Conclusion

ROMANTICISM obviously did not abruptly end in Germany jn 1830, or 1832 for that matter, but what did happen is that after that time it ceased to dominate the climate of much literary theory and practice, and romantic traits in literary works strike one as having become episodic, even adventitious, until their re-emergence as a renewal, a neo-romantic revival, in Richard Wagner’s music-dramas in the ’fourties, and in other slighter works. But aspects of romanticism, as we have defined them—for instance, the surrender to uninhibited feeling and veering mood, and the awareness of a sympathetic echo of that feeling and mood in nature (or was it a projection of the feeling ?)—present themselves in literature after 1830 : a particular instance is the lyric of Lenau, the pseudonym of Nikolaus Niembsch von Strehlenau (1802–50), a German-Hungarian poet who joined the group formed by Uhland and Kerner, also Mörike, and their satellite Swabian poetasters. ¹ He was an incongruously picturesque and exotic guest: in his poetry and his life a romantic to the extent that his was one of the melancholy, over-sensitive natures which could never come to a lasting understanding with the world, though this was more evident in his tragic life than in his strangely impersonal verse, in which he evidently did not say all he had to say, and shunned the confession of a purely private experience. Restlessly he wandered from his native country to Vienna, from there to the welcoming Swabians at Stuttgart—in the inappropriate atmosphere of triumphant Bieder-meier—then he experimented (unsuccessfully) in 1832 with life in Pennsylvania, but returned to Europe the next year. He was a poète maudit in the late-romantic Byronic tradition, and his mind would veer erratically from vehement concern with himself to a gloomy resignation and indifference ; but the disharmony which had tormented Brentano, the unhappy love-affairs which haunted Hoffmann and Heine all through their lives, produced in him a nervous instability which led to a breakdown, then to positive, maniacal madness. But even before he went mad he was obsessed by gloomy apprehensions, and his morbid sense of impending fatality expresses itself in his poetry, though in the unspecific, semi-symbolical imagery of the autumnal, cloud-wracked, decaying phases of nature: a sombre visualization of his own wretchedness uttered in the tones of a hopeless lament. Two examples among many of this recurrent dirge, this hymn to the transience and irrevocable sadness of physical existence are the poems ‘Himmels-trauer’ (‘Am Himmelsantlitz wandelt ein Gedanke,,’ Die düstre Wolke dort, so bang, so schwer’) and ‘Frühlings Tod' (‘Warum, o Lüfte, flüstert ihr so bang ?,’ Durch alie Haine weht die Trauer-kunde’). Even nature in its festive dress may evoke only sorrow : ‘Lenz’ (‘Die Báume blühn,,’ Die Vöglein singen’) illustrates this : the harmony of which he read in Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie existed for him between his mind and nature only, or usually, when nature was as sad as he, and he looked in vain for signs of the imminence of God in nature which was self-evident to Eichendorff; nor did the passing seasons and other evidence of transitoriness in natural phenomena convince him of an eternal life beyond this one, though he seems to want to believe in such a consolatory conception. One thing was clear to him, and that was his own inevitable gravitation towards unhappiness and disaster : another pattern in life was not evident to him, though in fact he followed a devious rhythm of fluctuations between exuberant literary activity and the inactivity of paralysing exhaustion, between the sceptical and rebellious mood of his Faust(1836)—in which he enlarged brilliantly on a single aspect of Goethe’s dramatic poem—and the contrasting mystical piety of Savonarola(1837), which lulled his Swabian hosts' apprehensions once more ; then he swung back again to violent, revolutionary thought and scenes of horror in Die Albigenser(1842). Yet the distinctively German romantic features of satire and caprice do not play a part—except perhaps in his Faust—in his work, and his combination of the contemplative and the improvised bring him nearer to Byronism than to the German variety of romanticism.