious manipulation of language. A novelty in Jean Paul's discussion of genius and talent is his recognition of an intermediate type: the “passive” genius, the feminine man who lacks the true creativity of the greatest but is as universal as genius himself. Jean Paul gives Moritz and Novalis as examples.¹⁸⁶ Similarly, while consciousness is necessary to the artist, there is also a “sinful” consciousness which destroys and dissolves the world of imagination and the instinct of the unconscious.¹⁸⁷

From the Schlegels Jean Paul draws the main division of poetry into classical and romantic. But Jean Paul avoids the term “classical,” as he associates it with excellence and perfection of every kind. He prefers to speak of Greek or plastic poetry in contrast to romantic or musical poetry.¹⁸⁸ The fervid hymn to Greece and the Greeks, “this beauty-intoxicated people with their serene religion in eye and heart,”¹⁸⁹ the view of Greek poetry as sculpturesque, objective, morally graceful, joyfully peaceful, is not new to readers of Winckelmann and Friedrich Schlegel's earliest writings, but it is surprising in Jean Paul, who had nothing of the Greek spirit. In him the nostalgia for Greece seems an even more romantic dream than in the other Germans, for surely there were few less serene and objective minds than his. Romantic poetry is described as the direct result of Christianity, from which chivalry and courtly love are derived. “A Petrarch who would not be a Christian is an impossibility: Mary alone ennobles all women romantically.”¹⁹⁰ In the second edition of Vorschule (1813) Jean Paul, in response to criticisms, somewhat modified his account of the Christian romantic: he now recognizes that there are romantic traits in Homer and Sophocles,¹⁹¹ long before Christ, and that there is a Nordic, Indic, and Near Eastern romanticism which is based on their non-Christian religions. He now adds also the distinction between the romanticism of the North and that of the South, in line with concepts elaborated by Bouterwek and Madame de Staël. Surveying modern poetry, he observes sensibly that “every century is differently romantic.”¹⁹² He even doubts the value of all such dichotomies; it is as if we divided all nature into straight and crooked lines. The crooked, he observes slyly, as well as the infinite line, is romantic poetry. But what can one gain for the understanding of “dynamic life” from such distinctions? Naive and sentimental, subjective and objective do not help us to distinguish between the different romanticism of Shakespeare, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Cervantes, or the different objectivity of Homer, Sophocles, Job, and Caesar.¹⁹³

The distinction between the genres is handled by Jean Paul with a like measure of levity. In the first edition he has nothing to say about the lyric. In the second edition he adds a meager section on the lyric, where he makes, in passing, the fateful suggestion that “the epic presents an event which develops from the past, the drama an action which extends into the future, the lyric an emotion which is enclosed in the present.”¹⁹⁴ This association of the main genres with the dimensions of time and tense has since caught the fancy of many writers on poetics from Dalls to Staiger.¹⁹⁵ But Jean Paul elsewhere ignores it and even contradicts it when he associates epic with the past and drama with the present.¹⁹⁶ In practice he distinguishes the epic and the drama but at length discusses the novel, which to him holds an intermediate position between the two. He can thus distinguish an epic novel from a dramatic novel: the epic novel includes the romantic novel, which is similar to a dream or a fairy tale and thus needs no beginning or end and allows any number of episodes (as does the epic in the Schlegels' theory). The dramatic novel is more closely plotted and seems to Jean Paul the preferable form. But on the whole Jean Paul thinks of the novel as some kind of “poetic encyclopedia,” a genre allowing great freedom.¹⁹⁷

Plot and motivation, in comparison to character, are minimized. Plot assumes meaning only in terms of character and is thought of as following the invention of character. Motivation is considered dangerous if over-rigid and excessive. Jean Paul sees many relations between plot, motivation, and character. For instance, he points out that very rigid characters are not good for a novel because they decide every action beforehand and thus make it predictable, while purely passive characters do even more damage because they shift the burden to the plot, which then disintegrates easily into a series of chance events.¹⁹⁸ In discussing characters Jean Paul applies his ideal of the union of the particular and universal: every humorous character, even a Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby, must have something to make him universal and symbolic, and every universal character must be individualized to become a speaking and memorable figure. Still, Jean Paul defends perfect, idealized characters, though they may be very difficult to handle, since generality increases with ideality.¹⁹⁹ Yet the poet must depict a complete world, a pandemonium and a pantheon, both his particular devils and his particular angels.²⁰⁰ He must depict the gamut of human types, the “races of the inner man,” the “mythology of souls,”²⁰¹ in order to create his second world. Jean Paul argues that poets need not know these situations and characters in real life; in each man there are all forms of humanity and the poet knows them as if by anticipation; he knows both Caliban and Ariel. The reader will find the characters true and right, even though he could not have met them in real life, since it is the poet who gives speech and awareness to humanity.²⁰² Each character, Jean Paul pleads, needs a punctum saliens, a “dominant tone,” though he admits that a great poet can convincingly reconcile the most discordant traits.²⁰³ Characters should have “rootwords,” their own vocabulary, but they should also be characterized by physical traits—sometimes only one physical trait—and even by their names.²⁰⁴ Jean Paul must have been one of the first novelists to reflect at length on the naming of novelistic figures. His standards of judgment, of course, are never those of verisimilitude and sheer illusion. He allows the novelist to endow his characters with his own wit and imagination, even though they should speak their own language of will and passion.²⁰⁵ Some of these distinctions seem not very convincing or at most seem confined to very specific types of the novel. Also, Jean Paul's observations on style are often little more than defenses of his own practice: he prefers “optic” to “acoustic” figures, defends catachresis and rhythmic prose, and, of course, loves puns and learned allusions, since verbal art is closely related to wit and wit to imagination.²⁰⁶

In many ways the sections devoted to wit, humor, and the comic are the most original in the Vorschule. They were among the first attempts to deal with these concepts speculatively in the context of a poetics and have proved extraordinarily influential. F. T. Vischer's discussion comes from Jean Paul; Coleridge reproduced his views; and Meredith used him.²⁰⁷ But while one must grant the historical merit of Jean Paul's classifications and the ingenuity of some of his formulas, it seems impossible to be satisfied with his distinctions today. One reason for Jean Paul's failure is his lack of clear distinction between psychology and poetics. Definitions of the comic, the witty, the humorous can be simply a matter of descriptive psychology, just like definitions of love, hate, joy, despair, or any other emotion.²⁰⁸ The question becomes aesthetic only if it is centered on the use to which the comic or the humorous is put in a work of art, or on its function in particular forms such as comedy or satire, or on the ways it defines the pervasive attitude of a particular author. Jean Paul does not draw these distinctions but rather tries elaborately to describe the varieties of the comic, interpreting the words to make their meaning conform with his ideals.

