Читать книгу Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature - Георг Брандес - Страница 13

La Nouvelle Héloïse appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later, in another country and in very different environments, a youthful genius, who possessed little in common with Rousseau, but who wrote under the influence of his romance and his ideas, published a little book which contained all the merits and none of the defects of La Nouvelle Héloïse, a book which stirred thousands upon thousands of minds, which awoke lively enthusiasm and a morbid longing for death in a whole generation, which in not a few cases induced hysterical sentimentality, idleness, despair, and suicide, and which was honoured by being proscribed by a fatherly Danish government as "irreligious." This book was Werther. St. Preux has changed his costume, has donned the famous Werther garb, the blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and Rousseau's belle âme has passed into German literature as die schöne Seele.

And what is Werther? No definitions can give any real idea of the infinite wealth of an imaginative masterpiece, but we may briefly say that the great importance of this story of ardent, unhappy love, lies in its being so treated that it gives expression not merely to the isolated passion and suffering of a single individual, but to the passions, longings, and sufferings of a whole age. The hero is a young man of the burgher class; he is artistically gifted, and paints for pleasure, but by profession he is Secretary to a Legation. Goethe has involuntarily made this young man see, and feel, and think as he himself did in his youth, has endowed him with all his own rich and brilliant genius. This transforms Werther into a great symbolic figure; he is more than the spirit of the new era, he is its genius. He is almost too rich and great for his destiny. There is, perhaps, actually a certain discrepancy between the first part of the book, in which Werther's mind manifests itself in its energetic, youthful health and strength, and the second part, in which he succumbs to circumstances. In the first half there is in Werther more of Goethe himself, who certainly did not commit suicide; in the second, more of that young Jerusalem whose unhappy death inspired the book. But such as he is, Werther is a type. He is not only the child of nature in his passion, he is nature in one of its highest developments, genius. Losing himself in nature, he feels its whole infinite life within himself, and feels himself "deified" thereby. Turn, for instance, to that wonderful entry in his journal written on August 18, 1771. It is as powerful and full of genius as a Faust monologue. Read that description of how "the inner, glowing, holy life of nature" opens before him, of how he perceives the "unfathomable powers working and creating in the depths of the earth," of how he yearns to "drink the surging joy of life from the foaming cup of infinity, in order that, as far as his narrow limitations permit, he may taste one drop of the bliss of that being which produces everything in and by itself," and you will understand how it is that, when he begins to feel like a prisoner who sees no way of escape, he is seized by a burning, so to speak, pantheistic, desire to fling his human life away, that he may "rend the clouds asunder with the storm-wind and grasp the billows;" you will feel the justification for his dying exclamation: "Nature! thy son, thy friend, thy lover, approaches his end."

A soul which demands so much room must inevitably be an offence to society, especially when society is hedged in by as many rules as it was at the close of the most social of all centuries. Werther abhors all rules. At a time when poetry was fettered by them, he reduces all its laws to one: "Know what is good and dare to put it into words." An artist, his views on painting are as heretical as his views on poetry. He meets a young brother artist, fresh from the schools, who deafens him with the doctrines of all the famous theorists, Winckelmann and Sulzer amongst others. This fellow is a perfect terror to him. "Nature alone," he writes, "fashions the great artist. Much may be said in favour of the laws of art, about as much as may be said in praise of the laws of society. The artist who observes them will never produce anything bad or absolutely valueless, just as the man who submits to the control of convention and decorum will never be an unbearable neighbour or a remarkable scoundrel; nevertheless, every rule, say what you will, tends to destroy true feeling for nature and to prevent its sincere expression." Werther's detestation of rules explains his abhorrence for all technical and conventional expressions. He gnashes his teeth with annoyance when the prince, who has no artistic taste, brings out some æsthetic platitude in reply to an eager remark he himself has let fall on the subject of art, and he is enraged by the string of ready-made social judgments which Albert has at his fingers' ends. "Why," he cries, "must you people, when you speak of a thing, immediately say, 'it is stupid' or 'it is clever,' 'it is good' or 'it is bad'? What do you mean? Have you investigated into the inner significance of the action? Have you traced its causes, divined its inevitability? If you had, you would not be so ready to pass judgment!" He revolts against the pedantry of the ambassador who cavils at the style of his secretary's despatches, he wishes misfortune may befall the theological blue-stocking who has cut down the pretty hazels in the rectory garden, and he is unreasonably embittered by the arrogance of antiquated erudition, by all lifeless, solemn ceremonial, and by the claims which those of a certain rank in society make on the submission and obedience of their inferiors.

