Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in GermanyBrandes, Georg
History
Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in Germany
Brandes, Georg
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Naturalism in literature; Romanticism
Tieck goes further than Wackenroder, and from music selects
instrumental music as that in which alone art is really free,
emancipated from all the restraints of the outer world. Hoffman too,
musician as well as poet, calls instrumental music the most romantic
of all the arts; and it may be mentioned as a striking instance of
the coherence which invariably exists between the great intellectual
phenomena of an age, as a proof of the fact that the Romanticists, with
all their supposed and all their real independence and spontaneity,
were unconsciously yielding to and following an inevitable general
tendency, that it is just at this time that Beethoven emancipates
instrumental music, and raises it to its highest development.
Enthusiasm for musical intensity and fervour having thus found its
way into literature, Tieck soon arrives at the point of regarding
emotional, melodious sound as the only true, the only pure poetry. His
_Love Story of Fair Magelone_ is a good example of this. Even in the
prose portions of the tale everything rings and resounds--the hero's
emotions and the landscape which serves as a background for them. The
Count hears none of the sounds around him; for "the music within him
drowned the rustling of the trees and the splashing of the fountains."
But this inward music in its turn is drowned by the sweet strains of
real instruments. "The music flowed like a murmuring brook, and he saw
the charm of the Princess come floating upon the silver stream, saw its
waves kiss the hem of her garment.... Music was now the only movement,
the only life in nature." Then the music dies away. "Like a stream
of blue light" it disappears into the void; and forthwith the knight
himself begins to sing.
In the "Garden of Poesy," of which we read in _Zerbino_, roses and
tulips, birds and the azure of the skies, fountains and storms, streams
and spirits, all sing. We read in _Bluebeard_ that "the flowers
kissed each other melodiously." In this literature everything has its
music--the moonlight, scents, painting; and then on the other hand we
read of the beams, the fragrance, and the shapes of music: "They sang
with melodious throats, keeping time with the music of the moonbeams."
The Romanticists had turned their backs upon material reality.
Definite, corporeal form, nay, even a distinct representation of mental
conditions was impossible to them. This was not what they aimed at. In
their eyes tangibility was coarse and vulgar. Every distinct feature
melts away in a sort of dissolving view. They are afraid of losing in
profundity and infinity what they might possibly gain in restraint and
plastic power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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