Tales of Wonder
and Tales of Terror
An Examination of
Folk Ballad’s Influence on
The Development
and Expression of English and German Romanticism
“Unmoved by the scornful neglect
of its sovereigns and nobles,
and encouraged by the tide of native
genius, which flowed in
upon the nation, German
literature began to assume a new,
interesting, and highly
impressive character, to which it became
impossible for strangers to shut
their eyes. That it exhibited the
faults of exaggeration and false
taste, almost inseparable from the
first attempts at the heroic and
at the pathetic, cannot be denied.”
– Sir Walter Scott
“Essay
on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad”
Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border
Justin Chen
Literature Senior Essay
Advisor: Professor Cyrus Hamlin
Submitted Friday, April 11, 2003
For Cyrus Hamlin
Contents
I. Introduction
II. Herder and the ballad revival
III. Simultaneous rejection of and fascination with the supernaturalin England
IV. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The reluctant Romantics
V. Goethe and Lewis’s adaptations of the ballad tradition
VI. Incorporation of the ballad within Faust and The Monk
VII. Last remarks
Bibliography
Appendices (not included in this online version)
(Wordsworth)
Lenore (Bürger)
Lucy Gray (Wordsworth)
Der Erlkönig (Goethe, tr. Scott)
Die Braut von Korinth (Goethe)
The Water-King (Danish, tr. Lewis)
Alonzo the Brave, and Fair Imogine (Lewis)
I. Introduction
“Tales
of enchantments and witchcraft can never be useful,” declares Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in his 1797 Critical Review critique of Matthew Lewis’s
controversial romance, The Monk (Gamer 77). Yet Coleridge and fellow
Englishman William Wordsworth went on in 1798 to co-author—anonymously, of
course—a collection of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads that was,
curiously enough, very much concerned with the “tales of enchantments and
witchcraft” that he had deemed so utterly useless. This inconsistency, while
notable, is not entirely surprising given the literary mood in England toward
the turn of the 19th century. Critics still caught up in the
epistolary and social realist works popular among the leading writers of the
day wanted nothing to do with stories involving themes of supernatural, which
they viewed as “unwanted German importations” (Gamer 144). And despite his
attempts to distance himself from the growing popularity of romances and
supernatural dramas, even Coleridge himself was susceptible to attack, as
evidenced by an 1800 Monthly Review article about his translation of
Schiller’s Wallenstein advising him to be “less faithful to his German
source” (Gamer 145).
But just
what was it about the “German” that so
frightened literary critics in England? And more importantly, how is it that
this officially reviled Continental movement was nonetheless able to transform
the very face of English literature and directly influence the production of
the Lyrical Ballads, a collection which in many ways embodies the
very essence of the English Romantic project in the eyes of modern readers?
This essay will attempt to trace the revival of interest in folk ballads that
began in Germany during the mid-18th century and to explore the role
of these ballads in shaping the development of both German and English
Romanticism. Specifically, I will examine how the goal of deriving poetic
inspiration from the simplicity of nature and folk language influenced the
thinking of major English writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and I will
also discuss how the reception of Lewis’s The Monk characterized the
general attitude in England regarding the supernatural ballads associated with
“vulgar” German tastes.
In
the major portion of the essay that remains, I will then attempt to define some
of the primary characteristics of the ballad’s influence on Romanticism,
including a fascination with death and morbidity, the idea of solitude as a
means of accessing the supernatural realm, and the spatial motif of travel or
distance. The major poems that I will consider for this purpose are Gottfried
August Bürger’s Lenore, Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray and Hart-Leap
Well, and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The next section
of the essay will be devoted to a discussion of Johann Wilhelm von Goethe and Lewis, two figures in different
countries who I see as sharing certain motivations and inspirations regarding
Romanticism and the supernatural or folk ballad. By analyzing some of these two
writers’ original poems, including Goethe’s Erlkönig and Die Braut
von Korinth and Lewis’s The Gay Gold Ring, I hope to demonstrate how
some of the folk-balladic themes that emerge from a comparison of Bürger,
Wordsworth, and Coleridge are adapted by other writers in their imitations of
ballads in the ancient style.
Finally,
I will discuss Goethe and Lewis’s incorporation of their own original ballads
within longer fictional works that are not primarily balladic in composition.
First, I will discuss how the insertion of The Water-King and Alonzo
the Brave into Lewis’s The Monk helps to both clarify the role of
ballad as it was adapted for the literary works of the period in general and to
augment the reader’s understanding of Lewis’s romance in particular. I will
conclude the essay by analyzing Goethe’s use of the König in Thule and Gretchen
am Spinnrade ballads within his quintessential Romantic drama, Faust.
Ultimately, I will argue that the folk ballad first embraced in Germany during
the mid-1700s would go on to play a central and exciting role in European
literature well into the next century.
II. Herder and the ballad revival
The
European movement toward reviving a literature based on a folk sensibility
first emerged in Germany, where “the popular ballad had come to figure in some
of the more momentous chapters of late eighteenth- and nineteenth century
thought, largely as a result of the exalted construction put upon balladry by
Herder” (Friedman 248). As Friedman suggests here, the German Romantic
philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder was a vitally central figure in the
late-18th century revival of interest in the folk ballad as an art
form that will later influence the writing of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe,
and Hoffmann, among others. Indeed, in Auszug Aus Einem Briefwechsel Über
Ossian und die Lieder Alter Volker, Herder writes, “In mehr als einer
Provinz sind mir Volkslieder, Provinziallieder, Bauerlieder bekannt, die an
Lebhaftigkeit und Rhythmus und Naivetät und Stärke der Sprache viele derselben
gewiss nichts nachgeben würden” (Herder 222). Here, Herder implies that it is
only within the rustic music of the countryside that he can find language and
poetry that is alive, rhythmic, and naïvely powerful.
