: Variétés Historiques et Littéraires (07/10) Recueil de pièces volantes rares et curieuses en prose et en vers by Fournier Edouard Editor - French literature FR Littérature

@FreeBooks

Posted in: #FreeBooks #FreeBooksIndia #FreeBooksApp #gg

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

PREFACE

Goethe says of himself, that the first sight of a work of genuine art was always displeasing to him. There was no correspondence between his own mind and the object he was contemplating. It would not fit--became galling. He was made conscious of a deficiency in himself; and the result was, a feeling of annoyance and irritation at the cause of it. Yet if he could overcome this aversion, and set himself to work to understand it, in faith that ultimately he would find himself repaid, he never failed to make the most delightful discoveries; new powers developed themselves in himself, and beauty after beauty came out in the object.

It is to this cause that we attribute the comparatively small success which the works of Ludwig Tieck have hitherto met with in England--just because they are genuine; and we venture to affirm, with some confidence, that if people will take the same pains, they will find their efforts attended with a similar result to that above mentioned. There is nothing strange in all this: there is a deep gloomy earnestness about Tieck, an unprepossessing sternness, which makes people feel uncomfortable, without exactly knowing why. They cannot make out his way of thought. They feel it is deep and strong; but as they do not start with any confidence in him as a teacher, it serves only to make them painfully conscious of their own dimensions, and afraid of what the strong man may do with them. For all they know, he may be a tyrant, using his powers only for destruction; breaking in and wasting all their beautiful gardens, and leaving them nothing but ashes, and torn-off leaves, and withering flowers.

More or less, there is always something awful in a purely ethical writer. Tieck's works do not profess to be religious writings. He is concerned wholly with the nature of man as he finds him, and with the working of the moral laws, the natural tendencies of virtue and vice in the system of the universe; and in this way he contrasts strikingly with writers like Fouqu?, whose works have so much of a distinct religious character. The wild preternatural spirit which breathes through all his tales forms but a subservient part. It does but represent the elements in which our moral nature hangs; and is, in fact, nothing more than the very element in which we all live, only held in a certain light that we may see it. Why he does not introduce the real influences of the other world as revelation makes them known to us, is a question which we need not ask ourselves; it is enough that it was not his purpose.

But perhaps we shall find the clue to the general tone of his mind in the state of things in Germany, and the general condition of European feeling at the time in which he was brought up.

His mind broke into consciousness at the stormy close of the eighteenth century, when Europe was rocking to her foundation, and all faith in God was dead. The seven thousand who would not bow the knees to the Deity of man were hanging off in fear and trembling, and watching for the doom of the world. In France, old Voltaire worshipped as a god. In Germany, the students at the universities caricaturing the sacrifice of the mass at the doors of the beerhouses, and one riding through the streets of G?ttingen upon an ass, to try, as he said, what must have been the feelings of the Saviour . It was a time of which Jean Paul said, "Now strikes the twelfth hour of the night; and the foul birds of night are screaming, and spectres dance; the dead walk abroad, the living dream."

Tieck was born in the Roman Catholic Church; but he was brought up without any religious teaching; and the Church herself in those dark hours possessed but few or none of those outward marks of holiness which could make him feel safe in trusting himself implicitly to her guidance: the poison of infidelity was in her very heart; disgraced by the grossest idolatry, her enemies battering furiously at her from without, and she apparently helpless to resist them. It is not so now: she too has felt the warm breath of spring that has since swept over the face of the earth, and is waking her up to new life and energy; yet, if even now such scenes as those of last summer at Treves can shock the senses of the cultivated world, what must it have been then? She was like a cracked bell that would not ring when it was struck.

