"Du weisst es ja, ich hab es dir bedeutet,
Ich kenne dich und deine schlimme Zunft.
Und lange Avar's ein Räthsel mir, wie euch
In ihrem Runde duldet die Natur.
Ach, als ich noch ein Knabe war, da mied
Euch Allverderber schon mein frommes Herz,
Das unbestechbar, innig liebend hing
An Sonn' und Aether und den Boten allen
Der grossen ferngeahndeten Natur;
Denn wohl hab ich's gefühlt in meiner Furcht,
Dass ihr des Herzens freie Götterliebe
Bereden möchtet zu gemeinem Dienst,
Und dass ich's treiben sollte so, wie ihr.
Hinweg! ich kann vor mir den Mann nicht sehn,
Der Göttliches wie ein Gewerbe treibt,
Sein Angesicht ist falsch und kalt und todt,
Wie seine Götter sind."[1]
There is not a trace in Hölderlin of the sanctimonious piety developed by the other Romanticists, who, to begin with, were far more decided free-thinkers than he. Yet his Hellenism is not pagan in the manner of Schiller's and Goethe's. There is a fervency in it which is akin to Christian devotion; his poetic prayers to the sun, the earth, and the air are those of a believer; and when, as in Empedokles, he handles a purely pagan subject, the spirit of the treatment is such that we feel (as we do in a later work, Kleist's Amphitryon) the Christian legend behind the heathen. The position of Empedokles to the Pharisees of his day and country is exactly that of Jesus to the Pharisees of Judea. Empedokles, like Jesus, is the great prophet, and both his willing sacrificial death and the worship of which he is the object awake feelings which remotely resemble those of the devout Christian.
In Hölderlin we find in outline, light and delicate as if traced by a spirit, symbols and emotions which the Romantic School develops, exaggerates, caricatures, or simply obliterates.
[1] "'Tis nothing new; this I have told you oft; I know you well, you and your evil kind. And long it was a mystery to me How Nature could endure you in her realm. Corrupters of mankind! Even as a child, My guileless heart shrank from you with distrust— That honest, fervent heart, that loved the sun, The cool fresh air, and all the messengers Of Nature, dimly discerned and great. For even then I timidly perceived How ye would take our true love of the gods And make it serve some baser, selfish end— And that in this ye would that I should follow you. Begone! I cannot look upon the man Who practises religion as a trade; His countenance is false and cold and dead, As are his gods."
III
A. W. SCHLEGEL
In 1797, August Wilhelm Schlegel, then aged thirty, published the first volume of his translation of Shakespeare. Rough drafts of several of the plays in this edition have been found, and these faded, dusty manuscripts not only enable us to follow the persevering, talented translator in his self-imposed task, but, when carefully read, give us direct insight into his and his wife's spiritual life, and indeed into the intellectual life of the whole period.[1]
Even apparently insignificant details are suggestive. The manuscripts are not always in A. W. Schlegel's handwriting. He set to work upon Romeo and Juliet in the winter of 1795–96; in 1796 he married Caroline Böhmer; and we have a complete copy of the first rough draft of the play in Caroline's handwriting, with corrections in Schlegel's. In September 1797, as her letters show, she copied As You Like It from an almost illegible manuscript. And she was more than a mere copyist. She collaborated with Schlegel in his essay on Romeo and Juliet, which ranks next to Goethe's disquisitions on Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister as the best Shakespeare criticism produced in Germany up to that time. We recognise her now and again in some outburst of womanly feeling, or in a greater freedom of style than we are accustomed to in Schlegel. She had a far truer understanding than her contemporaries of the full significance of a work, the aim of which was the incorporation of Shakespeare in his unalloyed entirety into German literature. But her interest in the work and the labourer did not, as the manuscripts show us, survive the first year of her married life. At first it is her handwriting which predominates, and, though it is less frequently to be seen alongside of her husband's in the manuscripts of those plays with which he was occupied during the years 1797–98, her collaboration is still apparent. We find the last traces of her pen in the manuscript of the Merchant of Venice, which dates from the autumn of 1798. In October of that year, Schelling joined the Romanticist circle in Jena. Thenceforward no more of Caroline's handwriting is discoverable.
Among the manuscripts in question, two give us a very distinct idea of the progress of Schlegel's intellectual development. They are two different texts of the Midsummer Night's Dream.
Before A. W. Schlegel's time no one in Germany, or elsewhere, had attempted to translate Shakespeare line for line. The two tame prose translations by Wieland and Eschenburg were, in fact, all that existed. As a student in Göttingen, Schlegel made the first attempt to reproduce in German verse parts of the Midsummer Night's Dream. From childhood he had been "an indefatigable verse-maker." His talent was obviously inherited. Half a century before he and his brother made their appearance, two brothers Schlegel had made a name for themselves in literature—Johann Elias, who lived for many years in Copenhagen, was a friend of Holberg, and, in everything connected with the stage, a forerunner of Lessing, and Johann Adolph, father of August Wilhelm and Friedrich, who, without much originality, possessed decided linguistic and plastic talent.
As a young student, August Wilhelm, already distinguished by his impressionableness as a stylist and opinionativeness as an author, ardently desired to make the acquaintance of Bürger, who was leading a lonely and unhappy life as professor at the University of Göttingen. Bürger's fame as a poet procured him no consideration in a place where learning alone was valued; his social position had, moreover, been injured by the discovery of his relations with his wife's sister. With the feelings of an exile, he warmly welcomed the distinguished and talented young disciple, whose taste was more correct and whose stores of knowledge were better ordered than his own. At this time Bürger was still considered to be Germany's best lyric poet and most accomplished versifier. Schlegel placed himself under his tuition, and learned all his linguistic and metrical devices, all the methods of producing artistic effects by careful choice and arrangement of words and use of rhythm and metres. With his natural gift of imitation, he appropriated as many of Bürger's characteristics as were at all compatible with his entirely different temperament. His poem Ariadne might have been written by Bürger. Bürger had been particularly successful in the sonnet, a form of poetry which had lately come into vogue in Germany. So closely did the pupil follow in the footsteps of his master, that when, many years later, a complete edition of Schlegel's works was published, two of Bürger's sonnets were accidentally included among them.
The master did homage to his remarkably promising pupil in a fine sonnet, beginning:—
"Junger Aar, dein königlicher Flug
Wird den Druck der Wolken überwinden,
Wird die Bahn zum Sonnentempel finden,
Oder Phöbus' Wort in mir ist Lug,"[2]
and ending with the charmingly modest lines:—
"Dich zum Dienst des Sonnengotts zu krönen
Hielt ich nicht den eignen Kranz zu wert,
Doch—dir ist ein besserer