54 organ peal, which wells upward in swelling, painting, all add their charms to an harmonious picture of the sunny side of life in the Middle Ages. Franz is a young pupil of Albert Dürer, and his experiences and observations on art and manners, during a two or three years' wandering, form the staple of the work. He is a noble-hearted, enthusiastic youth, though standing in need of advice given him by an older fellow-scholar, to this effect:- -"Strive to be somewhat harder, and you will lead a quieter life, at least a life in which you can work much more than in the torrent of emotions which now disturb and hinder you." We select one or two specimens as illustrative of the usual prose style of Tieck, and also as distinctively Ro-lyzed. Oh, ye foolish ones, who imagine almighty manticist in their character. Franz writes as follows, in an early letter to Sebastian, after leaving his home at Numberg: * * "I do not know how you may receive these expressions. I feel myself how necesBut if all men were sary is industry to man. artists, or understood art, if they dared not torture and sully the pure mind in the tumult of life, all would surely be far happier. Then they would have freedom and peace, which are truly the greatest happiness. How happy would the artist feel in undertaking to represent the purest emotions of such beings! Then, for the first time, it would be possible to attempt the sublime; then would that false enthusiasm, which clings to toys and trifles, first find a career in which to expatiate. But all men are so tortured and persecuted by envy, selfishness, care, and hardship, that they have no heart to look upon art and poetry, nature and heaven, as something divine. In their breast even devotion is mingled with earthly care, and when they think they grow wiser and better, they only exchange one lamentable condition for another."-p. 72. * * * "Do you not often feel," continued Rudolph, "a strange attraction of your heart toward the marvellous? At such times we cannot exclude dreamy images; we anticipate some wondrous continuation of our usual course of life. Often it seems as though the spirit of Ariosto's poems flew by above us, and would seize us in its crystal evolution; now we listen, curious for the new future, for all visions which pass bright with enchanted hues; then it seems as though the forest stream would utter its melody more clearly, as though the tongue of the tree would be loosened, that its whispers might rustle intelligible song. Then love begins to approach upon the tones of distant flutes, and the beating heart will fly to meet him; the present is banished as though by some mighty irrevocable ban, and the shining moments dare not fly. A circle of harmony holds us bound with magic power, and a new glorified existence shines like mystic moonlight into our real life."-p 227. "Oh, impotent art!" exclaimed Franz, seating himself on a green rock; "how lisping and childish are thy tones beside the full harmonious nature can be beautified, if, with artifice and petty cunning, you think to make your weakness strong! What more can you do than give us an aspiration after nature, as nature gives us an aspiration after God? It is not aspiration, not presentment, not intuitive emotion, but visibly religion, walking on every height, in every depth, receiving and enduring with divine compassion my adoring love. That hieroglyph which denotes the highest, the Deity, lies before me in active operation, laboring to express, to explain itself. I feel the motion, the enigma, in the act of disappearing, and feel my humanity. The highest art can but explain itself; it is a song whose self can be its only subject."-p. 274. The reader will have remarked in these characteristic passages, that admixture of flame and cloud, of beauty and of nonsense, of genuine feeling and inane extravagance, which is so distinctive of the Romantic School. The aim in this work, as in that already mentioned, by Wackenroder, and in others of the same school, is the glorification of art. These writers long to see art arise in the full glory of its empire, winning the worms of earth to an upward gaze and a heavenly aspiration. Such endeavors on the part of the Romanticist have been despised and censured as Catholic and mediæval in their tendency. A suspicion not altogether groundless, considering the quarter of the field from which these trumpet-tones were heard. Yet justice compels us to say that these votaries of art were at least free from the exclusiveness and the prejudices of Romanism. They adored Dürer and Raphael, Michael Angelo and Watteau, but they could, most of them, discern the glory of the freedom achieved by Protestantism, and would render due honor to the spirit of Luther. In Sternbald, Tieck extols country life, and recommends scenes from nature as subjects for the painter, rather than the perpetual repetition of the Madonna, saints, and sacred legends. Such a doctrine must have been flat heresy to the artistic Pharisees of the straitest mediæval school. From