The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume V Part 8

Even though it might be permitted to Painting, from its peculiar nature, to give a distinct preponderance to the Soul, yet theory and instruction will do best constantly to aim at that original Centre, whence alone Art may be produced ever anew; whereas, at the stage last mentioned, it must necessarily stand still, or degenerate into cramped mannerism. For even that higher pa.s.sion is opposed to the idea of having reached the acme of energy, whose image and reflex Art is called upon to display.

A right intelligence will ever enjoy seeing a creature worthily, and, as far as possible, also individually, represented; yea, Deity itself would look down with pleasure on a being that, gifted with a pure soul, should stoutly a.s.sert the dignity of its nature outwardly also, and by its sensually efficient existence.

We have seen how the work of Art, springing up out of the depths of Nature, begins with determinateness and limitation, unfolds its inward plenitude and infinity, is finally transfigured in Grace, and at last attains to Soul. But we can conceive only in detail what, in the creative act of mature Art, is but one operation. No theory and no rules can give this spiritual, creative power. It is the pure gift of Nature, which here, for the second time, makes a close; for, having fully actualized herself, she invests the creature with her creative energy. But as, in the grand progress of Art, these different stages appeared successively, until, at the highest, all joined in one; so also, in particulars, sound culture can spring up only where it has unfolded itself regularly from the germ and root to the blossom.

The requirement that Art, like everything living, should commence from the first rudiments, and, to renew its youth, constantly return to them, may seem a hard doctrine to an age that has so often been a.s.sured that it has only to take from works of Art already in existence the most consummate Beauty, and thus, as at a step, to reach the final goal. Have we not already the Excellent, the Perfect? How then should we return to the rudimentary and unformed?

Had the great founders of modern Art thought thus, we should never have seen their miracles. Before them also stood the creations of the ancients, round statues and works in relief, which they might have transferred immediately to their canvas. But such an appropriation of a Beauty not self-won, and therefore unintelligible, would not satisfy an artistic instinct that aimed throughout at the fundamental, and from which the Beautiful was again to create itself with free original energy. They were not afraid, therefore, to appear simple, artless, dry, beside those exalted ancients; nor to cherish Art for a long time in the undistinguished bud, until the period of Grace had arrived.

Whence comes it that we still look upon these works of the older masters, from Giotto to the teacher of Raphael, with a sort of reverence, indeed with a certain predilection, if not that the faithfulness of their endeavor, and the grand earnestness of their serene voluntary limitation, compel our respect and admiration.

The same relation that they held to the ancients, the present generation holds to them. Their time and ours are joined by no living transmission, no link of continuous, organic growth; we must reproduce Art in the way they did, but with energy of our own, in order to be like them.

Even that Indian-summer of Art, at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, could call forth only a few new blossoms on the old stem, but no productive germs, still less plant a new tree of Art. But to set aside the works of perfected Art, and to seek out its scanty and simple beginnings, as some have desired, would be a new and perhaps greater mistake; it would be no real return to the fundamental; simplicity would be affectation, and grow into hypocritical show.

But what prospect does the present time offer for an Art springing from a vigorous germ, and growing up from the root? For it is in a great measure dependent on the character of its time; and who would promise the approbation of the present time to such earnest beginnings, when Art, on the one hand, scarcely obtains equal consideration with other instruments of prodigal luxury, and, on the other, artists and amateurs, with entire want of ability to grasp Nature, praise and demand the Ideal?

Art springs only from that powerful striving of the inmost powers of the heart and the spirit, which we call Inspiration. Everything that from difficult or small beginnings has grown up to great power and height, owes its growth to Inspiration. Thus spring empires and states, thus arts and sciences. But it is not the power of the individual that accomplishes this, but the Spirit alone, that diffuses itself over all. For Art especially is dependent on the tone of the public mind, as the more delicate plants on atmosphere and weather; it needs a general enthusiasm for Sublimity and Beauty, like that which, in the time of the Medici, as a warm breath of spring, called forth at once and together all those great spirits.

It is only when the public life is actuated by the same forces through whose energy Art is elevated, that the latter can derive any advantage from it; for Art cannot, without giving up the n.o.bility of its nature, aim at anything outward.

