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But we must take care not to be carried too far in our depreciation of German light literature by our indignation at the over-estimate formed of some of its professors. Let us admit that there are admirable authors a fact which it would be impossible to deny with such works before us as Tieck's, and Hoffman's, and a host of others quos nunc perscribere longum est.
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 . This play, in the manner of Tieck's Puss in Boots, attempts to ridicule Kotzebue.
But oh! these solitary meals are the dismallest part of my present experience. When the company rose from table, they all, in my single person, ascended to the study, and employed themselves in reading the article on Oregon in the Democratic Review. Then they plodded onward in the rugged and bewildering depths of Tieck's tale until five o'clock, when, with one accord, they went out to split wood.
For seventeen years he had an influential position as "dramaturg" of the Royal Theatre, it being his duty to pass on plays to be performed and to decide upon suitable actors for the parts. It is pleasant to record that the evening of Tieck's long life was made secure from anxieties by a call to Berlin from Friedrich Wilhelm IV., the "Romantic king."
'What can you expect from a man who to- day is enthusiastic about Gluck's Iphigenia in Tauris, and to- morrow mad about Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia? he said. Tieck's conversation about these and similar topics was much too entertaining and charming for me to give any serious weight to the bitterness of his views.
It is this book which Heine had in mind when he ridiculed Tieck's "silly plunge into medieval naïveté." Overbeck and Cornelius in Rome, with their pre-Raphaelite, old-German and catholicizing tendencies, became the leaders of a productive school. Goethe scourged it for its "mystic-religious" aspirations, and demanded a more vigorous, cheerful and progressive outlook for German painting.
The heavy earth shall press the roots, the moss and bark of every-day life adhere to the stern, the strong boughs with flowers and leaves spread themselves out, whilst the sun of poetry shall shine among them, and show the colors, odor, and singing-birds. But the tree of reality cannot shoot up so soon as that of fancy, like the enchantment in Tieck's "Elves." We must seek our type in nature.
Insupportable as he now was on the stage in his little minor parts, praying them out in the most direful monotony, it was said that formerly, in his younger days, he had been a capital actor, and used to play, for instance, those sly, scampish inn-keepers which, in older times, used to occur in almost every comedy, and over whose total disappearance from the stage the host in Tieck's 'Verkehrter Welt' complains.
If all that I regarded as essentially German had hitherto drawn me with ever-increasing force, and compelled me to its eager pursuit, I here found it suddenly presented to me in the simple outlines of a legend, based upon the old and well-known ballad of 'Tannhauser. True, its elements were already familiar to me from Tieck's version in his Phantasus.
The profound and unanswerable questions put to us by these "children of light" confound us with the sense of our own spiritual and mental darkness. I often think of Tieck's lovely and deep-meaning story of "The Elves."
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