nature the Romanticist drew his pictorial and poetic art, and to nature he looked for his religion. Tieck was next engaged in a translation of Don Quixote, and in the composition of his exquisite drama, Genoveva, founded on the old ecclesiastical legend. In 1812 appeared a collection of tales under the title of Phantasus. Several of these have been translated. The story of The Fair Egbert is one of the most beautiful, but marred by the excess of that fatalistic gloom which is the skeleton almost ever present at the brightest feasts of the Romanticists. The only blemish of the Runenberg is an error in the same direction. Tieck and his school have, however, won the kingdom of Titania for themselves. The hostile critic may retreat with gratitude, if the fairy spells do not bind him, nor busy Puck satirize the nature of his head, as his elfship has been known to do in the days of Master Shakspeare. The crystal windows through which commonplace mortals like ourselves may catch a glimpse of this world of wonders, are fairy tales (märchen) and stories (novelle.) These are both favorite forms of poetry in Germany, especially the latter, demanding as it does neither the sustained plot of the novel nor the poetic invention of the fairy tale. It pledges the writer to nothing, and this elastic fabric may be as fragile, as incongruous, or as incomplete as the most way ward author could desire. Sterne himself could not have rebelled against its liberal conditions. This freedom, as our philosophic readers will anticipate, has often degenerated into license, and has been abused to shield that worst of literary crimes, dulness itself. Unmitigated prose, like Stifter's Hochwald, (which a man of his talent must have written asleep or with the toothache,) is frequently dignified by the same name as the spirited medley of incidents in the tales of Hoffmann, Hauff, and similar writers. The qualities of a good novelle are lively action and a well-devised denouement. The more unlooked-for the termination, the better; and the novelle-writer is most successful when most unlike the logician, so that none can divine his conclusion from his premises. The tales of Tieck are every where illustrative of the Romanticist principles, of the peculiar effort made by that school to combine the real and the ideal. Herder and Lessing had prepared the way for such successors by demolishing the artificial pomposities of that old French Renaissance style, which sacrificed at the shrine of conventional art all the truth and reality of nature. Accordingly, Tieck mingles with his most fanciful creations the discussion of every-day topics, and intersperses the wonders of fairy land with satirical side-thrusts at the prosaic absurdities of literary coteries or fashionable affectation, and above all, at the expiring follies of that decrepit stage which was about to vanish down its own trap-doors. Minor incidents, such as happen unnoticed every day, suddenly appear, fraught with deep instruction and unlooked-for beauty, showing to us hand in hand the sisters Poetry and Truth. In the tree we hear the whispering dryad, the note of the wood-bird undulates from the cadence of warning to the clear trill of hope, until it seems that all the powers of earth and air are marvellously linked with the most commonplace events. In this walk, Tieck is the very king of story, and under his footsteps sprang, with fresh life, a tender shoot of historic poetry, which is struggling now towards manhood. But to blend successfully these rival elements of dream-land and of prose, demanded workmen of no ordinary skill. In this "callida junctura" the Romanticists often fail. The machinery of supernatural and traditionary terrors is sometimes heard to creak and groan. То As, in Hoffman's Golden Pot, the fantastic and prosaic world reign in alternate chapters, and the breathless reader, without warning and without remorse, is plucked from the domestic tea-urn and set down beside the witch's caldron, the same persons and objects are now homely and sober enough, and presently the victims or the workers of the most appalling enchantments; and the steady English reader is immeasurably provoked to find them all like the knocker on the door of Archivarius Lindhorst, at one moment making horrible grimaces, and the next, as proper a knocker in its burnished propriety as any one would wish to see. those who will not absolutely surrender themselves to the author, and be content amidst all these curvettes, demivoltes, and pirouettes of the gambolling fancy, to catch some subtle under-current of higher meaning, all these metamorphoses of vegetables, nut-crackers, and professors into salamanders, gnomes, or magicians, seem only ridiculous and bizarre. In the middle of a story, the wand of the wizard takes as it were the place of the family umbrella; the cat which purred in solemn bliss at our feet becomes a fearful demon or a merry goblin, turning the point of the whole story. This mode of evolving a pi quante conclusion by supernatural