Art and Science can move only on their own axes; the artist, like every spiritual laborer, can follow only the law that G.o.d and Nature have written in his heart. None can help him--he must help himself; nor can he be outwardly rewarded, since anything that he should produce for the sake of aught out of itself, would thereby become a nullity; hence, too, no one can direct him, nor prescribe the path he is to tread. Is he to be pitied if he have to contend against his time, he is deserving of contempt if he truckle to it. But how should it be even possible for him to do this? Without great general enthusiasm there are only sects--no public opinion; not an established taste, not the great ideas of a whole people, but the voices of a few arbitrarily-appointed judges, determine as to merit; and Art, which in its elevation is self-sufficing, courts favor, and serves where it should rule.

To different ages are given different inspirations. Can we expect none for this age, since the new world now forming itself, as it exists in part already outwardly, in part inwardly and in the hearts of men, can no longer be measured by any standard of previous opinion, and since everything, on the contrary, loudly demands higher standards and an entire renovation?

Should not the sense to which Nature and History have more livingly unfolded themselves, restore to Art also its great arguments? The attempt to draw sparks from the ashes of the Past, and fan them again into universal flame, is a vain endeavor. Only a revolution in the ideas themselves is able to raise Art from its exhaustion; only new Knowledge, new Faith, can inspire it for the work by which it can display, in a renewed life, a splendor like the past.

An Art in all respects the same as that of foregoing centuries, will never return; for Nature never repeats herself. Such a Raphael will never be again, but another, who shall have reached in an equally original manner the summit of Art. Only let the fundamental conditions be fulfilled, and renewed Art will show, like that which preceded it, in its first works, its aim and intent. In the production of the distinctly characteristic, if it proceed from a fresh original energy, Grace is already present, even though hidden, and in both the advent of the Soul already determined. Works produced in this manner, even in their rudimentary imperfection, are necessary and eternal. * * *

LATER GERMAN ROMANTICISM

By George H. Danton, PH.D

Professor of German, Butler College

The group of later Romanticists is distinguished from the earlier pioneers by less emphasis on speculative philosophy, by greater spontaneity, and by more creative ability. The later school was less interested in questions primarily esthetic and was more democratic.

Both groups were enemies of the aristocratic Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; but where the earlier group worked with the Kantian understanding and with a supersensuous philosophy, the younger men lived in the world and were of it; they used the people to carry on their propaganda. Thus, though later Romanticism contains nearly all the ideas of earlier Romanticism, it displays in addition also, political, national, and social tendencies which were in the main foreign to the earlier writers.

There was in the later group a deeper sense of religion and a firmer belief in the spiritual foundations of experience than is shown by their predecessors, though all Romanticism tried to penetrate the mysteries of life and all Romanticists were seers as well as prophets. In the later school, too, there appears a development of the nature-sense far beyond anything shown in the first group. Indeed, the Schlegels may be said to have been without a sense for nature; in Tieck there is a great discrepancy between the man, his beliefs, and his practise, and Novalis' nature-feeling is not attached to any specific place. But Brentano loves the Rhine, and Eichendorff's landscape is genuinely Silesian. Caroline and Dorothea know nothing of the mood which makes Bettina throw herself p.r.o.ne in the gra.s.s to watch an insect crawl over her hand.

A keener appreciation of natural beauty led to a study of natural science; thence it was but a step to the "night-sides" of nature; and spiritism, mesmerism, occultism, and abnormal psychology fill the minds of such men as the Romantic philosopher Schubert, and of the physicians Carus and Pa.s.savant. Justinus Kerner wrote of the Seeress of Prevorst, and Clemens Brentano watched for years at the bedside of a stigmatized nun. On the other hand, from nature comes a love for home and country, and this love serves as a bridge to the patriotism which was the vital force in the Wars of Liberation and which, by well-marked gradations, destroyed the cosmopolitanism engendered by the French Revolution. Art went hand in hand with nature; the wild, weird landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, fascinating and specifically German, express the Romantic spirit fully as well as the delicate, spiritual, and thoroughly sane fancies of Philip Otto Runge, the artist of early Romanticism.