Thus “wit” for Jean Paul is a psychic power entirely apart from the comic. Wit is the discovery of similarities between incommensurable entities.²⁰⁹ Jean Paul distinguishes then between a wit of understanding and a graphic, visual wit. Graphic wit is important in art: it can either animate a body or embody a soul.²¹⁰ It is thus the metaphorical power in general, the poetic power itself, which is in the service of the symbolic view of the world. Puns thus can be defended as a technique for discovering remote similarities, producing surprise by coincidences and “wild pairings without priest,”²¹¹ and also (an interesting point) for displaying our freedom from subservience to the sign by drawing attention to the sign itself.²¹² Wit is a great liberator and equalizer. Jean Paul writes eloquently how necessary it is for the Germans to cultivate wit, since wit would give them freedom and equality just as these would give them wit.²¹³ Wit is thus basic to poetry and needed in a healthy and free society. But it can do these things only because Jean Paul does not distinguish between social wit and wit in literature. The term is conceived in psychological and linguistic and not in aesthetic terms. Wit is completely divorced from the comic and so becomes hardly distinguishable (in spite of Jean Paul's efforts) from “ingenuity,” “acumen,” and even “invention,” with which the term has been associated historically. If wit and ingenuity were the same, works of great combinatory power such as the Critique of Pure Reason would be witty.

The comic is likewise seen as a general phenomenon of life, but here Jean Paul gets involved in metaphysics. The comic is “sensually intuited infinite Unreason”; there is an “objective contrast between the striving or being of the ludicrous beings with the sensuously intuited relation”;²¹⁴ and there is also a subjective contrast which Jean Paul explains by a “lending” of our insight to the subject, the ludicrous being. To note Jean Paul's example: Why is it comic that Sancho Panza spends a whole night suspended over a shallow ditch? His action is not unreasonable because he could not know that there was no deep abyss and sensibly enough did not want to risk a fatal drop. Still, “lending our insight” to Sancho Panza does not describe what actually happens. If we “lent” our knowledge to Sancho his action would be merely absurd and silly.²¹⁵ Besides, even if “imputation”—a term later taken up by Vischer and Lipps²¹⁶—occurs, it seems unable to take care of all the varieties of the comic. Nonetheless, Jean Paul is surely right in rejecting Hobbes's (and implicitly Bergson's) theory of laughter as derived from a feeling of superiority, a “sudden glory.” (Sämtliche Werke, 11, 108. Addison, Voltaire, Beattie, and Goethe had used such arguments against Hobbes. For a modern statement directed against Hobbes and Bergson, see Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, New York, 1936.) He knows that laughter may be childish and good-natured; we do not mind if hundreds and thousands laugh with us.

Though examples are drawn from literature, the question of the comic is not focused on its aesthetic use. It is different with humor, a more narrowly definable phenomenon which Jean Paul was able to describe in terms of artistic values. He starts with Kantian concepts; humor is for him a species of the comic, the romantic comic. It is the “sublime in reverse,” it does not “annihilate the individual, but rather the finite by contrast with the Idea. Humor knows no individual foolishness, no fools [as in satire] but only folly and a mad world.”²¹⁷ Jean Paul here brings to a climax the evolution which this term had been previously undergoing in England. At first “humor” was associated with “humors,” with oddities, “humorous characters,” riders of hobby horses. Only in the 18th century did it begin to take on a serious or sentimental undertone. (See a history of the term in “Les Définitions de l'humour” in Fernand Baldensperger, Études de l'histoire littéraire (Paris, 1907), pp. 176 ff. Kames, Elements of Criticism (9th ed. Edinburgh, 1817), 1, 332, says: “This quality [of humor] belongs to an author, who, affecting to be grave and serious, paints his objects in such colors as to provoke mirth and laughter.” Cf. Vol. 1 of this History, p. 120.) With Jean Paul it becomes a peculiar form of the comic in which a philosophy of toleration, a serious conception of the world, is implied: an insight into its contradictions and a forgiveness for its follies. Jean Paul's humor is closely allied to hypochondria. The most serious, the most melancholy nation, the English, are the most humorous, and the most tragic times in history gave birth to the greatest humorists. As opposed to the older notion that humor is a distorted view, Jean Paul finds humor just the opposite, the largest and freest view of the world, sub specie aeternitatis. In the language of Schellingian metaphysics, which Jean Paul here adopts, the finite is here annihilated by the eternal Idea.²¹⁸

Obviously, Jean Paul's concept of humor is very near that of romantic irony as elaborated by Friedrich Schlegel.²¹⁹ Jean Paul, like Schlegel, defends the complete consciousness of the humorist. He recognizes, for example, that Sterne is a highly conscious artist: he argues that conscious manipulation allows even the use of the dirty and obscene because it is neutralized by humor. Swift's Yahoos or his “Lady's Dressing-room,” which shocked Thackeray, did not shock Jean Paul.²²⁰ The clown in drama is defended as the chorus of comedy. But irony in the narrow sense is confined by Jean Paul to the “semblance of the serious” and is, in general, suspected of frivolity, cynicism, and mere aestheticism.²²¹ Jean Paul has a deep suspicion of aestheticism: his novel Der Titan (1800-1803), written just before his book on aesthetics, depicts its dangers in the demonic self-destroying figure of Rocquairol. The double consciousness of the actor and the spectator was for Jean Paul a great personal temptation against which he fought all his life.²²² His elaborate distinctions between the comic, the ironic, the witty, and the humorous serve, at least in part, to establish his own ideal, which is both aesthetic and moral, a vision of the world which sees its incongruity and folly but views it with concern and sympathy.

