Kuno Francke

“ The eighteenth century is the age of Rationalism and of Romanticism. The eighteenth century glorifies human reason and human feeling. The rights of man and the dignity of man are its principal watchwords. Such an age was bound to see in Faust a representative of true humanity, a champion of freedom, nature, truth. Such an age was bound to see in Faust a symbol of human striving for completeness of life. ”

“ Lessing was the literary Arminius who delivered our theatre from this foreign rule. He showed us the nothingness, the laughableness, the flat and faded folly of those imitations of the French theatre, which were in turn imitated from the Greek. But he became the founder of modern German literature, not only by his criticism, but by his own works of art. This man pursued with enthusiasm and sincerity art, theology, antiquity, and archaeology, the art of poetry, history—all with the same zeal and to the same purpose. ”

“ But when we behold the exteriors of these Gothic cathedrals, these enormous buildings which are wrought so aerially, so finely, delicately, transparently, cut as it were into such open work that one might take them for Brabant lace in marble, then we feel truly the power of that age which could so master stone itself that it seems spectrally transfused with spiritual life, and thus even the hardest material declares Christian spirituality. ”

“ But it is the fourth devil to whom Satan gives the prize. He has not done anything as yet. He has only a plan, but a plan which, if carried out, would put the deeds of all the other devils into the shade—the plan "to snatch from God his favorite." This favorite of God is Faust, "a solitary, brooding youth, renouncing all passion except the passion for truth, entirely living in truth, entirely absorbed in it." To snatch him from God—that would be a victory over which the whole realm of night would rejoice. Satan is enchanted; the war against truth is his element. ”

“ The plots and structures of most of her stories deserve unstinted praise, and delight lovers of artistically organized and well-proportioned novels. And over all her books there plays that symbolistic spirit of neo-romanticism which spreads a veil of beauty even over the ugliness of life.
It is impossible to sum up Ricarda Huch's life and message to our generation in a few sentences. All her books from first to last command our respect. She is not afraid of life as so many old and new romanticists are, nor is she ignorant of it. ”

“ The sea-wind wakes and the wave from sleep,
Her corpse to rock and to hold.
The sea is rising, with passionate arms
There by the canal-bed to cling.
As if the young spouse with his kisses and charms
To beauty new life should bring. ”

“ Architecture had in the Middle Ages the same character as the other arts, as indeed all the manifestations of life then harmonized so marvelously with one another. The tendency to parable shows itself here, as in poetry. When we now enter a Gothic cathedral, we hardly suspect the esoteric sense of its stone symbolism; only a general impression pierces our soul; we realize an elevation of feeling and mortification of the flesh. The interior is a hollow cross, and we wander among the instruments of martyrdom itself ”

“ Only he is wise who knows
The steady gloom to fall
That slowly round him grows,
Severed from all.
In the fog to wander, how queer!
Solitude is life's own.
No man sees the other near,
Each is alone. ”

“ God allows the devil free play, because he knows that he will frustrate his own ends. Faust will be led astray—"man errs while he strives"; but he will not abandon his higher aspirations; through aberration and sin he will find the true way toward which his inner nature instinctively guides him. He will not eat dust. Even in the compact with Mephisto the same ineradicable optimism asserts itself. ”

“ Truly Rome, the Hercules among races, was so thoroughly devoured by Jewish poison that helm and harness fell from its withered limbs, and its imperial war-voice died away into the wailing cadences of monkish prayer and the soft trilling of castrated boys.
But what weakens old age strengthens youth. That spiritualism had a healthy action on the too sound and strong races of the North; the too full-blooded barbarous bodies were spiritualized by Christianity, and European civilization began. ”

“ To the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, Faust appeared as a criminal who sins against the eternal laws of life, as a rebel against holiness who ruins his better self and finally receives the merited reward of his misdeeds. ”

“ I speak of that religion which, by teaching the doctrine of the casting away of all earthly goods and of cultivating a dog-like, abject humility and angelic patience, became the most approved support of despotism. Men have found out the real life and meaning (Wesen) of this religion, and do not now content themselves with promises of supping in Paradise; they know that matter has also its merits, and is not all the devil's, and they now defend the delights of this world, this beautiful garden of God, our inalienable inheritance. ”

“ Were dead and cold. They've found a resting-place:
A bit of earth, a cross. God give them grace!
Sometimes at night when there's a creaking, crashing
And when the whistling winds the yards are thrashing ”

“ In Marlowe's drama Faust appears as a typical man of the Renaissance, as an explorer and adventurer, as a superman craving for extraordinary power, wealth, enjoyment, and worldly eminence. The finer emotions are hardly touched upon. Mephistopheles is the mediæval devil, harsh and grim and fierce, bent on seduction, without any comprehension of human aspirations. Helen of Troy is a she-devil, and becomes the final means of Faust's destruction. Faust's career has hardly an element of true greatness. ”