In a country, then, where there was no religion to which he could trust,--no philosophy but an infidel one; in despair of external guidance, Tieck was forced to the bold step of trying for himself what all these systems were made of; of going down himself, and searching the foundations on which they rested; what this nature of his really was. He dared stand boldly up before the world, and look it in the face, and ask it what it was. And the still more awful questions he asked of his own heart: What am I? How came I here? What is my business here? It is a fiery trial; and woe to him who fails! Better he had never been born! It is a sphinx he has to answer: if he find not the solution of the riddle, the monster will devour him. And few hearts but will quail, and few cheeks but will blanch, and few heads but will reel, with those bottomless abysses of scepticism yawning round. But it is like the Catholic legend of the purgatory of St. Patrick. Few of those who ventured in ever returned to tell the tale; but those who did were safe for ever. A man knows too well the value of the true, when he has been at such cost in the pursuit of it, to risk the losing of it again. "Abdallah" and "William Lovell," the two first books of any importance which Tieck published, shew him in the centre of the fearful struggle, wrestling with those two first unanswerable questions. And so at last he was content to leave them. To the last question he wrung out an answer from the depths of his own being; he comes now to offer it to us--a true teacher, if a stern one: and we shall do well to listen to his words; for the solemn earnestness which breathes through every line he has written shews how deeply he has read the mystery of life. The tales in the present volume were written in the first period after he emerged into a calmer and clearer light; and to these for the rest of this Preface we shall confine ourselves. We have said enough to account for their peculiar character externally; and the consideration of his later writings had better be left to another opportunity: to speak of them now would be but criticism without an object; before long some of them will be produced before the public, and what is to be said will be said then. Great things have happened in Germany since that time: a literature has sprung up almost without parallel for depth, and richness, and originality; and schools of poetry and philosophy various as those of Athens. Tieck has led one school, Goethe another; and if officious followers attempted to push them into rivalry, each knew his own place too well for such unnatural feud to endure.

The first startling feature, then, in all the characters in these tales is their terrible reality. In all the circumstances of the wild and wonderful, the supernatural working visibly, and interfering in the direction and control for good and evil of the affairs of the world; instead of finding the persons of the same fantastic character, such as we might naturally expect, as harmonising better with the elements in which they work; instead of saints with power of working miracles, or the ideal heroes of the age of chivalry,--we have the very men and women which we ourselves are, and such as we see every day around us. Excepting, perhaps, Goethe, no one knew his own age better than Tieck: he is a modern poet in every sense of the word; and that is why we claim so high a place for him.

The true poet of any time is he who can make that time transparent--who can let his readers in behind the curtain of their own souls and that of the society in which they live, and shew them what they are all doing, hoping, fearing--clear up their cloudy perceptions, and say for them what they would say for themselves if they could. This is exactly what Tieck does. His Emilius's, Egberts, Ludwigs,--what are they all, but the very men of whom every day he walked into the street he saw thousands? No matter what the conditions be under which he pictures them working, his men are real men, not fantastic; and that is all we have any right to require.

Yet I may say something about these marvellous conditions in which they appear; for perhaps even they are not so unreal as they seem.

It is only because we are used to them that this world and the beings that inhabit it do not seem wonderful. There is nothing in the phenomena which surround us abstractedly more reasonable than any other set might be which worked by fixed rules. As a matter of fact we experience one class, but that is all. It is not that one is wonderful and the other simple, as people seem to assume. This world we live in is, indeed, teeming with wonders. The poet has but to hold a magnifying-glass before it, and forthwith a thousand new forms of beauty start out before our eyes; and what before seemed most beautiful has become a monster. There are, indeed, poets who can produce the highest effect without any such magnifying; and the world as mirrored in their minds appears transfigured, its form and proportions continuing all the same. Yet the number of such spirits as have appeared on this planet of ours we may count upon our fingers, and of those who are fit to read and understand them the ratio is the same. Even Shakspere does not at times disdain the aid of the supernatural; and the idea of nature, as Tieck offers it, even its wildest and most fantastic form, is far deeper and nearer the truth than is the dull, common-place, lifeless thing which most men seem to regard it as. The question, however, is one which he will best qualify people to answer for themselves.

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)

Login to post a comment!