Jean Paul was hardly a good practical critic. It is possible, of course, to collect a mass of opinions from his varied writings about most German writers and a few foreign ones.²²³ They would throw light on his general theoretical position, such as his veneration for Herder, his coolness to Schiller and Goethe, and his generous praise for many contemporaries: Tieck, Novalis, Fouqué (whom he grossly overrated), and E. T. A. Hoffmann, whom he introduced into literature but with whose later writings he seems to have been disappointed.²²⁴ We could collect a number of appreciative remarks about the English novelists of the 18th century. Jean Paul has the usual romantic admiration for Shakespeare but condemned Paradise Lost.²²⁵ His praise of Molière seems to oppose August Wilhelm Schlegel's low opinion, but he also endorses Schlegel's preference for the farces.²²⁶ Little of all this, however, is argued or based on any analysis or characterization. Jean Paul did do some formal reviewing, but most of it is slight. The two extensive pieces on Madame de Staël's De L'Allemagne and Corinne are shrewd and penetrating. They show up her sentimentality and the superficiality of her understanding of German literature and philosophy.²²⁷ A feather in Jean Paul's cap was the favorable paragraph (1825) on Schopenhauer's Welt als Wille und Vorstellung which at the time was almost completely ignored by reviewers and public.²²⁸ Still, one is hardly prepared for Jean Paul's high regard for practical criticism. He remarks that a collection of reviews would be of more use to an artist than the newest aesthetics. “In every good review is hidden or revealed a good aesthetics, and more than that, one that is applied and free and the briefest of all and, by examples, the clearest.”²²⁹ He can say that the best poetics would be to characterize all poets.²³⁰ He makes some efforts of this kind, surveying, for instance, the prose style of the main German authors,²³¹ but the characterization itself is almost always only metaphorical, of the sort which was later called “impressionistic.” It agrees with his views that the critic should only point out beauties and that criticism is only a new poetry of which the work of art is the subject.²³² It is the logical consequence of the extreme view of totality which Jean Paul formulated: “The best in every author is what is not in the particular and which cannot be shown at all, because the splendor of the context does not tolerate the pointing to a detail.”²³³ But this would be critical paralysis and all that we have said about Jean Paul's literary theory must have shown that it is not a mere poetry about poetry but a serious intellectual construct, the strength of which is precisely in its distinctions, definitions, and descriptions, not of authors or works but of categories and devices, of the technique of the novel, and the nature of humor.

Notes

1. See “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” in Hölderlin, Werke, ed. Pigenot (3d ed. Berlin, 1943), 3, 623-5:

   Ich bin nun überzeugt, dass der höchste Akt der Vernunft, der, indem sie alle Ideen umfasst, ein ästhetischer Akt ist, und dass Wahrheit und Güte nur in der Schönheit verschwistert sind. Der Philosoph muss ebensoviel ästhetische Kraft besitzen, als der Dichter. Die Poesie bekommt dadurch eine höhere Würde, sie wird am Ende wieder, was sie am Anfang war—Lehrerin der Menschheit; denn es gibt keine Philosophie, keine Geschichte mehr, die Dichtkunst allein wird alle übrigen Wissenschaften und Künste überleben.

   I accept the view that this MS was written by Schelling and not by Hölderlin. Cf. Ludwig Strauss, “Hölderlins Anteil an Schellings frühem Systemprogramm,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 5 (1927), 679-747.

2. In Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, ed. Schelling and Hegel, 2 (Tübingen, 1803), 35-50.

3. Sämtliche Werke, 3, 628.

4. Ibid., pp. 620, 627.

5. Ibid., p. 619.

6. Ibid., p. 626.

7. Ibid., 4 227.

8. Ibid., 5, 348-9.

9. Ibid., p. 348: “Ineinsbildung.”

10. Ibid., 7, 292-3.

11. Ibid., p. 301: “nur wie durch Sinnbilder redender Naturgeist”; p. 300: “diese unverfälschte Kraft der Schöpfung und Wirksamkeit der Natur wie in einem Umrisse.”

12. Ibid., p. 316: “Die Gewissheit, dass aller Gegensatz nur scheinbar, die Liebe das Band aller Wesen, und reine Güte Grund und Inhalt der ganzen Schöpfung ist.”

13. Ibid., 3, 628: “Was wir Natur nennen, ist ein Gedicht, das in geheimer wunderbarer Schrift verschlossen liegt. Doch könnte das Rätsel sich enthüllen, würden wir die Odyssee des Geistes darin erkennen, der wunderbar getäuscht, sich selber suchend, sich selber flieht.”

14. Ibid., 5, 405, 390-1.

15. Ibid., p. 395.

16. Ibid., p. 411.

17. Ibid., p. 432: “Insofern war Christus zugleich der Gipfel und das Ende der alten Götterwelt.”

18. Ibid., p. 433.

19. Ibid., p. 436.

20. Ibid., p. 437.

21. Ibid., p. 439.

22. Ibid., p. 441.

23. Ibid., p. 442.

24. Ibid., p. 445.

25. Ibid., p. 446.

26. Ibid., p. 447.

27. Ibid., p. 667.

28. Ibid., p. 577.

29. Ibid., p. 593: “wenn die Architektur überhaupt die erstarrte Musik ist.”

30. Ibid., p. 640.

31. Ibid., p. 646.

32. Ibid., p. 667.

33. He refers to the “famous Meda,” apparently an error for Medoro; ibid., p. 671.

34. Ibid., p. 683.

35. Ibid., p. 683.

36. Ibid., p. 685.

37. Ibid., pp. 686-7.

38. Kritisches Journal, 2, 57-62. Not in collected edition.

39. See La poesia di Dante (Bari, 1948), pp. 180-1.

40. Sämtliche Werke, 5, 690.

41. Ibid., p. 710.

42. Ibid., p. 720.

43. Ibid., p. 729.

44. Ibid., p. 729.

45. Ibid., p. 732.

46. Ibid., p. 736.

47. Saintsbury, 3, 386-7.

48. Gesammelte Werke, ed. Seelig, 4, 302.

49. Ibid., p. 301: “Wer es nicht unmittelbar weiss und fühlt, was Poesie ist, dem lässt sich kein Begriff davon beibringen.”

50. Ibid., p. 167.

51. Ibid., p. 219.

52. Ibid., 3, 141: “Die Poesie ist das echt absolut Reelle. Dies ist der Kern meiner Philosophie. Je poetischer, je wahrer.”

53. Ibid., 1, 260: “Poesie einen besondern Namen hat und die Dichter eine besondere Zunft ausmachen. Es ist gar nichts Besonderes. Es ist die eigentümliche Handlungsweise des menschlichen Geistes. Dichtet und trachtet nicht jeder Mensch in jeder Minute?”

54. Ibid., p. 260: “oder die Liebe ist selbst nichts als höchste Naturpoesie.”

55. Ibid., p. 258: “Die beste Poesie liegt uns ganz nahe, und ein gewöhnlicher Gegenstand ist nicht selten ihr liebster Stoff.”

56. Ibid., p. 259: “Die Poesie beruht ganz auf Erfahrung.”

57. Ibid., 5, 294.

58. Ibid., 2, 41: “Der echte Dichter ist aber immer Priester, so wie die der echte Priester immer Dichter geblieben—und sollte die Zukunft nicht den alten Zustand der Dinge wieder herbeiführen?”