As the earlier men centred in Jena, so the later Romanticists flourished in Heidelberg, that city which Eichendorff called "itself a magnificent Romanticism." The earlier group was largely North German and brought with it clear perception and a certain power of a.n.a.lysis, an ability to dissect and to reason. With the Heidelberg group the South begins to play a larger part, though there were a number of North Germans in it. The richer fancy, the longer literary tradition, now add color to their productions. It is significant, too, that though "castle Romanticism" does not die out, a new note is struck with the celebration of the Rhine in song, story, and legend. The river begins with Romantic tradition and in a Romantic _milieu_, but rises to political significance as "Germany's stream and not Germany's boundary." The southward tendency of the movement reached its climax when its centre s.h.i.+fted to Munich, with a culture-loving king, an Academy of Sciences and a new University. Munich was fortunately not destined to become like Vienna, that other South German city, "a Capua of the spirit."

Though certain members of the later Romantic group were closely a.s.sociated with each other in a way that was unknown to the older set, Arnim and Savigny having each married a sister of Brentano, there was less real solidarity among them than in their forerunners. By no means all the men treated within the confines of the present article had the close personal a.s.sociation which, when combined with intellectual or literary activity, goes by the rather loose name of a "school." The first Romanticists were held together by a common effort to formulate or to attain a speculative philosophy. In the second group, there was a decentralizing, catholicizing tendency, and, above all, a greater individual creative ability. It was not merely the chance difference of external fortunes that kept them apart, though they never held together after the death of Brentano's wife in 1806, but that each projected his individuality into his literary work rather than into a common polemic ideal. The path-finding and discovery had already been done; in the quieter backwater it was possible to develop well-rounded works of real esthetic value.

Very significant of the differences between the schools is their journalistic activity. The ideal of the first Romanticists was to work without collaboration; but the very prospectus of Arnim's _Journal for Hermits_ is signed by a company of editors. The early journals were turned to the study of German literature through a renunciation of the present; the later Germanic studies arose from a high idealism and from a sincere desire to awaken the present to new national activity.

When, later in life, Gorres remarked of these journals that their collaborators felt as if they were accompanying the Holy Roman Empire to its grave, he was thinking of the year in which the most important of them flourished, 1808. In this, Germany's darkest period, Kleist's Phoebus, so cordially hated by many, and Arnim's _Journal for Hermits_ had their brief but influential career.

Such a journal as the _Athenaeum_, with its over-emphasis on the esthetic, with its fighting spirit, its excoriating, inexorable wit, its constructive and destructive criticism, its complete and total silence on Schiller, would have been an impossibility in the later period. The feeling for and thinking in Fragments, as practised by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, was foreign to the new school. They had no illusions that such thinking would become the daily custom of the people; they kept their eyes open to that which went on about them, and though they no more dared than the earlier group to work directly upon the political conditions of the day as did Gorres later (1814) in his _Rheinischer Merkur_, they attempted indirectly to react on the broad ma.s.s by branching out into religion and other folk-interests as the earlier school never cared to do. Perhaps this is an excuse for the shallowness of some of the product, especially of the fiction; at any rate, the attempt at dissemination was not without its success.

The external link connecting the two schools as well as the Romantic groups in general and the object of their star-wors.h.i.+p, Goethe, was Clemens Maria Brentano (1778-1842), in many ways the most typical Romantic figure of either school. Brentano's grandmother, Sophie La Roche, had been the friend of Wieland; his mother, Maximiliane, played a not unimportant role in the life of the young Goethe and is immortalized in the latter part of _Werther_. Maximiliane married Brentano, an Italian from the Como region, and Clemens was the third child of this loveless union. Brentano's early life was not happy; he was destined for a business career but was a failure in it, and then studied at various universities but with no great application or success. From 1797-1800 he was at Jena, where he succeeded in making himself hated by the Schlegels in spite of his defense of them in his satirical play, _Gustav Wasa_ (1800). This play, in the manner of Tieck's _Puss in Boots_, attempts to ridicule Kotzebue. The method is the same as Tieck's: there is the play within the play, the gagged officer (to take the place of the critic Bottger), the puns, of which, perhaps, the one on Lucinde _(Lux inde)_ is the best, and which, as often in Brentano, go beyond and surpa.s.s Tieck. Romantic irony flourishes: the whole world of the theatre, the author, the very lights, the building, the working day and the musical instruments in the orchestra are dramatized in turn. The dialogue of the latter far more intimately suggests their quality than does the speech of the flutes in Tieck, where their spirit is cerulean blue. _Wasa_, unfortunately, runs off into dull allegory, and this work is not to be compared with August von Schlegel's _Gate of Honor_ as a satire on the same subject.

