German and English Romanticism: A Confrontation

Author(s): René Wellek

Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn, 1964), pp. 35-56
Published by: Boston University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25599632
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 German and English Romanticism:
A Confrontation
RENfi WELLEK

I HAVE been called "the champion of the concept of a pan

European Romanticism"1 and, much as I dislike the term for its
association with knightly tournaments or boxing matches, I can
not deny that in 19491 published a long paper, in the first two num
bers of the newly founded periodical, Comparative Literature, in
which I tried to refute A. O. Lovejoy's famous attempt to show that
"the 'Romanticism' of one country may have little in common with
that of another." I met Lovejoy's challenge to exhibit "some com
mon denominator" by arguing that "we find throughout Europe the
same conceptions of poetry and of the workings and nature of poetic
imagination, the same conception of nature and its relation to man,
and basically the same poetic style, with a use of imagery, symbolism,
and myth which is clearly distinct from that of eighteenth-century
neoclassicism."2 I suggested that there is a profound coherence and
mutual implication between the romantic views of nature, imagina
tion, and symbol and that we thus can go on speaking of Romanti
cism as a single European movement.
Last year, in a new paper, "Romanticism Re-examined," I sur
veyed the debate of the last fourteen years and could come to the
conclusion that, on the whole, students of the issue agree with my
general view or have arrived independently at the same or similar
results. "In all of these studies," I said, "however diverse in method
and emphasis, a convincing agreement has been reached: they all see
the implication of imagination, symbol, myth, and organic nature,
and see it as part of the great endeavor to overcome the split between
subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and the un
conscious. This is the central creed of the great romantic poets in
England, Germany, and France."3
Today I should like to shift the perspective radically: I shall as

i. H. H. Remak, in Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective, ed. Newton P.

Stallknecht and Horst Frenz (Carbondale, 111., 1961), p. 227.
2. "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History," Comparative Literature, 1
(1949), 1, 147.
3. Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), p. 220.

[35]

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 36 ren? wellek
sume, however rashly, that the basic argument has been won: that
there is a common core of romantic thought and art throughout Eu
rope. I shall also try, as far as possible, to ignore the history of critic
ideas in the romantic age which I have amply discussed in my History
of Modern Criticism. Today I shall rather examine first the English
German and the German-English literary relations during the first
decades of the nineteenth century and then attempt to present a com
parison between German and English Romanticism which will try to
bring out the distinct and original features of the German movement.
In considering the question we have first to make up our mind
whom we consider romantic in the two countries. There is little dif
ficulty about England. Actually, there seems today hardly any dis
agreement that only six poets survive: Blake, Wordsworth, Cole
ridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Among the romantic novelists only
Scott commands contemporary attention. Among other prose writ
ers only Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey are still read today. All the
other figures who were conspicuous in their time: Southey, Rogers,
Campbell, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt, Jeffrey, etc., have disap
peared into the limbo of specialized interests, while one has the im
pression that marginal figures such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes, George
Darley, John Clare, and James Hogg have remained the exclusive
property of a few enthusiasts.
The question whom we should consider a romantic writer in Ger
many is, however, much more difficult to answer: I myself argued
that from a European perspective, the German Sturm und Drang is
parallel to what in the West we have become accustomed to call Pre
romanticism and that even Goethe and Schiller, in spite of their
classicist phases and classicist tastes, will appear romantic in this wide
general sense. In Germany for reasons I have discussed in the previous
paper the term "Romantic school" has become confined to two
groups of writers: the early group comprising the two Schlegels,
Wackenroder, Tieck, and Novalis; and the later or younger group of
whom Arnim and Brentano are the best-known names. In addition,
most German literary histories cite E. T. A. Hoffmann as a particularly
romantic writer, though he had only slight personal associations with
the two romantic groups: he met Tieck and Brentano very casually.4
Joseph von Eichendorff also, who knew Arnim and Brentano well,
4. Harvey W. Hewett-Thayer, Hoffmann: Author of the Tales (Princeton, 1948),
pp. 78, 81.

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 37

has been increasingly recognized as a typically romantic poe

this traditional focus on two groups of friends obscures t
pervasiveness of the romantic attitude in the Germany of the
and isolates such great writers as Holderlin, Jean Paul, and He
von Kleist needlessly by emphasizing their disagreements with
professedly romantic groups. I cannot see why one should d
even Uhland, Morike, Lenau, or the early Heine from romanti
a play such as Biichner's Leonce und Lena (1836) strikes me as
romantic and so does much of Grillparzer and Grabbe. I me
these names to suggest the plethora of interesting writers in t
many of that time. I need hardly point to the fact that one can
"romantic" several great thinkers: Fichte, Schelling, Schleierma
and Hegel, and that romantic feeling penetrated German natu
ence, political theory, and painting. And who can forget G
romantic music, though today it is usually called "classical": B
ven, after he had emancipated himself from his models, Schub
Schumann, Weber, and Mendelssohn.
Still, for the purposes of this paper I shall recognize the nar
limits put on the term romanticism in German literary history
examine first the historical question of the contact between th
lish romantic poets and the two German groups as defined abov
to personal contacts, we must conclude that they were very me
In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge visited Germany, but,
writers, they called only on Klopstock in Hamburg for a brief
awkward visit.5 In 1806 Coleridge, on his return from Malta,
Tieck in Rome, "but was not aware of his eminence as a p
Sophie Bernhardi, Tieck's sister, wrote to August Wilhelm Sch
(then at Coppet) about a "wonderful Englishman who had s
Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and the Old German poets and adm
Schlegel's translation of Shakespeare unbelievably," but she had
gotten his name.7 Coleridge renewed his fleeting acquaintance
Tieck on the occasion of the latter's visit to London in 1817: the

5. See Coleridge's account in "Satyrane's Letters'' utilizing a letter to Th

Poole, Nov. 20, 1798. See also Collected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford, 19
44if.
6. According to H. C. Robinson: see Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc.; be
ing selections from the remains of H. C. Robinson, ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester,
1922), p. 31 (Nov. 15, 1810).
7. Feb. 6, 1806, in Krisenjahre der Fruhromantik. Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis, ed. J.
Korner (Briinn, 1936), 1, 291-292.