59. Ibid., 1, 231: “Es sind die Dichter, diese seltenen Zugmenschen, die zuweilen durch unsere Wohnsitze wandeln und überall den alten, ehrwürdigen Dienst der Menschheit und ihrer ersten Götter, der Gestirne, des Frühlings, der Liebe, des Glücks, der Fruchtbarkeit, der Gesundheit und des Frohsinns, erneuern.”

60. Ibid., 3, 98: “Der echte Dichter ist allwissend—er ist eine wirkliche Welt im kleinen.”

61. Ibid., p. 320: “Die Trennung von Poet und Denker ist nur scheinbar und zum Nachteil beider. Es ist ein Zeichen einer Krankheit und krankhaften Konstitution.”

62. Ibid., 4, 314.

63. Ibid., 2, 41.

64. Ibid., 4, 286: “Je persönlicher, lokaler, temporeller, eigentümlicher ein Gedicht ist, desto näher steht es dem Zentro der Poesie. Ein Gedicht muss ganz unerschöpflich sein wie ein Mensch und ein guter Spruch.”

65. Ibid., p. 266: “Erzählungen ohne Zusammenhang, jedoch mit Assoziation, wie Träume. Gedichte, bloss wohlklingend und voll schöner Worte, aber auch ohne allen Sinn und Zusammenhang, höchstens einzelne Strophen verständlich; sie müssen wie lauter Bruchstücke aus den verschiedenartigsten Dingen sein. Höchstens kann wahre Poesie einen allegorischen Sinn im grossen haben und eine indirekte Wirkung wie Musik etc. tun.”

66. Ibid., p. 267: “Solle Poesie nichts als innre Malerei und Musik etc. sein? Freilich modifiziert durch die Natur des Gemüts.”

67. Ibid., p. 284.

68. Ibid., 1, 258-9.

69. Ibid., 4, 165: “Das Märchen ist gleichsam der Kanon der Poesie—alles Poetische muss märchenhaft sein. Der Dichter betet den Zufall an.”

70. Ibid., p. 172.

71. Ibid., p. 126: “Poetik: Im Märchen glaub ich am besten meine Gemütsstimmung ausdrücken zu können. (Alles ist ein Märchen.)”

72. Ibid., 3, 262-3.

73. Ibid., 4, 301: “Die Kunst, auf eine angenehme Art zu befremden, einen Gegenstand fremd zu machen und doch bekannt und anziehend, das ist die romantische Poetik.”

74. Ibid., p. 43: “Nichts ist romantischer als was man gewöhnlich Welt und Schicksal nennt. Wir leben in einem kolossalen Roman (im Grossen und Kleinen).”

75. Ibid., p. 290.

76. Ibid., p. 188.

77. Ibid., p. 212.

78. Ibid., 3, 124.

79. Ibid., 4, 263: “Den Satz des Widerspruchs zu vernichten, ist vielleicht die höchste Aufgabe der höhern Logik.”

80. Ibid., 1, 353.

81. Ibid., 3, 96: “Philosophie ist die Theorie der Poesie. Sie zeigt uns, was die Poesie sei, dass sie eins und alles sei.”

82. Ibid., 5, 247-8:

    Das “Geheimnis der schönen Entfaltung” ist ein wesentlicher Bestandteil des poetischen Geistes überhaupt und dürfte im lyrischen und dramatischen Gedicht wohl auch eine Hauptrolle spielen, freilich modifiziert durch den verschiedenen Inhalt, aber ebenfalls sichtbar als besonnenes Anschauen und Schildern zugleich; zweifache Tätigkeit des Schaffens und Begreifens, vereinigt in einen Moment—eine Wechselvollendung des Bilds und des Begriffs.

83. Ibid., 1, 251: “Der junge Dichter kann nicht kühl, nicht besonnen genug sein.”

84. Ibid., p. 250: “Nichts ist dem Dichter unentbehrlicher als Einsicht in die Natur jedes Geschäfts, Bekanntschaft mit den Mitteln, jeden Zweck zu erreichen, und Gegenwart des Geistes, nach Zeit und Umständen die schicklichsten zu wählen. Begeisterung ohne Verstand ist unnütz und gefährlich, und der Dichter wird wenig Wunder tun können, wenn er selbst über Wunder erstaunt.”

85. Ibid., p. 252: “‘Die Poesie will vorzüglich,’ fuhr Klingsohr fort, ‘als strenge Kunst getrieben werden.’”

86. Ibid., 3, 89-90: “Die Kunst zerfällt, wenn man will, in die wirkliche, vollendete, durchgeführte, mittelst der äussern (Leiter) Organe wirksame Kunst—und in die eingebildete (unterwegs in den innern Organen aufgehaltene, in den innern Organen als Nicht-Leiter isolierte) und nur mittelst dieser wirksame Kunst.”

87. Ibid., p. 94: “Wir wissen etwas nur, insofern wir es ausdrücken—id est, machen können.”

88. Ibid., 2, 41: “Was Schlegel so scharf als Ironie charakterisiert, ist, meinem Bedünken nach, nichts anderes als die Folge, der Charakter der echten Besonnenheit, der wahrhaften Gegenwart des Geistes.”

89. Ibid., 1, 258.

90. Ibid., p. 259.

91. Ibid., p. 386. Cf. 3, 72, on “Hieroglyphistik.”

92. Ibid., 3, 23.

93. Ibid., p. 12: “Jedes Wort ist ein Wort der Beschwörung. Welcher Geist ruft—ein solcher erscheint.”

94. Ibid., p. 23: “Wie Kleider der Heiligen noch wunderbare Kräfte behalten, so ist manches Wort durch irgendein herrliches Andenken geheiligt und fast allein schon ein Gedicht geworden. Dem Dichter ist die Sprache nie zu arm, aber immer zu allgemein. Er bedarf oft wiederkehrender, durch den Gebrauch ausgespielter Worte.”

95. Ibid., p. 107: “Die Welt ist ein Universaltropus des Geistes, ein symbolisches Bild desselben.”

96. Ibid., p. 26: “Von der Bearbeitung der transzendentalen Poesie lässt sich eine Tropik erwarten, die die Gesetze der symbolischen Konstruktion der transzendentalen Welt begreift.”

97. Ibid., p. 23: “Durch Poesie entsteht die höchste Sympathie und Koaktivität, die innigste Gemeinschaft des Endlichen und Unendlichen.”

98. Ibid., 4, 302: “Kritik der Poesie ist Unding. Schwer schon ist zu entscheiden, doch einzig mögliche Entscheidung, ob etwas Poesie sei oder nicht.”

