When Friedrich Schlegel exclaims, "Fichte is not a sufficiently absolute idealist … I and Hardenberg (Novalis) are more what idealists ought to be," we remember that ten years previously, and long before there was any talk of Romanticism and Romanticists, Tieck had perceived what were to be the characteristics of the new school, i.e. personal lawlessness, and the glorification of this lawlessness, under the name of imagination, as the source of life and art. Lovell is an extravagant personification of these characteristics. Kierkegaard's Johannes the Seducer, the most perfect and the last example of the type in Danish literature, always keeps within certain bounds; he evades ethical questions, looking upon morality as a tiresome, troublesome power, and never attacking it directly; but Lovell, the more many-sided, the more boldly planned, if less skilfully worked-out character, recoils neither from treachery, nor bloodshed, nor poison. He is one of this period's many variations of the Don Juan-Faust type, with a touch of Schiller's Franz Moor. Satiety of self-contemplation has, in his case, led to a boundless contempt for mankind, to a ruthless sweeping away of all illusions; the one and only consolation being that thus hypocrisy is unveiled and the ugly truth seen. There is a close analogy with much that the Romanticists subsequently wrote in such an utterance as this: "Voluptuousness is undoubtedly the great mystery of our being; even the purest and most fervent love dives into this pool… Only ruthlessness, only a clear perception of the illusion can save us; Amalie is, therefore, nothing to me, now that I see that poetry, art, and even love, are only draped and veiled sensuality… Sensuality is the driving-wheel of the whole machinery … voluptuousness is the inspiration of music, of painting, of all the arts; all human desires flutter round this magnetic pole, like moths round a candle;… hence it is that Boccaccio and Ariosto are the greatest poets, and that Titian and the wanton Correggio stand high above Domenichino and pious Raphael. Even religious devotion I consider to be only a diverted course of that sensual instinct which is refracted in a thousand different colours." One would expect this Lovell, in whose meditations sensuality plays so great a part, to be represented as a man whose instincts lead him far astray. Not at all! He is as cold as ice, as cold as Kierkegaard's shadow of a seducer, whom he in this particular anticipates. He does not commit his excesses with his flesh and blood, but with his fantastically excited brain. He is a purely intellectual being, a North German of the purest water. And there is one particular in which he is, in anticipation, astonishingly Romantic. When he has, so to speak, burned himself out, when every spark of conviction is extinguished in his mind, and all his feelings lie "slain and dead" around him, he seeks refuge in the supernatural and places his trust in mystic revelations, of which an old impostor has held out the prospect. This trait, which, significantly enough, is not to be found in his French prototype, was necessary to complete the character.

The personality here is so hollow, weighs so light in its own estimation, that the impression it produces on itself is, that it is both real and unreal; it has become unfamiliar to itself, and has as little confidence in itself as in any exterior power. It stands outside its own experiences, and when it acts, feels as if it were playing a part. Lovell tells us how he seduced a young girl, Emily Burton: "I suddenly cast myself at her feet, and confessed that it was nothing but my passionate love for her which had brought me to the castle; I declared that this was to be my last attempt to learn if there were any human heart that would still come to my aid and reconcile me to life and fate. She was beautiful, and I acted my part with wonderful inspiration, exactly as if it were a congenial rôle in a play; every word I said told; I spoke with fire and yet without affectation." And later he remarks: "She has herself to reproach for any temporary loss of home happiness; I am not to blame because, in accordance with conventional ideas, she is at present disgraced in the eyes of many. I played one part, she answered with another; we acted the play of a very stupid writer with great seriousness, and now we regret having wasted our time." The whole was nothing but a scene from a play.

In this fictitious character there are already developed those qualities which we find later in real characters, such as Friedrich Schlegel and Gentz; and in this one man's habit of mind we have all that, which, transferred to art, became the notorious irony of Romanticism. Here, in the character, is the undisguised egotism which looks upon life as a rôle; there, in art, the misconception and exaggeration of Schiller's idea that artistic activity is "a game," a play, i.e. an activity without any outward aim – in short, the belief that true art is that which perpetually shatters its own edifice, renders illusion impossible, and ends, like Tieck's comedies, in self-parody. There is the very closest resemblance between the manner in which the hero acts and the manner in which the comedy is written. The irony is one and the same; it may all be traced back to the same egotism and unreality.¹²

In order really to understand the psychological condition depicted in Lovell, we must not only see its ultimate consequences, but must also, as in the case of René, see how it originates and what conditions it. It is conditioned by the ferment of lawlessness distinctive of the period. Hence the most diverse creative minds co-operate in the production of the type. As a Titan of satiety, of tædium vitæ, Lovell is only one of a race of Titans.