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 38 ren? wellek
only twice, once at the Gillmans' in Highgate conversing on the au
thenticity of Shakespeare's plays, German mysticism, and animal
magnetism, as we know from Henry Crabb Robinson's reports and
some letters of Coleridge.8 Coleridge wrote several letters of recom
mendation for Tieck and wrote him one letter, which has only re
cently come to light, that speaks of Goethe's Farbenlehre and animal
magnetism. Two cordial letters by Tieck to Coleridge have been"
preserved.9 In 1828 Wordsworth and Coleridge went on a trip along
the Rhine and met August Wilhelm Schlegel in a large company at
Bad Godesberg: they had not met when Schlegel was in London in
1814 and 1823. Coleridge and Schlegel exchanged compliments
about their respective translations of Shakespeare and Schiller; and
supposedly Schlegel had to ask Coleridge to speak in English as he
couldnot understand his German.10 Later on Wordsworth saw Schlegel
at a wedding in Bonn, and in 1834 Wordsworth wrote him introduc
ing a friend and offering in return to be a guide to the Lake District for
any friend of Schlegel who chanced that way.11 On a tour in 1837,
Wordsworth met Brentano by chance on a street in Munich. He
"rattled in French" about religion "in a way that could but half
amuse and half disgust Wordsworth."12 Byron had met A. W.
Schlegel at Coppet in 1816 but did not care for him.13 This is appar
ently the sum total of personal and epistolary contacts between the
8. June 13 and 24. See Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J.
Morley (London, 1938), 1, 207-208, and Coleridge, Collected Letters, iv, 738, 739,
742-743, 744
9. Collected Letters, rv, 750-751, July 4,1817. For Tieck's letters see "Ludwig Tieck
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge," fournal of English and Germanic Philology, uv (1955),
262-268.
10. See "The Journal of Julian Charles Young," in Julian Charles Young, A Memoir
of Charles Mayne Young... (London, 1871), pp. 112,115, and a letter by Christopher
Aders to Crabb Robinson in Correspondence ofH. C. Robinson with the Wordsworth
Circle, ed. Edith T- Morley (Oxford, 1927), 1, 190 (Aug. 1828).
11. See F[ernand]. B[aldensperger]., "Une Lettre inedite de Wordsworth a A. W.
Schlegel," Revue Germanique, v (1909), 468. The person recommended was a young
Dr. James Vose, not "Rose" as Baldensperger transcribes: see Morley, Correspondence
ofH. C. Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, 1,259.
12. Morley, H. C. Robinson on Books and Their Writers, n, 530-531 (July 17,1837).
13. See The Works of Lord Byron. Letters and fournals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero
(London, 1898-1901), m, 341: "Schlegel is in high force" (July 29, 1816); (v, 333,
337-341), "I knew Schlegel well?that is to say, I have met him occasionally at
Copet" (Aug. 2,i82i).Ini82i Byron heard that Schlegel would attack him and re
acted violently in letters to Murray calling him "Hundsfott" and ridiculing his van
ity. On his reading Friedrich Schlegel's Lectures, of which at first he could "make out
nothing," see v, 191, 193-194 (Jan. 28-29, 1821).

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 39

two romantic groups. No friendships developed, few letter

exchanged. The meagerness of these contacts has induced a
student of the question, Eudo C. Mason,14 to make extra
claims for the one man, Henry Crabb Robinson, who had m
two Schlegels and Clemens Brentano as a youngster in Ger
and later knew both Coleridge and Wordsworth in England
son is an appealing figure: his letters and diaries are a mine o
mation, but I cannot see that he accomplished anything impor
an intermediary between the two groups. Whatever his under
ing of German romantic literature may have been, it is n
mented publicly, and certainly in his own time Crabb Robinso
strictly a "private person." It is legend that Robinson inf
Madame de Stael's De YAllemagne. His own not very numero
cles attracted no attention: the most curious is a piece on Blake
appeared, in German translation, in a short-lived Hamburg re
1811.15 Neither Blake nor Shelley nor Keats nor Lamb nor Ha
nor De Quincey had any German contacts, and those few th
ter Scott had were not with the German romantics.
Personal and epistolary contacts matter of course less than
pression made by the reading of books. But even in strictl
ary relations the contact between the two groups was exce
slight. Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats knew
ing of German romantic writing in our narrow sense, except
Byron and Shelley read or read in the Lecture courses of t
Schlegels in French or English translation.16 But of course Co
and De Quincey are the exceptions. Coleridge was importan
fluenced by German romantic aesthetics and criticism. I cannot
stand how it is still possible to deny this fact proved by all the
evidence. Certainly the whole romantic-classical, organic-mech
contrast is derived from Schlegel, as Coleridge himself admit

14. Deutsche und englische Romantik (Gottingen, 1959).

15. Vaterldndisches Museum. H. G. Wright, "Henry Crabb Robinson's 'E
Blake,' " in Modern Language Review, xxn (1927), 137-154, reprints the essay.
16. Byron, Letters and fournals, n, 201. Mary Shelley* sfournal, ed. Frederick
(Norman, 1947), pp. 93, 225 (March 16, 20, 21,1818), tells that Shelley read S
(probably August Wilhelm Schlegel's Lectures in English) aloud to his two
companions on his trip to Italy.
17. Cf. A. W. Schlegel, Ueber dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Heidelberg,
in, 8, with Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Cambridge,
1930), 1, 224. Coleridge himself refers to a "continental critic." See G. N.
"Coleridge and Schlegel Reconsidered," Comparative Literature, xvi (Spring
97-ii8.