99. Ibid., 3, 24: “Zur echten Kritik gehört die Fähigkeit, das zu kritisierende Produkt selbst hervorzubringen.”

100. Ibid., 2, 192:

     Tadle nichts Menschliches! Alles ist gut, nur nicht überall, nur nicht immer, nur nicht für alle. So mit der Kritik. Bei Beurteilung von Gedichten z.B. nehme man sich in acht, mehr zu tadeln als, streng genommen, eigentlicher Kunstfehler, Misston in jeder Verbindung ist. Man weise möglichst genau jedem Gedichte seinen Bezirk an, und dies wird Kritik genug für den Wahn ihrer Verfasser sein. Denn nur in dieser Hinsicht sind Gedichte zu beurteilen, ob sie einen weiten oder engen, einen nahen oder entlegnen, einen finstren oder hellen, einen hellen oder dunkeln, erhabnen oder niedrigen Standort haben wollen. So schreibt Schiller für wenige, Goethe für viele. Man ist heutzutage zu wenig darauf bedacht gewesen, die Leser anzuweisen, wie das Gedicht gelesen werden muss—unter welchen Umständen es allein gefallen kann. Jedes Gedicht hat seine Verhältnisse zu den mancherlei Lesern und den vielfachen Umständen. Es hat seine eigne Umgebung, seine eigne Welt, seinen eignen Gott.

101. Ibid., 3, 66-7.

102. Ibid., 4, 262:

     Shakespeare war kein Kalkulator, kein Gelehrter—er war eine mächtige, buntkräftige Seele, deren Erfindungen und Werke wie Erzeugnisse der Natur das Gepräge des denkenden Geistes tragen und in denen auch der letzte scharfsinnige Beobachter noch neue Übereinstimmungen mit dem unendlichen Gliederbau des Weltalls, Begegnungen mit spätern Ideen, Verwandtschaften mit den höhern Kräften und Sinnen der Menschheit finden wird. Sie sind sinnbildlich und vieldeutig, einfach und unerschöpflich wie jene, und es dürfte nichts Sinnloseres von ihnen gesagt werden können, als dass sie Kunstwerke in jener eingeschränkten, mechanischen Bedeutung des Worts seien.

103. Ibid., p. 299.

104. Ibid., p. 301.

105. Ibid., p. 258.

106. Ibid., p. 299: “Shakespeares Verse und Gedichte gleichen ganz der Boccazischen und Cervantischen Prosa: ebenso gründlich, elegant, nett, pedantisch und vollständig.”

107. Ibid., p. 293: “Shakespeare ist mir dunkler als Griechenland. Den Spass des Aristophanes versteh ich, aber den Shakespeares noch lange nicht. Shakespeare versteh ich überhaupt noch sehr unvollkommen.”

108. Ibid., 5, 156: “Der Erzieher des künftigen Jahrhunderts.”

109. Ibid., p. 163.

110. Ibid., 4, 60.

111. Ibid., p. 252.

112. Ibid., p. 266.

113. Ibid., 5, 291.

114. Ibid., p. 290.

115. Ibid., 1, 304.

116. Werke und Briefe, p. 15.

117. I owe this point to a note in H. H. Borcherdt's edition of Herzensergiessungen (Munich, 1949), p. 126.

118. Werke und Briefe, pp. 69-70:

     Sie redet durch Bilder der Menschen und bedienet sich also einer Hieroglyphenschrift, deren Zeichen wir dem Äussern nach kennen und verstehen. Aber sie schmelzt das Geistige und Unsinnliche … in die sichtbaren Gestalten hinein … rühren unsere Sinne sowohl als unsern Geist; oder vielmehr scheinen dabei … alle Teile unsers (uns unbegreiflichens) Wesens zu einem einzigen, neuen Organ zusammenzuschmelzen, welches die himmlichen Wunder auf diesem zweifachen Wege fasst und begreift.

119. Ibid., p. 147: “und es ist mir eine sehr bedeutende und geheimnisvolle Vorstellung, wenn ich sie zweien magischen Hohlspiegeln vergleiche, die mir alle Dinge der Welt sinnbildlich abspiegeln, durch deren Zauberbilder hindurch ich den wahren Geist aller Dinge erkennen und verstehen lerne.”

120. Ibid., p. 67: “Nur das Unsichtbare, das über uns schwebt, ziehen Worte nicht in unser Gemüt herab.”

121. Ibid., p. 222: “Wer das, was sich nur von innen heraus fühlen lässt, mit der Wünschelrute des untersuchenden Verstandes entdecken will, der wird ewig nur Gedanken über das Gefühl, und nicht das Gefühl selber, entdecken. Eine ewige feindselige Kluft ist zwischen dem fühlenden Herzen und den Untersuchungen des Forschens befestigt. … Sokann auch das Gefühl überhaupt nur vom Gefühl erfasst und ergriffen werden.”

122. Ibid., p. 211: “Wie ich denn überhaupt glaube, dass das der echte Genuss, und zugleich der echte Prüfstein der Vortrefflichkeit eines Kunstwerks sei, wenn man über dies eine alle andern Werke vergisst, und gar nicht daran denkt, es mit einem andern vergleichen zu wollen.”

123. Ibid., p. 52: “Ihm ist der gotische Tempel so wohlgefällig als der Tempel des Griechen; und die rohe Kriegsmusik der Wilden ist ihm ein so lieblicher Klang, als kunstreiche Chöre und Kirchengesänge.”

124. Ibid., p. 54: “Schönheit: ein wunderseltsames Wort! Erfindet erst neue Worte für jedes einzelne Kunstgefühl, für jedes einzelne Werk der Kunst!”

125. Ibid., p. 55: “So lasset uns denn dieses Glück benutzen, und mit heitern Blicken über alle Zeiten und Völker umherschweifen und uns bestreben, an allen ihren mannigfaltigen Empfindungen und Werken der Empfindung immer das Menschliche herauszufühlen.”

126. Ibid., p. 124: “Das ich, statt frei zu fliegen, erst lernen musste, in dem unbehülflichen Gerüst und Käfig der Kunstgrammatik herumzuklettern!”

127. Ibid., p. 130: “Warum wollte der Himmel, dass sein ganzes Leben hindurch der Kampf zwischen seinem ätherischen Enthusiasmus und dem niedrigen Elend dieser Erde ihn so unglücklich machen und endlich sein doppeltes Wesen von Geist und Leib ganz voneinanderreissen sollte!”

128. Ibid., p. 128: “Er geriet auf die Idee, ein Künstler müsse nur für sich allein, zu seiner eignen Herzenserhebung und für einen oder ein paar Menschen, die ihn verstehen, Künstler sein.”

