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In him patriotism becomes chauvinism; love, philandering; and his age of chivalry, a thinly veiled and sentimental picture of his own times. The strength and the indigenousness of Arnim are gone, and that power to throw a Romantic glamor over life which Tieck and Hoffmann had, is lacking. Only in his charming fairy-tale, Undine , does Fouqué rise above his milieu.
Ludwig Tieck exclusively devoted himself to the German and romantic Middle Ages, to the Minnesingers, to Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Calderon, and modelled his own on their immortal works. The eyes of his contemporaries were by him first completely opened to the long-misunderstood beauties of the Middle Ages.
His connection with, and influence upon, the Dresden group of romanticists, including Tieck, is a matter of record, and Fouqué looked upon him as a poet of uncommon ability. But let no one on this account believe that Loeben was a great poet and that the silence concerning him is therefore grimly unjust.
It belongs peculiarly to their national genius, some of whose most striking and thrilling conceptions are pervaded with this peculiar form of the sentiment of fear. Hoffman and Tieck are especially powerful in their use of it, and contrive to give a character of vague mystery to simple details of prosaic events and objects, to be found in no other works of fiction.
The Schlegels wrote frosty plays and Tieck attempted dramatic production. It was left for the most bizarre of the Romantic group to write the play of greatest power in it and to set a dramatic fashion which for more than a decade carried all before it.
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. The founders of the Romantic School, Novalis, the two Schlegels, and Tieck, opposed the system which held up the great masters of antiquity as exclusive models of excellence; they condemned this theory as cold and narrow, and opposed alike to the true interests of literature and progress.
"My dear, fanciful Cyprian," Theodore said, "there was no occasion for your vindication of the horrible. We all know how wonderfully great writers have moved men's hearts to their very depths by means of that lever. We have only to think of Shakespeare. Moreover, who knew better how to use it than our own glorious Tieck in many of his tales?
Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too much importance to the romantic school of Germany, Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, and gives to these writers, really gifted as two, at any rate, of them are, an undue prominence.
He was amiable and winning, full of quips and cranks, and with an inexhaustible fund of stories. Astonishing tales of adventure, related with great circumstantiality of detail, and of which he himself was the hero, played an important part in his conversation. Tieck once said he had never known a better improvisatore than Brentano, nor one who could "lie more gracefully."
Here Carlyle completed four volumes of translations from Tieck, Musaeus, and Richter, which were published under the title of "German Romance," and commenced a didactic novel, but burned his manuscript. An introduction from Proctor to Jeffrey led to his becoming a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, his first article, on Jean Paul Richter, appearing in June, 1827.
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