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 40 RENE WELLEK

The basic ideas of August Wilhelm Schlegel's Lectures on Dramat

Literature also impressed Hazlitt and De Quincey, though Hazlitt ha
his reservations and De Quincey attacked both Schlegels ferociously
But the influence of German romanticism on actual imaginativ
writing was negligible. An instance worth mentioning may be Cole
ridge's free version of Tieck's "Herbstlied" inserted in his play
polya.19 Coleridge read some of Tieck's fiction expressly in anticip
tion of their meeting in 1817, but he did not like it.20 And the tran
tion of Tieck's Love Charm, with a highly laudatory postscript
Tieck, reprinted in Masson's edition of De Quincey is not by D
Quincey, but by Julius Hare.21 E. T. A. Hoffmann's reception
England was very lukewarm: Walter Scott wrote an almost whol
damning article "On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition
(1827) and Carlyle's introduction to his translation of Der Goldene
Topf (The Golden Pot) in the same year is patronizingly condescend
ing to the poor drunken Bohemian.22
The influence of the English romantics is also negligible if we re
strict ourselves to the influence of the German romantic groups.
Wordsworth and Coleridge (and of course Blake) remained
known in Germany, as did Shelley and Keats for a long time. Freil
grath's translations of "The Ancient Mariner" and "The Solita
Reaper" did not appear until 1836.23 Gutzkow wrote an essay
Shelley in 1838 out of sympathy for a persecuted atheist and revo
tionary.24 But of course Byron proved to be, as everywhere, an eno
mous influence. Goethe's admiration helped, though it was hard
indispensable. But Byron's influence?which is rather an influence
a mood and of a hero-type than of his actual poems?comes after t
Romantic movement. He could not affect the Schlegels, Tieck,
18. On Hazlitt and Schlegel see my History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950 (N
Haven, 1955), n, 189, 209. For De Quincey see my "De Quincey's Status in the H
tory of Ideas," in Philological Quarterly, xxm (1944), esp. pp. 2571*. and n. 57.
19. "Glycine's Song" beginning "A sunny shaft did I behold": see S. T. Coleridg
Complete Poetical Works . .., ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), 1, 426-427.
20. See letters to H. C. Robinson, June 20,1817, and J. H. Green, Dec. 13,1817,
Collected Letters, rv, 743, 793. Sternbald "is too like an imitation of Heinse's Ardinghel
... it is a lewd day-dream, in which the Dreamer at once yawns and itches."
21. See Hans K. Galinsky, "Is Thomas De Quincey the Author of The Love Charm
in Modern Language Notes, in (1937), 389-394.
22. In the June 1827 number of the Edinburgh Review, xlvi, 176-195; first collec
in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Boston, 1839), 1,1-27.
23. See Sdmtliche Werke (New York, 1858), m, 122, 129.
24. Gotter, Helden, Don Quixote . . . (Hamburg, 1838), pp. 3-17.

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 41

valis, Arnim, Brentano, or Hoffmann. Heine and Lenau we

real German Byronists.25 The same is true of Walter Scott: he
mined the rise of the German historical novel after the Rom
movement. Hoffmann has the Serapion Brothers discuss Scott's
Mannering very favorably.26 But Arnim's Die Kronenwachter (
is apparently still untouched by Scott: only Willibald Alexis' n
from Prussian history and Wilhelm Hauff's Lichtenstein show
mark of the Magician of the North, and the late historical nov
Ludwig Tieck show that he could not resist Scott's all-pervas
fluence.27
We cannot escape the conclusion that personal, epistolary
literary relations between the two groups were extremely ten
Among the English, only Coleridge and De Quincey show the
ence of German romantic ideas; among the Germans, English r
tic influences from Byron and Scott come later. The two movem
existed at the same time, but they ran parallel without making
contacts, if we except Coleridge, whose very isolation points t
gulf between the two movements. But lack of historical contact
not, of course, preclude similarities and even deep affinities. I
tried to generalize about them before; as partial explanation on
point to common antecedents in history: e.g., the very genera
larity between the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge and
of Schelling and thus generally of the German romantics is m
even before Coleridge had read Schelling.28 It is due to the com
background in the tradition of Neoplatonism, in mysticism su
Bohme's, and in varieties of pietism. Rousseau and hence Go
Werther supply the common ancestry for the two groups in e
eenth-century sensibility and sentimentality. The Gothic tradi
can be found in Coleridge, Shelley, and Scott as well as in Tiec
nim, Brentano, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Ideas and folk them
grate most easily and form a common European heritage.
But there are obvious and startling differences between the
literatures which should be described in other terms than a dif
emphasis on specific ideas or a different use of universal theme
25. See Lawrence Marsden Price, English Literature in Germany (Berkeley,
pp. 316-328, and bibliography.
26. See Werke, ed. G. Ellinger (Leipzig, 1912), vm, 161-162.
27. See Price, pp. 329f., and bibliography.
28. See Donald E. Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling, New Haven, i960. O
ridge and Schelling see my Kant in England and History of Modern Criticism, V

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 42 ren? WELLEK
differences may stand out best if we focus on the important poetic
productions of the time and look at the differences in the hierarchy
of genres. This problem is a difficult and elusive one. It can be solved
only by bold critical judgment which will necessarily profit from the
hindsight acquired by our time. There can be hardly any dispute that
in Germany the romantic lyric had assumed a central status in the
hierarchy of genres. It differs profoundly from the English lyric: the
odes, the lyrical ballads, and the meditative blank verse of the English
poets. The Germans established the' 'artificial folksong'' as the norm of
the lyric, the kind of poem which can be described as the expression
of a subjective mood rendered by loosely, or even abruptly joined
images, usually in the four-line stanza of the folksong, in a rhythm
and sound pattern which tries to achieve musical effects. We must
distinguish this German romantic lyric from the folk song of a Burns
or Thomas Moore, which is social, implies often a definite addressee,
and conveys some, however rudimentary, logical statement. The
German lyric rather suggests immediacy of personal experience, even
inspiration, unconscious solitary speaking, without logical or even
imagistic coherence. It is a poetry of the famous Gemuet, of the culti
vation of the soul. It lacks what T. S. Eliot calls an "objective correla
tive." It comes near to the romantic ideal of an identification of sub
ject and object, man and nature, self and the world. I am thinking of
such poems as Eichendorff's "Dammerung will die Fliigel spreiten"
(1811) or "Ich wandre durch die stille Nacht" (1826), or Brentano's
"Abendstandchen: Hor, es klagt die Flote wieder." Max Kommerell,
Emil Staiger, and Kate Hamburger29 agree remarkably in taking this
type of lyric as the ideal of pure poetry, which serves, often strangely,
to devaluate anything which deviates from this pattern. In English
poetry of the time there is, I believe, hardly anything which corre
sponds to it closely. Possibly Shelley's song "A Dirge: Rough wind,
that moanest loud" or "A Lament: O world! O life! O time!" come
nearest, but even "Music, when soft voices die," which sounds simi
lar, turns out on closer inspection to be a series of conceits and even
an allegory.30 In France we would, I believe, have to go to Verlaine
before we find anything parallel.

29. Max Kommerell, "Vom Wesen des lyrischen Gedichts," Gedanken iiber Ge
dichte, 2d ed. (Frankfurt, 1956), pp. 9-56; Emil Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik (Zu
rich, 1946), passim; Kate Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung (Stuttgart, 1957), passim.
30. See F. R. Leavis' analysis in Scrutiny, xm (1945), 66-67.