129. Ibid., p. 131: “mehr dazu geschaffen war, Kunst zu geniessen als auszuüben?”

130. Ibid., p. 147.

131. Ibid., p. 206: “Es scheinen uns diese Gefühle, die in unserm Herzen aufsteigen, manchmal so herrlich und gross, dass wir sie wie Reliquien in kostbare Monstranzen einschliessen, freudig davor niederknieen, und im Taumel nicht wissen, ob wir unser eignes menschliches Herz, oder ob wir den Schöpfer, von dem alles Grosse und Herrliche herabkommt, verehren.”

132. Ibid., p. 217: “dass das ganze Leben des Menschen, und das ganze Leben des gesamten Weltkörpers nichts ist, als so ein unaufhörliches, seltsames Brettspiel solcher weissen und schwarzen Felder, wobei am Ende keiner gewinnt als der leidige Tod.” Cf. ibid., p. 226. Dichten comes from dictare and has nothing to do with verdichten (to condense).

133. Ibid., p. 197.

134. Ibid., p. 227: “Und eben diese frevelhafte Unschuld, diese furchtbare, orakelmässig-zweideutige Dunkelheit, macht die Tonkunst recht eigentlich zu einer Gottheit für menschliche Herzen.”

135. A much fuller treatment is in Robert Minder, Un poète romantique allemand: Ludwig Tieck, esp. pp. 305 ff.

136. See the quotations and discussion in Marie Joachimi, Die Weltanschauung der deutschen Romantik (Jena, 1905), pp. 181 ff.

137. See Rudolf Köpke, Ludwig Tieck (Leipzig, 1855), 2, 173, 238; and Schriften (Berlin, 1828), 6, xxvii-xxix.

138. Köpke, Tieck, 2, 173, 237.

139. Köpke, “Unterhaltungen mit Tieck, 1849-1853,” Tieck, 2, 167-256.

140. Kritische Schriften, 2, 183: “die unmittelbarste, nächste Empfindung meiner Persönlichkeit.”

141. There is ample information in the books by Henry Lüdeke, ed. Das Buch über Shakespeare, and Edwin Zeydel, Ludwig Tieck, the German Romanticist.

142. Kri. Schr. 1, 237: “im Zusammenhange.”

143. Ibid., 1, 230, 234, 283, 303; on Middleton see pp. 293 ff. Tieck translated Volpone (1798) and the Silent Woman (1800). On his studies of Ben Jonson see Walther Fischer, “Zu Ludwig Tiecks elisabethanischen Studien: Tieck als Ben Jonson-Philologe,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 62 (1926), 98-131.

144. Das Buch über Shakespeare, ed. Lüdeke, p. 406: “den Dichter nicht mehr als eine isolierte Erscheinung zu betrachten, sondern ihn aus seiner Zeit und Umgebung abzuleiten, hauptsächlich aber ihn aus seinem eigenen Gemüt zu entwickeln.”

145. Kri. Schr., 1, 37, 38, 65, 73, etc.

146. Ibid., pp. 149, 152, 159: “kein gedruckter Engländer.”

147. Schriften (28 vols. Berlin, 1828-54), 28, 258 ff., esp. 265-9.

148. Kri. Schr., 4, 318 ff. See the full account of Tieck's visit in Zeydel, Ludwig Tieck and England, pp. 48 ff.

149. Cf. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. R. Köpke (Leipzig, 1855), 2, 154 ff.; Dramaturgische Blätter (Breslau, 1825-26), 2, 74, 118. Goethe in reviewing this book rejects Tieck's view of Lady Macbeth. Werke, 38, 22: “eine zärtliche liebevolle Seele.” Also Kri. Schr., 3, 257: “ein wahrer Staatsmann”; cf. pp. 264, 277.

150. Schriften, 18, 265, 256: “als würde ich erst durch mein Gedicht erschaffen, und mein eigenstes Wesen zum Leben gebracht.”

151. On Tieck's Spanish studies cf. the two books by J.-J. Bertrand, Tieck et le théâtre espagnol, Paris, 1914; and Cervantes et le romantisme allemand, Paris, 1914. See Schriften, 23, 46 ff.; in “Eine Sommerreise.”

152. Kri. Schr., 2, 194-5, 249. Letters to Solger, Nov. 10 and Dec. 17, 1818, in Tieck and Solger. The Complete Correspondence, ed. Percy Matenko (New York, 1933), pp. 476, 493-4.

153. Kri. Schr., 2, 61-92.

154. Ibid., 1, 185-214. J. Grimm, Kleinere Schriften (8 vols. Berlin, 1869-90), 1, 6; 4, 7.

155. The eds. of Lenz, 1828, Novalis, 1802 and 1846, and Kleist, 1826.

156. Kri. Schr., 2, 175 ff., esp. 187, 205, 207, 208, 230.

157. Ibid., p. 243.

158. Ibid., pp. 24, 34, 55: “eine dunkle Macht … ein plötzliches, grelles Gelüst, beide zu überspringen, und das Leere, Nichtige, dennoch höher als die Wirklichkeit zu stellen … ein grossartiger Manierist.”

159. Köpke, 2, 22 ff.

160. Kri. Schr., 2, 309, 347, 349. Köpke, 2, 193 ff. In Dramaturgische Blätter there are several laudatory papers on Schiller's plays, e.g. on Wallenstein.

161. Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel, ed. H. Lüdeke (Frankfurt, 1930), p. 169; letter of August 26, 1813: “Ich habe überhaupt keine Freude an allen den Sachen, die wir veranlasst haben.” Köpke, 2, 173.

162. Ibid., 206, 204, etc. On Bettina see letter of Tieck to Solger, May 5, 1818; Tieck and Solger, pp. 436-8.

163. Köpke, 2, 208. See letter to Brinckmann, Nov. 17, 1835, in Euphorion, Supplement, 13, p. 71.

164. Schriften, 6, 213: “Poesie, Kunst, und selbst die Andacht [ist] nur verkleidete, verhüllte Wollust … Sinnlichkeit und Wollust sind der Geist der Musik, der Malerei und aller Künste … Schönheitssinn und Kunstgefühl sind nur andere Dialekte und Aussprachen, sie bezeichnen nichts weiter, als den Trieb des Menschen zur Wollust.”

165. Ibid., 18, 60, 62; “zu schaffen und zu vernichten … in Sehnsucht nach dem Unsichtbaren … das Ewige mit dem Irdischen.”

166. Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe, Berlin [1948?], pp. 195, 232, 230, 231: “lasset uns darum unser Leben in ein Kunstwerk verwandeln … Das ist's, dass der Künstler ein Schauspieler wird, der jedes Leben als Rolle betrachtet … die Kunst ist eine verführerische, verbotene Frucht; wer einmal ihren innersten, süssesten Saft geschmeckt hat, der is unwiederbringlich verloren für die tätige, lebendige Welt … Und mitten in diesem Getümmel bleib' ich ruhig sitzen, wie ein Kind auf seinem Kinderstuhle, und blase Tonstücke wie Seifenblasen in die Luft.”

