ABSTRACT
THE renewal of the Märchen was the distinctive romantic contribution to modern German literature (together with the renewal of the folk-song), and it was Ludwig Tieck who first made this contribution acceptable to a wider reading public, even before Friedrich Schlegel devised his theoretical justification of the genre in his æsthetic Athenäum Fragmente. Tieck was in fact one of the earliest and most influential, and for a time the most popular, of the writers associated with the Athenäum doctrines of romanticism. He was most successful in evoking in his Märchen the atmosphere of mystery and terror, for these were sensations with which he was familiar, having an apparently genuine superstitious belief in the latent sources of sinister power in nature—menacing natural forces which might take possession of a man’s mind like a malignant fiend—and he is said to have experienced hallucinations at intervals all through his life. But in other ways he was strangely remote from life, which he viewed suspiciously from a distance, preferring to learn about it from books : for he was an insatiable reader ; and though he wrote a good deal of verse, his was not a poetic nature, in spite of the fact that he was a good judge of literary quality in other writers. He was so much the pioneer in romantic fiction that his relationship to his successors (who were, to a great extent, his heirs and beneficiaries) is of special interest. In the hands of a great writer even a fairy-story can acquire an incongruous relevance to life, and Tieck’s technique of Märchen-writing was inherited by at least two German romantic writers—Brentano and E. T. A. Hoffmann—who brought warmth and vitality into what with Tieck always remains a technical achievement, a deliberate attempt to excite terror and apprehension, but of the ‘delicious’ literary variety, a counterpart to the agreeable melancholy in which readers of the Wertherzeit had luxuriated, and which again appealed to the romantic reading public. 1 Perhaps the essential feature of Tieck as a writer is that he seems to have no heart, or at any rate to be inadequate in his emotional reactions to anything but blatant horrors ; he can be funny on occasion, but without Brentano’s sustained gaiety and zest; and he does not know the remorse which played such a large part in Brentano’s lyric after his conversion to fanatical Catholicism : for whereas Brentano became religious, Tieck was merely superstitious. Nor is he concerned, essentially, with the motives of human behaviour, in any co-ordinated total conception of the mind’s processes, though isolated bizarre incidents attract his attention ; he prefers to leave it to Hoffmann to probe into the mind in a more systematic way, using careful observation instead of erratically picking on individual peculiarities in isolation. Predominantly then he was less the born writer, concerned with presenting a more or less plausible account of the motives for human action, than the showman, who relies on his knack of seizing upon, and exploiting, sensational incidents and features ; above all, of devising situations in which a sense of horror may be evoked. The age seemed ripe for horrors and mysteries, though they had to be presented with more sophistication than the Sturm und Drang had displayed ; Tieck’s age was also hungry for more ‘medievalism’ than had hitherto been forthcoming. Tieck had the acumen and the technical skill to supply what was wanted, and often to combine the two genres, the horrific and the medieval, in a skilful amalgam which was apparently a quintessence of the new ‘romantic’ manner, as Friedrich Schlegel was soon to describe it in theory. Though he is best at evoking horror, he occasionally succeeds in cracking what appears to be a spontaneous joke, but too often his sense of fun is painfully contrived, and even his satire (which has an edge to it) is usually wasted on insignificant objects.