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 43

When we look at prose the divergence between the two coun

is equally striking. The English essay preserved its high stan
rived from the eighteenth century. There were two distinct t
English fiction, the Gothic novel and the novel of manners, un
established the vogue of the historical novel which draws on
two traditions. In Germany, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister?ridicu
England by Francis Jeffrey and De Quincey as immoral, vulg
absurd31?established the genre of the Educational Novel. Wit
German romantics a rather hybrid type drawing on the educ
novel, but more closely related to Sterne's Tristram Shandy,
the central form: the mixture of irony and fantasy for which
rich Schlegel prescribed a program in his "Letter on the Nov
His own Lucinde (1799)?a medley of such forms as the letter,
alogue, the idyll, the fantasy, and allegory?is not successful
tion, though it does contain, intermittently, much wit, charm
atmosphere, and even good sense about love and marriage. Ra
Jean Paul is the main German romantic novelist, the magnus
of German fiction: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heine, Stifter, and
begin with him. Matthew Arnold was quite off the mark wh
1854, he ridiculed the idea that the whole literary movement
many in the last fifty years could be ascribed to Jean Paul an
valis.33 Jean Paul is known (if he is known at all) in the
speaking world largely through Carlyle's translations, which
fined to the grotesque idylls, to Schmelzle s Journey to Flaetz
the Life ofQuintus Fixlein. Carlyle himself, in his three essay
Paul, knew very well how to characterize Jean Paul's style, im
tion, and religious vision.34 One must know the "Speech of t
Christ from the Vault of Heavens that there is no God"35 to
ciate Jean Paul's reach into the sublime or know the scenes o
bles and mirrors, the dream world strangely mixed with the w
3i. Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (London, 1844), e.g., 1,263. De
Collected Writings, ed. David Masson (London, 1889-90), xi, 222-258.
32. Friedrich Schlegel, "Brief uber den Roman," part of Gesprdch uber di
(1800), in Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich, 1956), pp. 31
33. Letter to Sainte-Beuve, Sept. 28, 1854, in Louis Bonnerot, Matthew
Poete (Paris, 1947), pp. 521-522. Cf. "Heinrich Heine" in Essays in Criticis
Series, beginning, for a similar statement.
34. See my "Carlyle and German Romanticism," in Xenia Pragensia
1929), 390-403.
35. "Rede des todten Christus vom Weltgebaude herab, dass kein Gott sei,
"Erstes Blumenstuck" in Blumen- Frucht- und Dornenstucke . . . (Siebenkds),

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 44 ren? wellek
the German small burghers and the little courts, and to recognize a
type of fiction which is outside the main stream of the novel of man
ners. Among the German romantics, Brentano's novel Godwi, a "novel
gone wild,"36 is an obvious imitation and almost parodistic exaggera
tion of Jean Paul's manner, and E. T. A. Hoffmann's Opinions of
Kater Murr exploits some of Jean Paul's technical devices to the limit.
The supposed reminiscences of the tomcat Murr alternate with frag
ments of the biography of Kapellmeister Kreisler which were written
on the reverse pages of the wastepaper the tomcat had used for his
writing. Everything was then printed continuously just as it came in
to the printer's hand. Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus, learned something
from Jean Paul: he aims at the same combination of educational nov
el, humorous rhapsody, and imaginative fantasy. But there was noth
ing similar in English before Carlyle's novel, and it was difficult to
get Sartor Resartus published.37
In addition to this peculiar kind of novel, or rather hybrid form of
romance and satire, the German romantics cultivated two genres which
were hardly known in England at that time: the artificial fairy tale
and the Novelle. Novalis had proclaimed the "fairy-tale the canon of
poetry."38 His own novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, though some
thing of an educational novel set in a fanciful Middle Ages, assumes
quickly the mood and uses the devices of the fairy tale: "Die Welt
wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt."39 Tieck has set the pattern for
the romantic fairy tale with his eerie story, "Der blonde Eckbert"
(1797), and the other Romantics vary it: Brentano's fairy tales draw
often on the seventeenth-century Neapolitan Basile and his grotesque
baroque gambols and verbal arabesques, while Hoffmann, in his fairy
tales, seems rather to have learned from Gozzi and the tradition of the
commedia delV arte. There is nothing so fanciful, verbally inventive,
and absurdly grotesque as some of Brentano's fairy tales: e.g., in
Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia the castle is made out of sucked egg
shells and its roof of torn-out hen's feathers. Nothing is so eerily fa
tastic as Hoffmann's Golden Pot, which shifts from the prosaic to the
weird and uncanny with graceful ease. The old applewoman turns
into a grinning door knocker; the student Anselmus finds himself
36. Godwi. . ., ein verwilderter Roman . . . (Bremen, 1801-02).
37. Written in 1830-31, published in Eraser's Magazine, 1833-34. In book form,
Boston, 1836?at Emerson's urging?and London, 1838.
38. Gesammelte Werke, ed. Carl Seelig (Zurich, 1945), iv, 165.
39. Gesammelte Werke, 1, 304.

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 45

imprisoned in a glass bottle on a shelf in the library. Brentan

Hoffmann seem to me to have created a type of fairy tale whi
far removed from ostensible folklore. The better-known roma
German fairy tales such as Tieck's Runenberg, which is a versi
the Rip van Winkle legend, or Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, wh
his shadow to the devil, or Fouque's Undine, the water sprit
wants to acquire a human soul, are nearer to actual folklo
straight narrative, to the short story, the Novelle, and thus t
main stream of fiction.
The German Novelle has, because of its great artistic successe
tracted much critical attention and much effort has been exp
and, I am afraid, wasted to give a definition o? the genre. I cann
how the Novelle can be distinguished from the short story and
differs, basically, from the formal pattern established by Boc
and Cervantes, the models very much in the mind of its G
practitioners. It seems to me impossible to confine the Nov
stories told within a framework, a technical device established
Decamerone and in Germany made popular by Goethe's Unterh
en deutscher Ausgewanderte (Entertainments of German Emigr
I795)-40 Nor can one confine the Novelle to stories which have
much discussed "falcon" of Paul Heyse's theory of the Nov
Kleist's Novellen have no framework and need none, and th
Hoffmann's Serapionsbruder is an external device which broug
gether stories published independently and does not distinguis
storids collected in Serapionsbruder from stories collected witho
framework. There is no discernible "falcon" in many a German
velle to which it would be difficult to refuse the title. I fail to see w
is achieved for the definition of the genre or its criticism when
hard von Arx tries to establish a concept, "Novellistisches Dase
which seems to mean something inferior, unfree, hurried, pre
implying the overrating of a single case. The writer of Novellen
are told, "works out of poverty," is unable to build a worl
world of a large-scale novelist.41 In bombastic Heideggerian ter
we merely learn that Novellen are short stories and not long n
and are thus apt to tell of a single event which is taken to be r
tative and universal. But this of course is the procedure of all
40. See Fritz Lockemann, Gestalt und Wandlungen der deutschen Novelle (M
1957).
41. Bernard von Arx, Novellistisches Dasein (Zurich, 1954), p. 175: "So arbeitet der
Novellist aus einer gewissen Armut heraus."