Brentano's _G.o.dwi_ (1801), the sub-t.i.tle of which, "An Unmanageable Novel by Maria," shows its character, is a far better production. It has the strong, full-blooded, pa.s.sionate love of life characteristic of its author, "the many-souled" Brentano, whose Romantic irony resulted from his being ashamed of his sentimentality, and whose hatred of philistinism was caused by his fear of his own latent tendency toward that point of view. The plot of _G.o.dwi_ runs wild, but the satire and the interspersed lyrics make it interesting reading.

Romantic irony can go no farther than in this book, in which the author's own death-bed scene is portrayed and in which the preceding parts of the work are referred to by page and line--"This is the pond into which I fall on page so and so."

If Brentano's _Rosary_ cycle (1809) is somewhat unpleasantly superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes s.e.x and religion like a mystic of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or when he expresses the note of the people. His use of the supernatural, of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as _The Lore-Lay_, the legend of which was actually invented by Brentano. Like all Romanticists, Brentano was a poet of incomplete works, of moods which abandoned him before the artistic perfection of his effort was reached; but his suggestive touches, and, above all, his constant use of the refrain in all phases and _genres_, especially to emphasize and summarize his musical consciousness, are a striking proof of the French adage, "Quand le coeur chante, c'est toujours un refrain."

Brentano surrenders himself pa.s.sionately to his mood. His surrender and his distorting irony, like Heine's, arise from his desire to a.s.similate all of the outside world; it explains, in part, the Romantic desire to mediate, to translate, to bridge the cleft between oneself and the world. In part, too, it explains the desire for musical imitation so apparent in both Tieck and Brentano. It is an attempt to express in terms of one sense the ideas or apperceptions of another. But where Tieck falls into meaningless jingle, Brentano succeeds, not merely in suggesting but in producing the effect, as in his _Merry Musicians_ (1803), or in bringing about its latent mood, as in his _Spinner's Song_ or in his version of the old folk-epithalamium, "Come out, come out, thou lovely, lovely bride."

Brentano's prose tales vary in quality from the over-allegorized latter part of _The Fairy Tale of the Rhine and the Miller Radlauf_ (1816) to the simple and homely _Kasper and Annie_ (1817), with its elemental clash of soldiers and citizens. Through many of the tales there runs a note of satire and of symbolism, but the fancy is exuberant and the interest well maintained. Brentano's discovery of the Rhine as an object of poetry and veneration is completely summarized in _Radlauf_, where the Rhine lyrics are often of wonderful beauty and definiteness and the river becomes a benevolent _deus ex machina_, who--significantly--in dreams, guides and aids the simple, honest miller in his search for a bride.

Later in life, Brentano returned to the Roman Church into which he had been baptized as a child, and gradually withdrew from literary activity. Long before his death in 1842, he had renounced his earlier life as wicked and abhorrent, and had given himself over entirely to the Church. But his career with its constant wanderings, its lack of permanency of occupation, of family ties, and of a real home, his inability to grow old, his inner unreality, his excessive productivity-in short, all that is incomplete, over-stimulated, destructive of self, make him the most typical figure of the later Romantic group.

Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) is by no means so bizarre a figure.

Born in Berlin of a n.o.ble family, he inherited a peculiar patriotism and his love of culture, and developed these without the eccentricities which characterized his brother-in-law. The main influences of his early years were Goethe and Jena, but, as a direct inspiration, Tieck must also be mentioned. Arnim's early works lie largely in the field of natural science, especially in physics. He had little of Brentano's lyric gift; indeed, his poems, where not wooden, are often merely reminiscent. They show, too, in an unusual degree, the ability to adapt himself to another's mood and a.s.similate it--that which the Germans call "Nachempfinden," a quality which stood him in excellent stead in his work on _The Boy's Magic Horn_.

The drama _Halle and Jerusalem_ (1810) is an amalgamation of the story of Cardenio and Celinde used by Gryphius and Immermann, with the story of the Wandering Jew. The first four acts take place in Halle where Cardenio is a teacher and where he is living in incestuous relation with Olympia. He is a Faust-nature and his father is Ahasuerus.