He seeks refuge with children, who "of all things upon earth are nearest to his heart," and with uncultured souls, whose genuine feelings and genuine passions give them a beauty in his eyes which nothing can surpass. Watching the girls fetch water from the well reminds him of patriarchal times, of Rebecca and Eleazer, and when he cooks his own green peas he lives in thought in those Homeric days when Penelope's haughty suitors killed and prepared their own food. Nature enchants and captivates him. If he is not a Christian, if, as he expresses it, he is not one of those who have been given to the Son—something in his heart telling him that the Father has reserved him for Himself—it is because to him that Father is Nature; Nature is his God.

Wherever he goes in society he offends against its cold and formal regulations. He is ejected in the most insulting manner from an aristocratic gathering; he, the plebeian, all unwitting of offence, having remained in his chief's drawing-room after the arrival of distinguished guests. Himself ardently, hopelessly in love, he does what he can to save an unfortunate youth whom an unconquerable and not unrequited passion has driven to offer violence and to murder a rival. Werther's petition is not only rejected by the representatives of the law, but he is himself compelled by the law to bear witness against the man he would so willingly shield and save.

All this, however, is mere minor detail. The woman he loves, and whom he could so easily have won, had no plighted word stood between them, becomes the wife of another; this is the shock that breaks his heart.

This book represents the full heart, right or wrong, in collision with the conventions of everyday life, its craving for infinity, for liberty, which makes life seem a prison and all society's partition walls seem prison walls. "All that society does," says Werther, "is to paint them for each individual with fair perspectives opening to a wide horizon. The walls themselves are never broken down." Hence this dashing of the head against the wall, these long sobs, this deep despair which nothing but a bullet through the heart can still. On the occasion of their meeting, Napoleon reproached Goethe for having mixed up the love-story with the revolt against society; the reproach was unreasonable, for the two are indissolubly connected; it is only together that they express the idea of the book.

Unlike La Nouvelle Héloïse, Werther is no glorification of the triumph of virtue and deistic piety over natural instincts and passions; it represents passion running its predestined course. In this tragedy of the human heart, the law-defying being and the lawless passion meet their inevitable doom. The termination to the story, however, was not of Goethe's invention; he made use of a manuscript describing the death of young Jerusalem (vide Kestner's book on Goethe and Lotte). In its last lines he only altered a single word, as being too vulgar. The manuscript runs, "Barbiergesellen trugen ihn"; in the book we read, "Handwerker trugen ihn, kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." This sentence in its cutting brevity intimates that a life is at an end, that a human being at war with himself and society, mortally wounded in his deepest sympathies, has succumbed. Mechanics bore him to the grave, middle-class society held pharisaically aloof; no priest accompanied him, for he was a suicide, and had defied the laws of religion; but he had loved the people and had associated with the uncultured, so they followed him to the grave.

It is well known to what an outburst of sentimental literature this work gave rise; how its passionate emotion turned into heavy sentimentality, as in the case of Clauren, Lafontaine, and Rahbek, the Dane, or was diluted into sickly platonism, as in Ingemann's feeble imitation, Varners Vandringer, But Werther was not responsible for all this; absorption in feeling and emotions is only one feature of the book. There wells forth from the very midst of this absorption such a healthy love of nature and of life, such a hearty, revolutionary ire at conventional society, its prejudices, its compulsory regulations, its terror of genius, whose stream might possibly overflow its banks and flood the "tulip beds and kitchen-gardens," that the main impression which the work leaves on our minds is that of the impulse towards originality and poetry which it depicts, arouses, and satisfies.

What an advance we have here upon La Nouvelle Héloïse! In the first place, there is a far deeper and purer feeling for nature than in Rousseau. The additional fact, that scenery is looked at from a new point of view, is to be ascribed to the influence of a literary event which occurred in 1762, and made a great impression; namely, the publication of Ossian. The Scottish bard so melted even Napoleon's hard heart that he much preferred him to Homer. At this time the authenticity of Ossian had not been called in question; at a later period men turned from these poems with the pique which people who have been raving about the singing of a nightingale would show if they discovered that some rascal hidden among the bushes had been imposing on them. In the hearts of his contemporaries, Macpherson succeeded in supplanting Homer. Among others he influenced Goethe, which accounts for our finding the healthy Homeric view of nature which prevails in the first half of Werther, superseded in the second by the Ossianic mist pictures which harmonise with the increasing morbidity, restlessness, and lyrical passion of the tale.

Rousseau's chief female figure is drawn with uncertain touch. Like most French heroines, she is wanting in womanly simplicity. In genuineness and sincerity of passion she falls far short of her namesake, the real Héloïse, whose every word comes from the heart. Julie's utterances are cold; she perpetually relapses into lectures on Virtue and the Supreme Being. She makes such observations as the following: "To such a degree are all human affairs naught, that with the exception of the being which exists by itself, there is no beauty except in that which is not." She means in our illusions. Julie dissects feelings, and reasons in high-flown language. In contrast with her how naïve and natural is the vigorous Charlotte! Think of the latter, for instance, in the famous scene where she is cutting bread and butter for her little sisters and brothers. If she offends it is not by declamation, but by a touch of sentimentality, as, for instance, in the scene where her thoughts and Werther's meet, when, looking out into the rain through the wet window-pane, she utters the word: "Klopstock!"