means, or by some inevitable fatalism, mars, æsthetically and poetically, the wholesome effect of the tale. John Bull hates your symbologies and your inner meanings; he must be told straightforward what you have to say: he flings the fantastic book, which seems in one page to ridicule the supernaturalism it cooks into a hell-broth the next, into the remotest corner of the room, whistles to his dog as a companion at least more sane than his author, and if you ask him how he liked the novellen, makes answer, with a fierce face, "Sir, the man's drunk!" man. It has been remarked that the temple of German fame is a beautiful imitation of the Athenian temple of Minerva, in which was an altar dedicated to Oblivion. Could we restore to its natural state the latest heap of gray dust now upon that altar, what choice gifts might we not then discover! Dramas by some impetuous follower of Gutzkow, innocent of his talent, but hastening after his errors, until, stumbling at last, his fall extinguishes the borrowed light. Lyrics, feebly striving after Heine, with profound political opinions suggested by the words, Freiheit, Tod, Tyrannen, and accompanied by the usual accessories of flowers, dew-drops, and superlatives. Poems in very blank verse, of a didactic tendency, inculcating with clearness and sufficient force the one great fact, that prose is the natural and habitual language of Letters, tales, and novels, with considerate directions respecting passages where tears will be most appropriate, but unsuspicious that the smiles excited can be so only at the author's expense. Below these we should find fiery controversies upon questions of criticism, with works on education, culinary art, and domestic duties, all severely trying to the reader's patience, and far beyond his most zealous practice. At this stage of the investigation we should also recognize the names of Hoffmanns waldau, Lohenstein, Brocke, Gottsched, Bodmer, and many besides. Though it may seem hardly fair to rank all these among the multitude who are thus willingly ignored, yet ere very long such will be their fate. The desire for literary immortality, so rarely gratified, becomes less than futile in the absence of creative genius. Men of this order must be content to labor in their day and generation, one little link in the chain of universal progress in themselves nothing, but necessary in their span of life to a wide field of culture whither their eye cannot reach. As poets, as models, let them for ever be for gotten; and may an age in which such men could appear as shining lights never return. The direct benefit of the poetry they taught and wrote, or of the bombastic dulness and frigid pedantry which distinguished their prose, it would seem difficult to discover; nevertheless, wise heads have done so. It is, however, indirectly, that their influence has been productive of the greatest results. The minds which rose up to deliver poetry from such bondage were among the greatest Germany has ever welcomed; and, on a different track, though with the same object in view, the Romanticists also labored zealously. They at the same time combated most earnestly the doctrines of the "Illuminati," whose theory was to enforce grand rules of conventional, moral, and poetical propriety,-a mathematically correct machine, which should cut and smooth, and turn men out like "superfine cream-laid envelopes:" men were to narrow their views, that they might see more clearly. The very necessity of our nature to look above the dust and cobwebs of everyday life to a world of some sort beyond, seemed crushed, as though the generation would be content to become veritable moles, and pass away, leaving for centuries to come no other vestige than a mound of earth. Knowing it to be only the few out of the many who hear a deeper voice across the storm" in the grand tumults of nature, or care to listen to the clear ripple of that under-current streaming through all earthly things, and freshening their faded glory, it was this voice which the Romanticists strove more widely to interpret. To teach a hidden poetry in every-day existence, alike in hardy toil, in deep grief, in kind thoughts of love and friendship, and in daily struggle against evil borne out by the resolute faith and will strong in self-sacrifice, pressing onward and upward through a thousand cares and trifles, until it rests at last upon the height whose "-toppling crags of duty scaled, Are close upon the shining table-lands Of which our God himself is moon and sun.” So fair a text might well kindle the imagination of the preacher. But imagination without bit or bridle is a dangerous steed, and often bears his rider, like the prince in the Arabian tale, so high above the earth, that he forgets which way to move the spring which should direct him home; and at last is fain to descend upon the desert mountaintops. Free natural poetry like this seems to shape itself instinctively into the fairy tale; and finds there, in skilful hands, its proper home. Is it not