The fifth act is taken up with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem where the romantic fates of the characters are decided. The play abounds in contemporary satire and, as in all of Arnim's work, there is distinct emphasis on action, the goal of human endeavor.

Arnim's prose is better than his verse. Soon, in _The Guardians of the Crown_ (1817; volume 2 unfinished and published in his literary remains, 1854), he strikes an individual note. This novel is one of the best products of German Romanticism. The Guardians are a mysterious secret organization who guard the imperial crown in a fairy castle and are favorable to the ancient house of Hohenstaufen but inimical to the ruling Habsburgs. The basis is the newly awakening ideal of German unity but Arnim fails to express this clearly, and the concluding motif, that Germany's crown is to be spiritually won, resolves the whole into a frosty allegory. The progress of the story is, however, extremely interesting; the whole s.p.a.cious and varied scene of medieval life is there, and as Tieck and Wackenroder discovered Nuremberg, and Brentano the Rhine, so Arnim may be said to have shown in its full activity the Ghibelline city of Waiblingen. It is, to be sure, a Romantic Waiblingen, and not the real city, as Arnim himself was afterward forced to admit with some disappointment when he actually saw it. But as Arnim portrays it, it rises to typical value without losing any of its poetic individuality. It is the city of the Hohenstaufens, the last stand of medievalism against the encroachment of a new civilization. The echoes from Gotz von Berlichingen are at once apparent to the reader. But Arnim's city of the sixteenth century does not look backward only; the conflicts in it point forward also.

Its abbess is not the traditional pious, fat old lady, but a tall, thin, practical and active woman. Its Faust is a figure of aggressive naturalism, a charlatan and quack who practises blood-transfusion on the hero and who lies drunk in a pig-sty--a scene which shows Arnim's power of drastic contrast at its best. The hero, Berthold, does not sit back and wait for the crown to come to him, but with money mysteriously given him builds a cloth-mill on the site of his ancestral palace and becomes the mayor of the city. How different a picture from the hazy cities of Novalis' _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_!

It is a part of the new spirit in Romanticism to point the way for the people of Germany to go forward--to leave mysticism and dreams, and to grapple with the life around them.

A similar impulse toward popularization actuated Arnim and Brentano in their joint work, _The Boy's Magic Horn_ (1806-8). This is the achievement upon which their greatest fame will always rest. It is one of the best collections of folk-songs and popular ballads in any language, and has been of the greatest influence upon Germany. There was no desire on the part of the editors to write a learned treatise; they simply wished to gather together and record the folk-songs of the Fatherland before they were lost forever. In Arnim's own words: "The richness of this our national song cannot fail to attract universal attention; it will surprise many; it will supplement many an effort of our own times, or will render such effort needless. We expect a great deal from the joyous happy life in these songs--a manifold, full tone in poetry, an echo of very definite ideas, or an impulse to arouse many a half-forgotten youthful memory. These poems will not only be read, they will be remembered and sung. They embrace in their content, perhaps the greatest portion of German poetry. They will thus set free many an indefinite longing--a something which is not satisfied by much re-reading."

Goethe greeted the new undertaking with enthusiasm and urged the editors to "keep their poetic archives clean, strict, and in good order." He, too, urged that "this book should be in every house where joyful humans dwell, by the window, under the mirror, or where song book and cook book lie. There it should remain, ready to be opened, and there something should be found for every varying mood." While this fate has not been granted the work, it has grown deservedly popular. Philological criticism has caviled at the free hand which Arnim, especially, used in remolding the songs, but the editors are freed of any possible charge of intellectual dishonesty toward reader and source in that their object was to present artistic unities and not material for further study and dissection.

A folk-song is a song which has become a part of the lyric consciousness of the people; often the singers do not know that what they are singing has a literary origin--they have thoroughly a.s.similated it. In the best sense of the term, the songs of _The Boy's Magic Horn_ are folk-songs. They are both narrative and dramatic as well as pure lyric in form, and are simple, powerful, and direct in expression. They treat all phases of German life of the past, from a crude version of the _Lay of Hildebrant_ to the riddles, lullabies, and counting-out rhymes of children. Pictures of the moral and social life of peasant Germany are followed by poems of nature and of the supernatural. Tragedies vary with humorous skits, extravagant and mocking, and the collection is enlivened with many flyting poems about tailors--a favorite b.u.t.t of the peasant past. Ballads of popular origin and ballads with an added sentimental touch, such as the famous Stra.s.sburg poem with the added Alpine horn motif, are found here.