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 46 ren? wellek
stories claim to be "exemplary" as Cervantes knew. We don't need
existentialism, the frame, or the "falcon" to appreciate Michael Kohl
haas, the fanatic of justice, or Die Marquise von O_, who advertises
for the man who violated her, or any number of striking Novellen by
E. T. A. Hoffmann, which seem to me best when they do not ap
proximate realistic genre pictures or fairy tales, but are stories of
eccentric artists or simply horror stories. Though E. T. A. Hoffmann
draws on the Gothic novel tradition and specifically on "Monk"
Lewis for his long novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels, his art can be
matched in English only later by Edgar Allan Poe, or elsewhere by
Merimee or by Pushkin's Queen of Spades.
If we glance finally at the German romantic drama, the difference
from the English situation is equally striking. In England there was a
deep gulf between the stage and the closet drama which was very
rarely bridged. The best poetic drama of the time was probably Shel
ley's Cenci, z pastiche of Shakespeare and Webster which is effective
on the stage but could not be performed then because of its theme:
the incest of father and daughter. There are also the mythological
poems cast in dramatic form, such as Shelley's Prometheus Unbound or
Byron's Manfred and Cain, which were written only for an imaginary
theater. In Germany, however, there were dramatists who produced
effective stage plays which constitute something like a genre: the
tragedy of fate. I know that Schiller's Bride of Messina was the first
example and that, in its lower reaches, the Schicksalstragodie degener
ated into sensational horror plays such as Werner's 24th of February or
Milliner's Guilt. But much of Kleist, beginning with Die Familie
Schroffenstein, the wonderful fragment Robert Guiscard and Katchen
von Heilbronn, or even Grillparzer's Ahnfrau cannot be dismissed as
mere popular entertainment.
In the tragedy of fate the German romantics found a peculiar form
for what is, it seems, the basic outlook on life, the attitude, the "vi
sion" of the German romantics: their feeling for the uncanny, the
menace, the sense of evil lurking behind the facade of the world. Ger
man romanticism, in contrast with English and French Romanti
cism, is not Rousseauistic: it lacks the trust in goodness, the trust in
God and Providence, or the belief in progress which inspires Words
worth and Coleridge and, in a secular form, Shelley or, in a messianic
prophetic version, Blake (who must not be misinterpreted as a Satan
ist or a forerunner of Nietzsche). In the best things of Tieck, Bren

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 47

tano, Arnim, and E. T. A. Hoffmann a sense of the double bottom o

the world is conveyed: a fear that man is exposed helplessly to sini
forces, to fate, to chance, to the darkness of an incomprehensib
mystery.
This in itself is, of course, an age-old feeling, but the Germans
convey it by methods not paralleled in England at that time: by the
grotesque and by romantic irony. The grotesque is a term which
is used so widely that it often means little more than the bizarre or
odd, but if we follow its historical association with the grotesque
decorative work of Raphael and see it particularly as abolishing the
difference between the human and the animal realms, we can arrive,
as Wolfgang Kayser does in his book,42 at a more precise meaning.
The grotesque assumes the horror and the menace of the world and a
fateful determinism which reduces man to a helpless puppet in the
hands of superior powers. This is why puppets and automatons or
homunculi, such as Arnim's mandrake and Golem, are favorite fig
ures in German romantic fiction, particularly in Hoffmann, and why
Kleist in his profound essay on the Puppet Theater chose the puppet
as metaphor for his philosophy of history. The world of Brentano,
Arnim, Hoffmann, and even Biichner in Leonce und Lena is filled with
bored puppets, twitching, jerky, human dolls which have little in
common with the apparent models: the heroes and heroines of
Shakespeare's comedies or the sweetly melancholy figures of Mus
set's Fantasio.431 cannot think of English parallels at that time: possi
bly the dance macabre of Beddoes' Death's Jest Book is somewhat simi
lar in mood.
The grotesque can be repulsive or simply in bad taste, but it is often
lifted into the realm of art by the detachment of the author, the psy
chic distance, the irony, the playing with the material which is culti
vated with particular insistence by the German romantics. Today it
is frequently forgotten that devices considered strikingly modern
were common among the German romantics: the deliberate break
ing of illusion, the interference of the author, the manipulation of the

42. Das Groteske, seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Oldenburg, 1957); Eng
lish translation, 1963 (Bloomington, Ind.).
43. Arnim Renker, Georg Buchner und das Lustspiel der Romantik (Berlin, 1924),
showed that Leonce und Lena draws on Musset's Fantasio but the ethos is quite differ
ent. On the play see Rudolf Majut, Studien um Buchner (Berlin, 1932); and Gustav
Beckers, Georg Buchners "Leonce und Lena": Ein Lustspiel der Langeweile (Heidelberg,
1961), an existentialist reading.