“ Few works prove more convincingly than Der Oberhof that great literature is neither more nor less than an artistic visualization and faithful reflection of life. The reading of this unassuming "village story," the first of its kind in German literature, warms the heart and stirs the springs of living fancy, simply because it relates in terse and direct language a series of incidents in the lives of very possible and very real human beings. ”

“ Smiling then as children smile in sleep,
Moving still our silent lips we keep,
And the word will, ere it spoken seems,
Fall into oblivion, death in dreams.
Over us the mighty vessels float,
Sails are bright on many a sombre boat. ”

“ It is quite otherwise in Romantic art, in which the wild wanderings of a knight have ever an esoteric meaning, symbolizing perhaps the erring course of life. The dragon whom he overcomes is sin; the almond which from afar casts comforting perfume to the traveler is the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, which are three in one, as shell, fibre, and kernel make one nut. ”

“ Lisbeth, the daughter of Münchhausen and Emerentia, the connecting link between romantic and realistic Germany; and Oswald, the Suabian Count disguised as a hunter, a thoroughly good fellow. But this by no means exhausts the list of pleasing personalities. The good Deacon, who had lost interest in life and faith in men while tutoring a young Swedish Count, and who was made over by his new work among the solid middle class of Westphalia, is a character of real charm; his ideals are humanitarian in the best sense, his wisdom is sound, his help generous. ”

“ They have no day down there, they have no night.
The sand is shimmering green. There planks lie scattered,
A giant mast in livid splinters shattered.
And up from pallid vines rise bubbles whirling—
From vines that evermore are swaying, curling,
Their long and wary tendril-arms unfurling. ”

“ Much more satisfied is Satan with the report of a third devil, who has stolen the first kiss from a young, innocent girl and thereby breathed the flame of desire into her veins; for he has worked evil in the world of spirit, and that means much more and is a much greater triumph for hell than to work evil in the world of bodies. ”

“ Immermann intensely disliked it. He was, as he said, a lover of men; the worship of nature drained and exhausted the sympathies, the wills and the spirits of men. The passages in which Klingsor himself, in his moments of despair, and Merlin expose the emptiness of this philosophy, are among the best philosophic statements of the play. They are, however, too exhaustive. But they are good philosophy, if they are bad drama and poetry. ”

“ But love dispels all fears and doubts, and the good Deacon makes Oswald and Lisbeth man and wife.
Immermann's lifelong attempts at the studied poetizations of traditional, aristocratic, high-flown themes brought him but scant recognition even in his day, and they have since been well-nigh forgotten. But when, one year before his death, he wrote an unpretentious love story taken from the life of simple people whom he met on his daily walks, he thereby assured himself of immortality. ”

“ In the world's history no event is the direct result of another; all events rather exert a mutual influence. It was by no means due only to the Greek scholars who emigrated to Europe after the fall of Byzantium that a love for Grecian culture and the desire to imitate it became so general among us; a similar Protestantism prevailed then in art as well as in life. Leo X., that splendid Medici, was as zealous a Protestant as Luther, and as there was a Latin prose protest in Wittenberg, so they protested poetically in Rome in stone, color, and ottaverime. ”

“ When Homer describes the armor of a hero, it is a good piece of work, worth such and such a number of oxen; but when a monk of the Middle Ages describes in his poems the garments of the Mother of God, one may be sure that by this garb he means as many virtues, and a peculiar significance lies hidden under this holy covering of the immaculate virginity of Maria, who, as her son is the almond-kernel, is naturally sung as the almond-flower. That is the character of the medieval poetry which we call Romantic. ”

“ This image of immaculate beauty which is glorified by maternal love and suffering had the privilege of being made famous by poets and painters, and adorned with all charms of the sense, for it was a magnet which could attract the multitude to the lap of Christianity. ”

“ There are very interesting chapters and passages in these and kindred books, clever studies of human nature, wonderful accounts of epoch-making events, interspersed with lyric effusions and romantic ballads, but, on the whole, we must say that the author has wasted in these works her poetic strength on political themes too big for her grasp — reminding us again of Elizabeth Browning in her Italian period. Nevertheless, Ricarda Huch here as in all her work proves herself a prose writer of fine skill and of an austere beauty of language. ”

“ With these occupants and no more, the castle resembles a harmless home for the insane. But one day Münchhausen, the prince of liars and chief of swindlers, accompanied by his servant, Karl Buttervogel, the Sancho Panza of the story, comes to the castle. His presence enlivens; his interminable stories, through which Immermann satirizes the tendencies of the time, delight at first, then tire, then become intolerable. ”

“ Romantic art had to set forth, or rather signify, the infinite and purely spiritual, and it took refuge in a system of traditional, or rather of parabolistic symbols, as Christ himself had sought to render clear his spiritualistic ideas by all kinds of beautiful parables. Hence the mystical, problematic, marvelous, and transcendental in the artwork of the Middle Ages, in which fantasy makes her most desperate efforts to depict the purely spiritual by means of sensible images, and invents colossal follies, piling Pelion on Ossa and Parsifal on Titurel to attain to heaven. ”