167. Schriften, 5, 308, conclusion of Act I of Verkehrte Welt (1798): “Ach du schwaches, leichtzerbrechliches Menschenleben! Ich will dich immer als ein Kunstwerk betrachten, das mich ergötzt und das einen Schluss haben muss, damit es ein Kunstwerk sein und mich ergötzen könne. Dann bin ich stets zufrieden, dann bin ich von gemeiner Freude und von dem lastenden Trübsinne gleich weit entfernt.”

168. Bettina von Arnim, Frühlingskranz, ed. W. Oehlke (Berlin, 1920), 1, 371: “das grösste mimische Talent was jemals die Bühne nicht betreten.”

169. Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel, ed. Lüdeke, p. 144; letter to Friedrich Schlegel, Dec. 16, 1803: “ich bin un so mehr ein Individuum, um so mehr ich mich in alles verlieren kann.” Tieck and Solger, ed. Matenko, p. 363; letter to Solger, March 24, 1817: “es ist mir schon sonst so gegangen, dass ich Gedanken, die nachher mein Leben wurden, vorher wohl ein Jahr in mir, ich möchte sagen, nur mimisch nachgemacht habe.” Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel, p. 146; to F. Schlegel: “Vorzüglich ängstigte mich Alles, was mir bis dahin das Liebste gewesen war: meine Liebe zur Poesie, mein Talent schienen mir recht eigentlich das Böseste in mir, was mich ganz zu Grunde richten musste.”

170. See the discussion of Tieck's views of dreams and use of dreams in Albert Béguin, L'Âme romantique et le rêve (2d ed. Paris, 1946), pp. 217-38.

171. Vorschule, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Berend, 11, 8, 14, 74.

172. See esp. “Jubilate-Vorlesung” in Vorschule, SW, 11, 377 ff. also note in “Clavis Fichtiana,” SW, 9, 476. Unprinted notes on the Schlegels in Berend, Jean Pauls Aesthetik, pp. 37-8, and cf. p. 104.

173. E.g. SW, 11, 74-5, 75n., 80. The preface to the 2d ed. of Quintus Fixlein (1796) attacks Schiller's Briefe über aesthetische Erziehung.

174. In Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben von J. P. Richter, ed. Ernst Förster (Munich, 1863), 3, 39: “Eine höhere kritische Schule als in der hohen von Jena” (1799).

175. SW, 11, 19: “Meine innigste Überzeugnung ist, dass die neuere Schule im ganzen und grossem recht hat.”

176. Ibid., pp. 22, 25, 37.

177. Ibid., pp. 425, 234: “Blosse Zeichen geben; aber voll Zeichen steht ja schon die ganze Welt, die ganze Zeit; das Lesen dieser Buchstaben eben fehlt; wir wollen ein Wörterbuch und eine Sprachlehre der Zeichen. Die Poesie lehrt lesen.”

178. Ibid., pp. 235, 21.

179. Ibid., p. 38: “Die Phantasie macht alle Teile zun Ganzen … sie totalisiert alles.”

180. Ibid., p. 46: “Im Genius stehen alle Kräfte auf einmal in Blüte.” Cf. p. 53.

181. Ibid., pp. 49, 196. There a note from Jean Pauls Briefe und bevorstehender Lebenslauf (Gera, 1799), p. 147. Albert Béguin, L'Âme romantique et le rêve, pp. 167 ff., has a good chapter on Jean Paul's dreams.

182. SW, 11, 196: “Er muss euch—wie ja im Traume geschieht—eingeben, nicht ihr ihm. … Ein Dichter, der überlegen muss, ob er einen Charakter in einem gegebenen Falle Ja oder Nein sagen zu lassen habe, werf' ihn weg, es ist eine dumme Leiche.”

183. Ibid., p. 48: “Die Teile werden von der Ruhe erzogen.”

184. Ibid., pp. 28, 46, on “Besonnenheit”; see pp. 123 and passim.

185. Especially Leibgeber in Siebenkäs and Schoppe in Titan. A history of the double in literature, with a section on Jean Paul, is in Otokar Fischer, Duše a slovo (Prague, 1929), esp. pp. 179 ff., and in Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology, Cambridge, 1949.

186. SW, 11, 41, 44.

187. Ibid., p. 49.

188. Ibid., p. 56.

189. Ibid., p. 57: “Dieses schönheitstrunkne Volk noch mit einer heitern Religion in Aug' und Herz.”

190. Ibid., pp. 75-6, 79: “Ein Petrarch, der kein Christ ist, wäre ein unmöglicher. Die einzige Maria adelt alle Weiber romantisch.”

191. Ibid., pp. 76, 80.

192. Ibid., p. 80: “Jedes Jahrhundert ist anders romantisch.”

193. Ibid., pp. 74-5.

194. Ibid., p. 254: “Das Epos stellt die Begebenheit, die sich aus der Vergangenheit entwickelt, das Dramo die Handlung, welche sich für und gegen die Zukunft ausdehnt, die Lyrik die Empfindung dar, welche sich in die Gegenwart einschliesst.”

195. E. S. Dallas, Poetics, London, 1852; Emil Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik, Zurich, 1946.

196. SW, 11, 142.

197. Ibid., p. 233: “Poetische Enzyklopädie.” Cf. pp. 234-5.

198. Ibid., p. 231.

199. Ibid., p. 201.

200. Ibid., pp. 202, 197.

201. Ibid., p. 194: “Rassen des innern Menschen”; p. 206: “Seelenmythologie.”

202. Ibid., p. 193.

203. Ibid., pp. 208-9: “Dieser hüpfende Punkt … Hauptton (tonica dominante).”

204. Ibid., p. 211: “Wurzelworte des Charakters.” On naming see pp. 252-3.

205. Ibid., p. 212.

206. Ibid., pp. 260, 275, 303, 177 ff.

207. See Friedrich Vischer's Aesthetik, 1 (Reutlingen, 1846) on the objective comic (the farce), the subjective comic (wit), the absolute comic (humor); on Jean Paul, ibid., e.g. pp. 354-5, 385, and passim. S. T. Coleridge, Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, pp. 117-20, 440-6. George Meredith, On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1877).

208. I accept here, though not completely, Croce's view. See “L'umorismo” in Problemi di estetica (1903; 4th ed. Bari, 1949), p. 281. See also Estetica (Bari, 1946), pp. 100, 385.