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 48 RENE WELLEK

conventions of the novel or the play: Brentano's Godwi refers to th

page of the first volume on which he has fallen into a pond.44
Tieck's Puss in Boots a character discusses the play Puss in Boots wh
is just being performed.45 Zerbino in another of Tieck's satiric
plays pushes the play backwards, as if it were a machine in reverse
motion, so that the preceding scenes come back into view.46 Bu
this breaking of the illusion which as a device dates back to the wh
"Rehearsal" tradition and in the novel had its immediate model
Sterne, is only a superficial symptom of romantic irony as expound
theoretically by Friedrich Schlegel and Solger. To them, irony mean
complete objectivity, and ultimately an insight into the contradictio
of all existence and the nothingness of aesthetic illusion. Hegel and
Kierkegaard found romantic irony ethically irresponsible, mere pla
acting, mere aestheticism, but in the best romantics it is more than
realization that art is only art, that imagination is free and capricio
it is an insight into the chance existence of man, his insignificanc
and his sovereignty over his insignificance which must have repel
a cosmic optimist like Hegel or a deeply troubled, agonized believer
like Kierkegaard. This romantic irony is completely absent from th
English romantic writers, even when they laugh or joke or parody
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats are earnest, even solem
people, though Shelley may ridicule Wordsworth and Coleridge
savagely satirize Swellfoot the Tyrant or Keats may write funny do
gerel on his trip to Scotland. Lamb may be whimsical, Scott broadl
humorous, but no Englishman?with the possible exception of B
ron?has the sense of art as play, of life as Nothingness, of the artis
as an outsider in the way the German romantics have.
This ironical detachment is obviously related to the whole pro
lem of what today is called the "alienation" of the artist, which w
so much greater in Germany than in England. Wordsworth was
lonely man, Blake lived in a world of vision, Byron and Shell
flouted and attacked their society. The Germans hate and ridicule th
Philistines: they wage savage war against the burghers, and Hof
mann, at least in his fiction, shrinks at the mere contact with the
44. Godwi, ed. Heinz Amelung, in Sdmtliche Werke, ed. C. Schuddekopf (Munich,
1909-17), v, 310. "Dies ist der Teich, in den ich Seite 143 im ersten Bande falle."
45. Der gestiefelte Kater (1797). The original, shorter version is reprinted in Satir
undParodien, ed. Andreas Muller (Reihe Romantik, Vol. rx, in Deutsche Literatur, ed. H
Kindermann, Leipzig, 1935), p. 50.
46. Prinz Zerbino (1798), in Schriften (Berlin, 1828), x, 3301*.

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 49

world of merchants and artisans who disturb the dream world o

artists. The books of the German romantics are peopled with e
trics, odd fellows, riders of hobbyhorses?sometimes as harmle
Uncle Toby or Walter Shandy, but more often sinister and d
ous.47 Some are merely grotesque fools: Jean Paul's Dr. Katzen
eats spiders and sucks junebugs alive in the presence of his
Others are criminals obsessed with a fixed idea like Rene Cardi
the jeweler in Hoffmann's Mademoiselle de Scudery, who has t
der the buyers of his works of art; others are sinister figures,
tans or hypnotists like the Magnetiseur. Often they are divided
apart, "zerrissen," split personalities, we would say today, some
represented as actual physical doubles.48 The theme of the doub
characteristic of German Romanticism, may be merely humoro
it was in Plautus' Menaechmi, in Shakespeare's Comedy of Error
in Moliere's Amphitryon. In Jean Paul, who apparently coined
German term, Doppelganger, it assumes a sinister doubt of the
tity of the ego: Schoppe would suddenly look at his hands i
pany and say: "Here sits a man and I am in him, but who is it?
hates his image in the mirror gallery: the orang-outangs multip
endlessly.49 In Hoffmann the double is often simply the other
criminal self within man: the Mr. Hyde against the Dr. Jek
Stevenson's much later romance. Contemporary interest in "an
magnetism," in Mesmerism, gave scientific support to this ide
irrational self in every man. Or the double, as in the remarkabl
of Chamisso's, Erscheinung, may be the other self who usurps th
of the original self: yet it is impossible to decide who is the rig
?the idealist or the cowardly, lying scoundrel.50 The theme
received its most profound treatment in Dostoevsky?the co
ness of human existence, the problem of the stability and fixit
human self?is clearly stated by the German romantics.51 It is
47? See Herman Meyer, Der Typus des Sonderlings in der deutschen Literatur (A
dam, 1943).
48. On doubles see Otokar Fischer, "Dejiny dvojnika," in Dule a slovo (Pr
1929), pp. 161-208, and Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambr
1949).
49. Titan, from Sdmtliche Werke, ed. E. Berend (Berlin, 1927-), rx, 322. "Da sitzt
ein Herr leibhaftig und ich in ihm, wer ist aber soldier?"
50. (1828) in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Koch (Stuttgart, n.d.), n, 18.
51. See Dmitri Chizhevsky, "The Theme of the Double in Dostoevsky," in Dos
toevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Rene Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.,
1962), pp. 112-129.

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 50 RENE WELLEK

merely alienation from society, or the conflict between the artist an

society: it is a much profounder malaise about the utter elusiveness
reality, the discontinuity of our self, the impossibility of human f
dom. I am not aware that the English romantic poets raised su
issues.
In the most complex, most clearly elaborated figure of the divided,
half-mad romantic artist, Hoffmann's Kapellmeister Kreisler, art be
comes the salvation from division and madness. Kreisler is a musician
not only because Hoffmann was one, but because music is to Hoff
mann and to the German romantics the highest art, the art which leads
us into the dark abysses of our soul and the mystery of the world.
Here again the contrast with the English romantic poets is pain
fully obvious. They have no, or hardly any, deeper relation to music,
which in England had ceased to be a creative art. I am not aware of a
single significant reference to Mozart, Beethoven, or even Handel
among the English romantic poets. Wordsworth reportedly fell
asleep at a musical evening party.52 Shelley speaks himself of his
"gross idea of music": he went to the opera at the persuasion of
Thomas Love Peacock in London and again in Milan, and he lis
tened with delight to Jane Williams playing the guitar.53 Keats ad
mits that "through Hunt he is indifferent to Mozart." Still, he in
dulged with his brothers and friends in an after-dinner parlor game of
imitating vocally some musical instrument, Keats himself apparently
imitating the bassoon.54 Among the essayists a definite deprecation of
music seems to be the pattern. Lamb wrote a semi-serious "Chapter
on Ears" where "he must avow that he has received a great deal more
pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty."55 De Quincey com
ments on the "obstinate obtuseness" of the English in regard to mu
sic.56 Hazlitt, who on occasion reviewed performances of operas and
oratorios, consistently disparaged the genre and describes approv
ingly the indifference of the English public.57 Music bores him as it
52. Morley, H. C. Robinson on Books and Their Writers, I, 293 (April 5, 1823).
53. Letter to John Gisborne, June 18,1822, in Letters, ed. Roger Ingpen (London,
1909), n, 976-977- On opera see n, 592, 599.
54. Letter to George and Georgiana Keats (Dec. 16, 1818-Jan. 4,1819), Letters, ed.
Maurice B. Forman, 4th ed. (London, 1952), p. 251. On parlor game, Letters, pp. 73?
129.
55. The Works, ed. Thomas Hutchison (Oxford, 1924), 1, 520.
56. "Style" (1840), in Collected Writings, x, 135.
57. "The Italian Opera" (1816), in Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London,
1930), v, 325. Cf. v, 196.