Delicate, haunting rhymes alternate with crude a.s.sonances, and occasionally one meets with ba.n.a.lities; but, as a whole, the collection is of surprising merit. It is a product of the Romantic return to the past, but is filled with a poetic outlook toward the future. Of the work as a whole Heine says, "I cannot praise the book enough. It contains the most graceful flowers of the German spirit, and he who wishes to know the German people at their best, let him read these folk-songs. * * * In these songs one feels the heart-beat of the German folk. It is a revelation of all melancholy cheerfulness, all their foolish reason. Here German anger beats its drum, here is the pipe of German scorn, the kiss of German love."

The part which the Romantic mood played in the Wars of Liberation is definite and well-recognized. The soldier, Gneisenau, felt that the politics of the future lay in the poetry of the day, and Adam Muller proudly proclaimed poetry to be a war-power: The Romantic longing for the distance, for love, when directed to the remote past of the Fatherland, not only yielded a new life in art and religion but induced a tremendous patriotism as well. The cosmopolitan temper which caused Lessing to say that love of country was an unknown feeling to him, gave way before an intenser nationalism. The earlier Romanticists began it; in the later group it took more specific form and became a propaganda. It was also precipitated in verse and prose. The spark came from Fichte, who was gradually led to see in the destiny of the German people a large cultural fact. Fichte, like a true German, emphasized education as the means of progress: Arnim grasped the problem from another side; he felt himself autochthonous, and consciously set out to make his connection with the soil react on those sprung from the soil. In him, as well as in Fichte, dawns the ideal of the German people as an ent.i.ty, as a nation.

There are three poets whose main value lies in the appeal they made to the belligerent spirit of the day. They represent three phases of the German character. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), the eldest of the group, is the pamphleteer, the politician, and the teacher, as well as the poet. He is the hard-headed, earnest intellectual whose lyric poetry, whatever its esthetic weaknesses, arouses to action by its deadly insistence on an idea, on hatred of the French, on salvation by the sword. Arndt is all virility and fire.

The life of Theodor Korner (1791-1813), the son of Schiller's intimate friend, shows that mixture of idealism and practicality for which the Germans are becoming more and more noted. Korner was aroused from his poetic diletantism by the alarms of war. He enlisted in the famous Lutzow corps and died a soldier's death, thus becoming the symbol of all that was ideal for the patriotic youth of his day, the hero and the poet, the man of "Lyre and Sword." His patriotic poems, often composed on the very field of battle, were sung by the soldiers to the roll of cannon and the beat of drum. The trace of Schiller's rhetoric in Korner's poems adds to their effectiveness, spurring to action and firing young minds to patriotic emulation of high ideals. Like Arndt's lyrics, Korner's poems are actual doc.u.ments in the struggle for liberty-verses which affected men.

The German mystic trait, the touch of the religious, marks the poetry of Max Schenkendorf (1783-1817). His was a quieter nature, which loved the Fatherland, its language, its romantic scenes and past.

Characteristic also is his veneration for Queen Luise, whose beauty, tenderness, and fort.i.tude had endeared her to the people as well as to the poets.

Though every Romantic poet took some stand on the questions of the day, the most distinctly lyric of them, Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), was not of a military temperament. Even he, however, followed the King of Prussia's call to arms but, significantly enough for "the last Knight of Romanticism," as he was called, arrived a day too late on the field of Waterloo. The somewhat fanciful t.i.tle by no means indicates a jouster at windmills; it implies, rather, that in Eichendorff there were gathered for the last time with all their poetic brilliancy, the declining rays of the Romantic movement. After him, the enthusiasm is in its decline or changes to forms which lie outside the confines of the Romantic spirit.

Eichendorff is a thorough _pleinairiste_, filled with the atmosphere of his native Silesia and, in some measure, hardly intelligible apart from its landscape. His birth-place, the castle of Lubowitz, near Ratibor, rising high on a hill in full sight of the Oder, is the ultimate background of all his nature-poetry. Here must be localized the ever-recurring hill and valley, wood, nightingale, and castle.