sometimes, however, matter 1854.] for regret, that with Tieck and others the simplicity of this species of tale is spoiled by allusions to some conventional evil, destroying our own childlike pleasure, and the harmony of the work itself? They should rather be written in the straightforward language of childhood, and the hidden moral, or philosophy, lie not in words, but in essence. In making this remark we are not the less alive to the valuable services which Tieck has rendered in this branch, both to the objects of the Romantic school and to the national lite rature. When we hear of Tieck as a dramatist, and call to mind his successful labors as a student and translator of Shakspeare, we seem naturally to anticipate, as the productions of his pen, grave historic dramas, perfect in their form, and in their humorous and poetical expression. But the name even of his plays will be sufficient to dispel so lofty an idea. Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, and The World Topsy-turvy, are titles not suggestive of Shakspeare or of Calderon as models. The two former are the popular tales dramatized; the latter is a play answering in every respect to its name, and containing two or three smaller stories, or scenes, acted one within the other, like those curiously-carved toys with which the Chinese excite our barbarian admiration. All those who take part in the theatrical performance are permitted to make their remarks, despite dramatic laws and stage regulations. The orchestra reflects sadly and profoundly, through an adagio in A minor, or in the brilliant allegretto tells of the joy of existence. Poets remonstrate publicly upon the stages with hardhearted managers, who persist in putting their idolized pieces into the hands of ungifted actors. Spectators display, by side remarks, the depth of their sensibility, their critical power, their knowledge of dramatic art. It is against the stage evils and the public ignorance that the satire of the piece is mainly directed. The poem of Prince Zerbino in Search of Good Taste is somewhat in the same style, though with almost less regard to any rules of form. It contains very much of what appears upon the surface to be nonsense; but how often it happens that the jester proves wiser than the sage! pure His Highness Prince Zerbino is ill, very ill; he suffers from a terrible mortal disorder —a most inconvenient and unnecessary longing to get to the bottom of things. An old charlatan of a prophet, named Polycomikus, prescribes for his complete restoration a jour The story, ney in search of good taste. Waving boughs and trembling spray. Nestor. Now, is not that a most atrocious manner of rustling? So many forests as I have seen in my day, and never has such a thing happened to me. The Wood. Our tops they wave in the heights of blue, And claim their share with the clouds of air, From fluttering fingers to coiling root, spring With music and odor through us go. We whisper, we rustle, we rock, and we swing, it fans us, Blessing, caressing us all the long day. O hearken, Spring, O welcome Spring, from morn till eve, Seek restful ease in shades like these, Nestor. Be free from sorrow! 'Tis just this chatting of yours, that almost borders upon the rational, which is my greatest trouble. The most insane of all is when they chime in together; were it not for the singularity of the occurrence, I should have run away long since. The Wood. Each for himself; we oaks, and firs, and beeches, Stand interlaced and massed, yet each is free; And none his brethren scorns, or overreaches; All bud and branch in broad-armed liberty. One points to heaven; another, downward tending, Shades with wide hands the grass-each hath his part, When play the winds, yet all, together blending, Send one vast anthem from the forest's heart. And so with men,-so diverse and so partedSome gnarled and earthward, some that seek the height, Yet to the wise they utter, single-hearted, One mother speech-a ceaseless prayer for light. Nestor. There, there; that's the preaching of toleration with a vengeance! The ideas and language a little confused; nevertheless, it's enough to drive one mad. Its blades, with cooling dew, how kind they are; Losing the greatest love that waits thee nigh? The Song of the Birds. Merry we lie in our green tree-cities, Twittering and fluttering, and singing our ditties; The morning, the evening, they still find us singing Under the boughs, where we gather and house; Through the deep shadows the branches are flinging, Over the mountains and over the lea, Over the meadow and over the hill. The Sky. These all I embrace with soft linking arms, And give them drink, and shield them from all harms On my eternal bosom. These I love worn More grand the vapors, tempest-piled or torn, Nestor. This is too much! I am losing my senses;-standing the whole time alone, and yet to be obliged to listen to an incessant chatter; it is too mad! Who comes yonder? A woman, apparently. Fine figure, but too tall, far too tall. It seems the general failing here. |