209. SW, 11, 158.

210. Ibid., p. 170.

211. Ibid., p. 178: “Eine wilde Paarung ohne Priester.”

212. Ibid., p. 179.

213. Ibid., pp. 184 ff.

214. Ibid., p. 102: “Der sinnlich angeschaute unendliche Unverstand.” “Den. Widerspruch, worin das Bestreben oder Sein des lächerlichen Wesens mit dem sinnlich angeschauten Verhältnis steht, nenn' ich den objektiven Kontrast.”

215. Ibid., p. 97: “Wir leihen seinem Bestreben unsere Einsicht.”

216. Ibid., p. 99: “Unterschiebung.” Vischer, Aesthetik, 1, 385. Theodor Lipps, Komik und Humor (Hamburg, 1898), pp. 60 ff.

217. Ibid., p. 112: “Der Humor, als das umgekehrte Erhabene, vernichtet nicht das Einzelne, sondern das Endliche durch den Kontrast mit der Idee. Es gibt für ihn keine einzelne Torheit, keine Toren, sondern nur Torheit und eine tolle Welt.”

218. Ibid., pp. 116, 113, 114-5.

219. See the chapter on Friedrich Schlegel, above, and literature on irony quoted in note on p. 15.

220. SW, 11, 124. On Yahoos, MS quoted in Berend, Jean Pauls Aesthetik, pp. 110-11: “Wie kann man Swift die Yahoos so übelnehmen, da sie doch nur die satirische Karikatur enthalten, wenn er auch im Leben über Menschen zürnte?—Warum soll jedes satirische, d.h. poetische Wort von ihm ein wahres sein?”

221. SW, 11, 134: “Schein des Ernstes.”

222. On Jean Paul's fictional attack on aestheticism see K. J. Obenauer, Die Problematik des aesthetischen Menschen in der deutschen Literatur (Munich, 1933), pp. 182 ff.

223. Much is collected in Berend, Aesthetik, and in Paul Nerrlich, Jean Paul und seine Zeitgenossen, Berlin, 1876.

224. See the “lecture” on Herder concluding Vorschule, SW, 11, 420 ff.; reviews of Fouqué in Kleine Bücherschau (1825), and in SW, 16, 357, 360, 370. Jean Paul wrote an introduction to E. T. A. Hoffmann's Phantasiestücke (1814); in ibid., pp. 288-93. On relations to Tieck, Novalis, etc. see Nerrlich, pp. 246, 250, 252, 253-6.

225. SW, 11, 200-1, 235; on Milton, p. 227. Shakespeare was “his God”: Wahrheit aus Jean Pauls Leben, under March 21, 1805.

226. SW, 11, 133.

227. Ibid., 16, 297, 329. Carlyle translated Jean Paul's review of De l'Allemagne in Fraser's Magazine (1830). See Carlyle, Works, Centenary ed. (London, 1899), 26, 476-501.

228. SW, 16, 468.

229. Ibid., p. 6n.: “In jeder guten Rezension verbirgt oder entdeckt sich eine gute Aesthetik und noch dazu eine angewandte und freie und kürzeste und durch die Beispiele—helleste.”

230. First ed. of Vorschule (Hamburg, 1804), pp. 805 ff.: “Die beste Poetik wäre, alle Dichter zu charakterisieren.”

231. SW, 11, 259.

232. Ibid., p. 343: “Denn alle echte positive Kritik ist doch nur eine neue Dichtkunst, wovon ein Kunstwerk der Gegenstand ist”; p. 350: “Fehler lassen sich beweisen, aber Schönheiten nur weisen.”

233. MS quoted in Berend, Aesthetik, p. 77: “Das Beste in jedem Autor ist, was nicht im einzelnen liegt, und gar nicht zu zeigen ist, weil der Glanz des Zusammenhangs keinen einzelnen Fingerzeig verträgt.” Cf. SW, 11, 355, 337-8.

1. Schelling is quoted from Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, 14 vols. 1856-61. Letters and poems can be found in Aus Schellings Leben in Briefen, ed. G. L. Plitt, 3 vols. 1869-70. From the extensive literature I use M. Adam, Schellings Kunstphilosophie, in Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte, 4, 1907; and Jean Gibelin, L'Esthétique de Schelling d'après la Philosophie de l'art, Paris, 1934.

2. Novalis is quoted from Gesammelte Werke, ed. Carl Seelig, 5 vols. Zürich, 1945. Eduard Havenstein, Friedrich von Hardenbergs aesthetische Anschauungen, Palaestra, 84 (Berlin, 1909) is of little use. Helmut Rehder, “Novalis and Shakespeare,” PMLA, 63 (1948), 604-24, interprets Novalis' pronouncements well.

3. Wackenroder is quoted from Werke und Briefe, Berlin, 1938; reprint [1948]. There are three good essays on Wackenroder, of which the last is easily the best: Heinrich Wölfflin, “Die Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders,” in Studien zur Literaturgeschichte: Michael Bernays gewidmet (Hamburg, 1893), pp. 61-73; I. Rouge, “Wackenroder et la genèse de l'esthétique romantique,” in Mélanges Henri Lichtenberger (Paris, 1934), pp. 185-203; and Gerhard Fricke, “Bemerkungen zu Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroders Religion der Kunst,” in Festschrift Paul Kluckhohn und Hermann Schneider gewidmet (Tübingen, 1948), pp. 345-71.

4. Tieck's criticism is quoted from Kritische Schriften, 4 vols. Leipzig, 1848-52 (cited as Kri. Schr.) and from Das Buch über Shakespeare, ed. Henry Lüdeke, Halle, 1920. Full discussions are in Robert Minder, Un poète romantique allemand: Ludwig Tieck, Paris, 1936; and in Edwin H. Zeydel's Ludwig Tieck, the German Romanticist, Princeton, 1935. On his relations to English literature see H. Lüdeke, L. Tieck und das alte englische Theater, Frankfurt, 1922; and Edwin H. Zeydel, Ludwig Tieck and England, Princeton, 1931. On Calderón and Tieck: J.-J. Bertrand, Tieck et le théâtre espagnol, Paris, 1914. Incidental discussion of criticism in Raymond M. Immerwahr, The Esthetic Intent of Tieck's Fantastic Comedy, St. Louis, 1953. More specialized articles, etc. are quoted in Minder's bibliography.

5. Jean Paul's Vorschule der Aesthetik is quoted from Vol. ii of Sämtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Berend, Weimar, 1935 (cited as SW, 11) Eduard Berend's Jean Pauls Aesthetik (Berlin, 1909) is the best study.