From St. Preux to Werther the advance is equally great In the former there was, as his name implies, some reminiscence of the ideal knight. It is Goethe, the poet of the modern era, who finally disposes of this ideal. In his heroes, physical courage, which never fails in its effect on naïve readers, is almost too much ignored. It is so in the case of Wilhelm Meister and Faust. And Werther too is no knight, but a thinking and feeling microcosm. From his limited point in space he embraces the whole of existence, and the trouble in his soul is the trouble which heralds and accompanies the birth of a new era. His most enduring mood is one of limitless longing. He belongs to an age of anticipation and inauguration, not to one of abandonment and despair. We shall see his antithesis in Chateaubriand's René. The main source of Werther's unhappiness is to be found in the disparity between the limitations of society and the infinity of the heart. In early days the heroes of literature were kings and princes; their worldly position harmonised with their spiritual greatness; the contrast between desire and power was unknown. And even after literature had widened its bounds, it still admitted only those whose birth and wealth raised them above the low toils and troubles of life. In Wilhelm Meister Goethe indicates the cause. "O thrice happy," he cries, "are they who are placed by birth on the heights of humanity, and who have never dwelt in, have never even travelled through, the valley of humiliation in which so many an honest soul spends a miserable life. They have scarcely entered existence before they step on board a ship to take the great common journey; they profit by every favourable breath of wind, while the others, left to their own resources, swim painfully after, deriving but small benefit from the favouring breeze, and often sink when their strength is exhausted to a miserable death beneath the waves." Here we have one of the blessings of life, namely, wealth, praised in eloquent terms, and what may be said of wealth, the lowest in order of life's outward advantages, may be said with still more reason of all the other external forms of happiness and power.

It is at the change of the century that we first come upon this strange incongruity, a personality who is a sort of god and ruler in the spiritual world, whose capacity of feeling is such that by means of it he draws into his own life the whole life of the universe, the demand of whose heart is a demand for omnipotence (for omnipotence he must have in order to transform the cold, hard world into a world after his own heart), and who, along with all this, is—what? A Secretary of Legation, perhaps, like Werther, with a few hundred thalers a year, a man who is so needy that he is glad when the Hereditary Prince makes him a present of twenty-five ducats, who is confined half the day to his office, who is debarred from all except bourgeois society, and looks for the fulfilment of all his desires of happiness in the possession of a girl who is carried off from under his nose by a commonplace prig. Would he cultivate a talent, there are obstacles in his way; would he gratify a desire, some conventional rule restrains him; in his longing to follow his ardent impulses, to quench his burning spiritual thirst, he passionately stretches out his hands, but society peremptorily says: No. It seemed as if there were a great and terrible discord between the individual and the general condition of things, between heart and reason, between the laws of passion and those of society. The impression that this was so had taken deep hold of that generation. It appeared to them that there was something wrong with the great machinery of existence, and that it would soon collapse. Nor was it long before they heard the crash, before that time came when all barriers were broken down and all forms done away with; when the established order was overthrown and distinctions of class suddenly disappeared; when the air was filled with the smoke of gunpowder and the notes of the "Marseillaise" when the ancient boundaries of kingdoms were changed and re-changed, kings were dethroned and beheaded, and the religion of a thousand years was abolished; when a Corsican lieutenant of artillery proclaimed himself the heir of the Revolution and declared all careers open to the man of talent, the son of a French innkeeper ascended the throne of Naples, and a quondam grenadier grasped the sceptres of Sweden and Norway.

It is the longing and the vague unrest of anticipation that distinguish Werther. A revolution lies between him and the next great type, the Frenchman, René. In René the poetry of prophecy is superseded by that of disillusionment. In place of pre-revolutionary discontent we have anti-revolutionary dissatisfaction. All those great changes had been powerless to bring man's actual condition into harmony with the cravings of his spirit. The struggle for the human rights of the individual appeared to have resulted solely in a new tyranny. Once again we meet the young man of the age in literature. How changed he is! The fresh colour has gone from his cheek, the ingenuousness from his mind; his forehead is lined, his life is empty, his hand is clenched. Expelled from a society which he anathematises because he can find no place in it, he roams through a new world, through primeval forests inhabited by savage tribes. A new element, not to be found in Werther, has entered into his soul—the element of melancholy. Werther declares again and again that nothing is so obnoxious to him as ill-humour and despondency; he is unhappy, but never melancholy. René, on the other hand, is lost in an idle grief which he is unable to control. He is heavy-hearted and misanthropical. He is a transition figure, standing midway between Goethe's Werther and Byron's Giaour and Corsair.