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 51

presents "no distinct object to the imagination": it makes an "unin

terrupted appeal to the sense of pleasure alone"; it is like "colou
without form: a soul without a body."58 In commenting on a pe
formance of Mozart's Don Giovanni Hazlitt voices his disapproval o
attempts to exalt the opera above the common run. It is a "kind of
scented music." The duet "La ci darem la mano" gives him "mor
pleasure than all the rest of the opera put together."59 Only Coler
is an exception among the English writers, chough his interest in m
seems almost entirely theoretical. Still, we know that very early t
idea of writing an opera libretto crossed his mind.60 Only recentl
entry in a late notebook has been published in which Coleridge spea
of music as "this mighty magic," regretting his own ignorance, bu
romantically asserting that "music seems to have an immediate com
munion with my life." "It converses with the life of my mind, as if
were itself the Mind of my Life."61 But this reflection is quite isolat
and points again to Coleridge's singular position and special relation
ship to the Germans. In general, it may be not unfair to contrast t
metaphor of the Aeolian harp as "the corresponding breeze," rightl
pointed out by Meyer H. Abrams as the characteristic image of the
English poets' sense of the unity of the universe,62 with Hoffmann
use of the Devil's voice, which he professed to have heard as a boy o
the seashore in East Prussia: a weird sound which filled him wi
profound terror and piercing compassion.63 This natural music is a
image of the singing which kills the daughter of Rat Krespel, or i
may be the demonic violin playing of Kreisler: a voice from the up
per world which brings salvation or lures to destruction. Hoffman
is no exception among the Germans. He is preceded by Wackenroder
58. "The Oratorios" (1816), Complete Works, v, 296-297. Hazlitt echoes eighteenth
century British views. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York
I953)? PP- 91-94- Cf. Herschel Baker, William Hazlitt (Cambridge, Mass., 1962),
p. 297.
59. "Don Juan" (1817), Complete Works, v, 364.
60. Letter to George Coleridge, April 7,1794, Collected Letters, 1, 79. Coleridge then
knew a musician, Charles Clagget, who set four of his poems to music (for Clagget
see DNB).
61. In Inquiring Spirit. . ., ed. Kathleen Coburn (London, 1951), pp. 214-215.
62. "The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor," Kenyon Review, xrx
(1957), 113-130; reprinted in English Romantic Poets', Modern Essays in Criticism, ed.
M. H. Abrams (New York, i960), pp. 37-54.
63. "Die Automate," in Werke, ed. G. Ellinger (Berlin, 1912), vi, 95. Hoffmann
himself refers to his source; see G. H. von Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der
Naturwissenschaft (Dresden, 1808), p. 65.

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 52 RENE WELLEK

whose musician Berglinger, like Kreisler, feels music as a divin

spiration and perishes in the conflict with the world. In W
roder's last sketch, the strange "Oriental Legend of a Naked Sai
written shortly before his death, art is conceived as the way t
tion from the incessant deafening roar of the wheel of Time,
the saint has to imitate with ecstatic mad gestures until he is f
the saving sounds of a song. This saint's legend seems almost t
pate Schopenhauer, who celebrated the effect of art in "stoppin
wheel of Ixion"65 and temporarily and illusorily alleviating th
of existence. For the German romantic artists and for Schopenh
who, we must remember, was their contemporary in spite of
lated fame, music is the central, the highest art. Thus also the
chy of the arts differs in Germany and England, as does the hi
of genres in literature.
We might ask whether we can account for these differen
causal terms. Do the economic and social differences betwee
two countries determine the literature? It would be easy to de
them, e.g., the contrast between the German particularism wi
many small states and lack of a single center, and England wit
great metropolis, London.66 Industrially England was undoubt
far more advanced than Germany. But the concrete bearing on
erature of such knowledge seems, in this age of Marxism, g
overrated. As to social provenience, the two groups in both cou
represent a similar mixture of upper and lower bourgeoisie an
tocracy: Byron and Shelley were noblemen, as were Novalis, A
and Eichendorff. Coleridge was the son of a clergyman, as wer
two Schlegels. Tieck was the son of a ropemaker in Berlin. Kea
father managed a livery stable in London. If we examine t
nomic resources of the two groups we are led to the conclusio
only Byron and Scott made a fortune by writing, that Words
had the luck of receiving an inheritance, that Shelley lived by borrowing
on his expectations as the grandson of a baronet, that Keats drew a
small annuity, and that Coleridge had a patron in the china manu
facturer Thomas Wedgewood but also fended for himself eking out
64. Werke und Briefe (Berlin, 1948), pp. I97f.
65. Sdmtliche Werke, ed. A. Hubscher (Leipzig, 1937-41), n, 231. "Das Rad des
Ixion steht still."
66. Two books by W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social
Background of the Literary Revival (Cambridge, 1935), and Culture and Society in Classi
cal Weimar 1773-1806 (Cambridge, 1962), contain much material.

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 53

a living from journalism, lecturing, and some royalties. Lamb

official of the East India Company. The situation in Germany w
so very different put in these personal terms. August Wilhelm
gel was for years a member of the household of Mme. de Stae
later a Professor of the University of Bonn. Friedrich Schlege
came a high official in Metternich's Austria. Novalis was a salt
supervisor. Arnim and Eichendorff were Prussian landowners.
A. Hoffmann was a law official, though for several years he tr
earn his living as an orchestra conductor and theater manag
seems to me difficult to generalize with such data and easy to
gerate the economic hardships which were suffered by a few
writers at some time.
Politically, the outlook of both groups was necessarily deeply
fluenced by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wa
England the distinction of two generations is obvious: Wordsw
and Coleridge were young men at the outbreak of the Revo
and were carried away by enthusiasm for it: they were disapp
by its excesses and repelled in their patriotism and therefore
into a conservative position which later showed also as hostility
industrial revolution fostered by the liberals. In Wordsworth p
larly, the enmity toward the city and admiration for the "per
public of shepherds"67 in the Lakes were important factors of
politics. The younger generation?Byron, Shelley, and Keats
to manhood in the stifling atmosphere of the Restoration and
liberals of diverse shades. Shelley was the most radical, though
radicalism remains quite Utopian in spite of his exhortation to
Men of England" to "forge arms,?in your defence to bear".6
Germans were politically conservative but in different degrees
upsurge of patriotic fervor against the French and hence agains
ideas of the Enlightenment was shared by all. Novalis, in his e
Christianity or Europe (1799) was, to quote Lukacs, the first to
mend "the simple exchange economy of the Middle Ages, th
ity of labor in arts and crafts against the rising fragmentation
talist economics."69 Others put the conservative creed in pure
litical and religious terms. Friedrich Schlegel, Adam Muller
67. Wordsworth's own term: see Guide to the Lakes, 5th ed., ed. E. de Seli
(London, 1906), p. 67.
68. "Song to the Men of England" (1819?first published 1839), in Complete
cal Works, ed. Thomas Hutchison (Oxford, 1933), p. 568.
69. "Holderlins Hyperion," in Goethe und seine Zeit (Bern, 1947), p. 120.