Two years before Lovell was planned, Jean Paul, who was ten years older than Tieck and four years younger than Schiller, began a description of this race in his so-called "Faustiade," the novel Titan. Jean Paul is in many ways the forerunner of Romanticism; in the Romantic School Hoffmann recalls him to us, as Tieck recalls Goethe. He is a thorough Romanticist in the absolute arbitrariness with which, as an artist, he sets to work. As Auerbach says, he has "in readiness studies of men, moods, traits of character, psychological complications, and miscellaneous imagery, which he introduces at random, adjusting them to given characters or situations." He thrusts all kinds of irrelevant matter into the elastic framework of his story. He is, further, a Romanticist in his absorption in self – for it is himself, always himself, who speaks by the mouth of his characters, whatever they may be; in the famous humour which with him lords it over all else, respecting none of the conventions of style; and, finally, in the fact that he is the antipodes of classical culture. But, whatever he may have been in art, in life he was not the defender of lawlessness, but the ardent champion of liberty, Fichte's equal in enthusiastic persistence. He was neither the foe of enlightenment, nor of reason, nor of the Reformation, nor of the Revolution; he was convinced of the historical value and the full validity of the ideas which it is the glory of the eighteenth century to have produced and championed. Therefore he uplifted a warning voice against the futile, demoralising fantasticality of the Romanticists.

Titan contains the most powerful of Jean Paul's ideal characters, Roquairol. His strength did not lie in the delineation of ideal characters; he was first and foremost the admirable, realistic idyll-writer.

Roquairol is a prototype of the form in which the age moulded its passion and its despair. He is burning, conscious desire, which develops into fantastic eccentricity, because circumstances have no use for it, and because it does not possess the power to take hold of reality, re-mould it and subject it to itself; it becomes a disease, which strikes inwards and leads to morbid self-contemplation and suicide. Roquairol describes himself in a letter (Titan, iii. Zykel, 88)

"Look at me when I take off my mask! My face twitches convulsively, like the face of a man who has taken poison. I have indeed taken poison; I have swallowed the great poison ball, the ball called Earth… I am like a hollow tree, charred by a fantastic fire. When the worms in the intestines of the Ego – anger, ecstasy, love, and the like – begin to crawl about in me and devour each other, I look down upon them from the height of my Ego, I cut them in pieces as if they were polypi and fasten them into each other. Then I look on at myself looking on. This repeats itself ad infinitum. What is the use of it all? Mine is not the usual idealism, the idealism of faith; mine is an idealism of the heart, peculiar to those who have often experienced all the emotions, on the stage, on paper, or in real life. But of what good is it?.. I often look upon the mountains and the rivers and the ground round about me, and feel as if at any moment they might dissolve and disappear, and I with them… There is in man a callous, bold spirit, which asserts its independence of everything, even of virtue. Man chooses virtue if he will; he is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced a storm at sea, when the raging, foaming waters lashed themselves into great crested billows, while from a calm sky the sun serenely looked on. So be it with you! The heart is the storm, the sky the Ego!.. Do you believe that the authors of tragedies and novels, or at any rate the geniuses among them, who a thousand times over have aped everything human and divine, are different from me? What really sustains them and the others is their hunger for money and renown… The apes are the geniuses amongst the beasts, and geniuses are apes in their æsthetic mimicry, in heartlessness, malignity, sensuality, and – gaiety."

He relates how an inclination which was simply the result of ennui had led him to seduce his friend's sister. "I lost nothing; in me there is no innocence. I gained nothing, for I hate sensual pleasure. The broad black shadow which some call remorse quickly blotted out the fleeting bright picture of the magic-lantern; but is the black worse for the eyes than the bright?"

He who reflects carefully upon even these short extracts from Jean Paul's huge four-volume novel will see how here again a connecting line is drawn between life and art. Without premeditation, but very significantly, Roquairol takes the nature of the productive artist as an image of his own, and the expressions "charred by fantastic fire" and "the idealism of the heart" are as accurate as scientific definitions. There was no doubt in the author's mind as to what it was he wished to delineate. Roquairol, after committing his last and most abominable crime, namely, visiting Linda by night, disguised as his friend and her lover, Albano, is made to die by his own hand on the stage. He is playing a part which ends in suicide, and he shoots himself dead. He lives to the last moment in a world of appearances and make-believe, confusing or blending the real with the imaginary. And this determination to make reality fantastic or poetical is the distinguishing feature of the succeeding generation, the task to which it set itself, the problem which all its productions were attempts to solve. To understand this is to understand and excuse the blunders it makes in its schemes for the remoulding of reality, such a scheme, for instance, as we find in Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde.

The great question of the relation of poetry to life, despair over the deep, bitter discord between them, the unwearied struggle to bring about a reconciliation – this is what lies at the foundation of the whole of German literature from the Sturm und Drang period to the death of Romanticism. In order, therefore, to understand Lucinde, as well as Lovell, it is necessary to look back. We understand both better by the help of Jean Paul's Titan. Lovell's predecessor is the Titan Roquairol, Lucinde's the Titaness Linda.