ABSTRACT
AFTER the Jena group dissolved, the next distinctive regrouping, of romantic writers took place in the spring of 1805, when two young men of letters, who had been close friends for four years already—Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim—joined forces in Heidelberg. It was the right setting for ‘romantic’ poetry in the sense in which Friedrich Schlegel had often used the word, for Heidelberg was rich in marvellous evocations of chivalric times, and lay under the enchantment of the old MáVcAett-Germany of which the romantics dreamed—unlike Jena, a prosaic town, apart from the prestige of Goethe’s proximity at Weimar, which had originally attracted the Schlegels ; with their departure, Jena’s romantic aura evaporated. But in the poetic and idyllic atmosphere of Heidelberg Brentano and Arnim brought to fulfilment some at least of the theoretical promise of the Athenäum, and translated into reality a part of Friedrich SchlegePs visionary hypotheses of the ’ literature of the future’, which should be inspired by the old German poetry of the Middle Ages. The sense of frustration that hangs over the disintegration of the Jena group, the inevitable failure of its members to achieve what was an inherently unattainable goal, had been emphasized by the death of Novalis, the young romantic prophet of poetry, love and death, in 1801, and by the dissensions amongst surviving members of the group ; now this mood of discouragement gave place to the sanguine spirit of the Heidelberg partnership. Arnim, though a writer richly endowed with imaginative powers, was by far the less considerable of the two ; and their main original achievement was Brentano’s lyrics and Märchen(for the most part generally unknown, because unpublished, until after his death). But their most important contribution to the German literature of their own time was their anthology of folk-song—Des Knaben Wunderhorn : Alte deutsche Lieder(3 vols., 1805–8). The baroque title is that of a single ballad, placed first in the collection and illustrated on the title-page of the first volume by an engraving of a medieval page-boy galloping along and flourishing a horn (the Tieckian symbol of the romantic lay); in a more elaborate, Gothick form the horn reappears on the very attractive title-page of the second volume (1808). Their choice of poems was restricted, as the sub-title shows, to those in German, unlike the Weltbürgertum of Herder’s anthology, Alte Volkslieder(1774–8), in which he had ranged (apart from twenty German folk-songs) into other, and often exotic literatures. In the Wunderhorn the exotic ceased to be a frequent attribute of the folksong, and there was no more to be heard of the curious snatches of Eskimo or Red Indian balladry which Herder quoted with relish in his essay on folk-songs in Von deutscher Art and Kunst(1773). Instead of this interpretation of folk-poetry as being not least the creation of primitive folks in the remoter parts of the world, Brentano and Arnim evidently followed A. W. Schlegel in thinking of the ‘folk’ as being in the first instance the common people of their own country, the honest peasantry who, in the Wordsworthian sense, are closest to nature, and are supposed to respond to its voice with unfeigned sincerity, speaking the language of the heart. The poetry produced by the ‘people’ in this impersonal sense assumed a mysterious, almost a magical significance, as if it were the result of some marvellous process of spontaneous composition by the disembodied spirit of the people, or ‘folk-soul' (‘Volksseele’) in contrast to sophisticated poetry (Kunstdichtung), which was normally attributable to named authors. 1 This credulity about the poetic capacities of the Volksseele as a communal unit of poetry-making is related to the romantic belief that the Volksseele plays a big part in other historical processes : in the evolution of language (this was the basis on which Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm founded the modern study of philology), of folk-tales (the Grimms' collection, the Kinder- und Hausmârchen(1812) is unlike the Wunderhorn in that it is chiefly culled from oral sources, and comparatively 'unimproved’—a feature which naturally displeased Brentano), 1 law (Savigny, Brentano’s brother-in-law, evolved his ’ historical' theory of jurisprudence on the principle that ‘law is not made ; it exists and evolves with the people’), 2 and Adam Müller’s related theory of political economy. Post-romantic readers have proved less eager to accept the hypothetical existence of the multi-talented Volksseele. In any case, the contrast between Volksdichtung(whether composed by the Volksseele or not) and Kunstdichtung is obviously an imperfect and unconvincing distinction. An impersonal, conventional manner need not be the exclusive characteristic of Volksdichtung at all, as the markedly impersonal, communal conventions of baroque Kunstdichtung show, with their shared intel-lectualist conceits ; in other centuries too, subjective peculiarities may be pushed aside by stereotyped poetic traditions which belong to no one poet, or group of poets ; emphasis on formal surface effects (as, for instance, that of the German anacreontic poets of the eighteenth century) encourages this almost anonymous quality nearly as much as does the generally accepted artless technique of the folksong. Nor is the anonymity which made the romantic feel at ease with the old folk-songs invariable, any more than Kunstdichtung need necessarily be assigned to a named poet. In any case, the anonymity of the folk-song is a trivial feature : for, if vague conceptions of the poetry-making Volksseele are put aside, it must be admitted that every song must eventually go back to a specific author, as whole- or part-maker, even if his identity has been lost in the course of time, and even if he might hardly recognize his own poem at the end of that process of‘weathering’ (‘Zersingen’)— of progressive modifications, omissions and accretions—involved in the long process of oral transmission. In the seventeenth century (to the romantics still a part of the Middle Ages, which in their view apparently extended right up to Gottsched’s reforms on the very eve of the Aufklärung) Volksdichtung—authentic or ostensible soldiers' and students' songs in the medieval tradition—and Kunstdichtung flourished side by side, and were often practised by the same poets: Simon Dach and Grimmelshausen are notable examples ; it is often from this baroque age that the poems in the folk-song manner by named poets were culled for the pages of the Wunderhorn. And if a great part of their conception of the Volkslied was based on the fallacy of anonymity, Arnim and Brentano were too, by modern standards, unscrupulous in their editorial practices : they cheerfully corrected what Arnim calls the ’ authentically historical discords' 1 of the original songs, liberally contributing their part to the process of ‘Zersingen’ before the (by now often mutilated and ‘improved’) poems were allowed to take their place in the printed pages of the anthology. Whenever they felt that a folk-song was not sufficiently ’ medieval’, they cheerfully made good this deficiency in a proprietary way, emphasizing where necessary the quaintness of phrasing and the conventional arrangement, though without the parodistic twists which Tieck sometimes sardonically gave to his retold versions of old folk-stories.