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 54 RENE WELLEK

Zacharias Werner were converted to Roman Catholicism, E. T. A

Hoffmann administered somewhat reluctantly the laws persecuting
the German Burschenschaften,70 and Eichendorff served as an official of
the Prussian Ministry of Education in charge of Catholic Ecclesiastic
Affairs. Thus the German romantics believed in an alliance of con
servativism and nationalism accepted only by the older English
group. This is a great distinctive feature of German nineteenth-cen
tury history, for elsewhere, in Italy and the East European countries,
nationalism and liberalism were firmly allied. The fervor of German
medievalism, the passionate interest in the German past and in peas
ant folklore can be associated with this general revolt against the
levelling and centralizing tendencies of the Enlightenment, the Rev
olution, and Napoleon. In England we have to go to Carlyle, Rus
kin, and the Oxford movement to find similar conceptions of the
Middle Ages as social norm: as a realm of order, tradition, and joyful
handicrafts.
For the concrete literature economic and political conditions and
ideologies are less important than the relation to philosophical and
religious traditions. Some of this is implied in the economic and po
litical attitudes: obviously the Catholic conversions were also politi
cally motivated. In England both the Enlightenment and established
religious tradition were in a paradoxical combination stronger than
in Germany. Blake, a nonconformist by background, was the one
obvious exception. Coleridge for a time was a Unitarian and Hazlitt
was the son of a Unitarian preacher. In England, there was no parallel
to the German idealistic philosophy: academically Common Sense
philosophy was in the saddle and unofficially the influence of Utili
tarianism was spreading at that time. Thus the relation to religious
and philosophical tradition was very different in the two countries:
the German romantics were confronted with the enormous prestige
of the philosophy of Kant and Fichte and had a systematic philoso
pher and ally in Schelling. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis were
themselves engaged in technical philosophical speculation,71 while
Kant and Fichte affected the layman by a misunderstood interpreta
70. Gottfried Fittbogen, "E. T. A. Hoffmanns Stellung zu den 'demagogischen
Umtrieben' und ihrer Bekampfung," Preussische Jahrbiicher, clxxxtx (1922), 79-92.
Cf. H. Hewett-Thayer, pp. 91-93.
71. Friedrich Schlegel's independence and importance as a philosopher has been
argued by Josef Korner in the introduction to Neue Philosophische Schriften (Frank
furt, 1935). On Novalis see Theodor Haering, Novalis als Philosoph (Stuttgart, 1954).

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 GERMAN AND ENGLISH ROMANTICISM 55
tion: as propounding either a crushing scepticism or an irresponsible
solipsism. Kleist felt that Kant had taken away all certainty of knowl
edge. Tieck drew from Fichte the view that "Things are because we
thought them."72 In England, only Coleridge tried to speculate as a
philosopher, and he drew heavily on the Germans; Shelley and
Wordsworth were either confined to the British empiricist tradition
or went back to Plato. In Germany, Lutheran orthodoxy had disin
tegrated, but there was always the alternative of Roman Catholicism,
which offered a refuge in uncertainty: Friedrich Schlegel went the
way to Rome. Brentano, a Catholic by birth, became fervently re
ligious and spent years taking down the visions of a stigmatized nun,
Katherina Emmerich. Only August Wilhelm Schlegel preserved an
eighteenth-century scepticism,73 though he had sympathized and
played with all kinds of philosophies.
The distinction between the two countries is equally obvious when
we look at the writers' relations to literary tradition. The Germans
were confronted with the overwhelming presence of their classics, of
whom Goethe lived till 1832 and produced incessantly during the
heyday of Romanticism. He in particular was the great model and
the great challenge. Shakespeare then came as a revelation, and an in
tense connection was established with the older Romance literatures;
Cervantes and Calderon especially were widely known and influen
tial. With the Spanish poetry came its meters: the German use of the
four-beat trochee of the Spanish drama and romances has no parallel
in England. The first popular example in English is Hiawatha (1855).
In England there were no immediate models of great authority. The
later eighteenth century, at least in poetry, seems barren and the clas
sicism of the age of Queen Anne was no longer a formidable foe. Spen
ser, Shakespeare, and even Milton were remote in time, and thus they
could be drawn upon very freely: the poetic antiquarianism rarely
produced self-conscious pastiche if we except Coleridge's Ancient
Mariner, especially in its earlier archaic version, and Keats's Eve of
St. Mark. Rather, the great English romantic poets could draw on a
younger tradition which they lifted into a higher region: the Augus
72. "Die Wesen sind, weil wir sie dachten," in William Lovell (1795), in Schriften
(Berlin, 1828), vi, 178. See Fritz Bruggemann, Die Ironie als entwicklungsgeschichtliches
Moment (Jena, 1909), a misnamed book on romantic subjectivism.
73. Berichtigung einiger Missdeutungen (Berlin, 1828), and the letter, "Sur la religion
chretienne," dated Aug. 13,1838, inCEuvres ecrites enfrancais, ed. E. Bocking (Leipzig,
1846), 1, i89f.

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 56 ren? wellek
tan Miltonic meditative poem, or the ode of the type of Collins and
Gray, or the eighteenth-century octosyllabic verse tale. The German
romantics felt much more strongly that they had to break with the
Hellenic classicism of Goethe. They drew more consistently on folk
forms or on forms of Romance art poetry which they often misin
terpreted as popular. In prose, the Germans represent most clearly a
case of "rebarbarization": an attempt to raise such popular genres as
the Gothic novel, the fairy tale, and the anecdote into the realm of
higher art.
Something thus can be done to account for the differences between
the two literatures at that time, but I would be the first to admit that
causal explanation and even historical antecedents do not accomplish
much. We must leave something to chance, to genius, to a constella
tion of circumstances, possibly to that obscure force, national charac
ter. Why not agree that we are faced here with some ultimate data,
with history or the national character? It is variety that is the spice of
life, and of literature. The literary historian and the comparatist has
done what he can do if he has accurately described, analyzed, charac
terized, and compared what he has seen and read.
YALE UNIVERSITY

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