“Nur wer ist,” he
goes on to question, “der sie sammle, der sich um sie bekümmre, sich um Lieder
des Volks bekümmre, auf Strassen und Gassen und Fischmärkten, im ingelehrten
Rundgesange des Landvolks, um Lieder, die oft nicht skandiert und oft schlecht
gereimt sind?” (Herder 222). Thus, it is clear that Herder feels he is alone in
his task of descending into the “Strassen und Gassen und Fischmärkten” to find
these pure lyrical expressions. As Georg Scholz confirms in Die
Balladendichtung der deutschen Frühromantik, Herder is “der Begruender der
ersten Ballade in Deutschland. Er dichtet Schauerballaden im besseren Sinne”
(Scholz 132).
Herder’s unique
impulse to look to traditional German folk sources for poetic inspiration has
been described as an “enthusiasm for the uncultivated” (Friedman 248), and his
motivation for such a pursuit can be traced to a desire to “reform German
poetry, whose chief weakness lay in its supine acceptance of a subordinate
position in the empire of French letters” (Friedman 248). Herder’s project,
then, supposes an opposition between the innocent and unfettered expression of
naïve folk wisdom and what he feels is an artificial, obscuring formality
imposed upon literature by the French school. He expresses a distaste for this
sort of literary formality when he writes, “Je entfernter von künstlicher,
wissenschaftlicher Denkart, Sprache und
Letternart das Volk ist, desto weniger müssen auch seine Lieder fürs Papier
gemacht und tote Letternverse sein” (Herder 198). Sir Walter Scott summarizes
the importance of this movement away from literary formality in his “Essay on
Imitations of the Ancient Ballad” that appears as a preface to his 1802
collection entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border: “This
emancipation from the rules so servilely adhered to by the French school of
poetry, particularly by their dramatic poets, although it was attended with
some disadvantages, especially the risk of extravagance and bombast, was the
means of giving free scope to the genius of Goethe, Schiller, and others, which,
thus relieved from shackles, was not long in soaring to the highest pitch of
poetic sublimity” (Scott, Minstrelsy xliii). On Scott’s view, then, the
ballad revival was the single greatest influence on the literary production of
the central German writers of the Romantic period.
Beyond
the complicating influence of this more theoretical desire to reject French
Letters, Herder also possesses a basic appreciation for the folk poem’s innate
qualities. His love of folk ballad and other traditional verse forms is
especially evident in the Briefwechsel Über Ossian. “Vom Lyrischen, vom
Lebendigen und gleichsam Tanzmässigen des Gesanges, von lebendiger Gegenwart
der Bilder…vom Gange der Melodie und von hundert andern Sachen, die zur
lebendigen Welt, zum Spruch- und Nationalliede gehören und mit diesem
verschwinden—davon, und davon allein hängt das Wesen, der Zweck, die ganze
wundertätige Kraft ab, den diese Lieder haben, die Entzückung, die Triebfeder,
der ewige Erb- und Lustgesang des Volks zu sein!” (Herder 198). In this rather
extensive catalogue of the virtues of folk ballad, Herder places special
emphasis on its natural and musical—that is, uncontrived—qualities. In the
preface to the second part of his 1779 collection, Volkslieder, he
writes, “Es ist wohl nicht zu zweifeln, dass Poesie und insonderheit Lied im
Anfang ganz volksartig, d. i. leicht, einfach, aus Gegenständen und in der
Sprache der Menge sowie der reichen und für alle fühlbaren Natur gewesen”
(Herder 276). Here, Herder again demonstrates a profound interest in the
uncontrived, natural character of folk ballad. It was only in this profound
simplicity, according to Friedman, that Herder could find both “the untrammeled
expression of the Volk” and “the bona fide character of the race”
(Friedman 249).
The strong
emphasis that Herder places on simplicity, on a return to nature and more
rustic inspiration, resonates strongly with the sentiments echoed by Wordsworth
in his Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. “The
principal object then which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to make the
incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not
ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature,” Wordsworth writes. “Low and
rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential
passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their
maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic
language…and lastly, because in that situation the passions of men are
incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” (Wordsworth, Preface
115). Wordsworth strongly echoes Herder’s praise of the folk ballad’s
ability to reject “künstlicher, wissenschaftlicher Denkart” with his own
description of a “plainer, more emphatic language.” Furthermore, Herder’s
emphasis on the centrality of “alle fühlbaren Natur” is matched by Wordsworth’s
own invocation of the “beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”
Herder’s effort to
unearth an eminently native folk voice was mirrored in England by writers like
Thomas Percy in his 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Scott in
his 1802 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Scott was an especially
active proponent of the developing genre, even going so far as to write some
poems of his own in the ancient ballad style. His “Glenfinlas,” “The Eve of St.
John,” “The Fire King,” and “Frederick and Alice” all appeared in Matthew
Lewis’s 1801 compilation Tales of Wonder, poems that his friends
criticized as “injudicious” and which he himself later discredited as “early
German mad productions” (Gamer 174). Scott’s discomfort with the “German”
nature of his early work is demonstrated by the following vow: “Should I ever
again attempt dramatic composition, I would endeavour after the genuine old
English model” (Gamer 174).
A pronounced
late-18th century English aversion to “the German,” clearly evident
in these passages, will be discussed in the next section. Nationalism aside, it
is interesting to consider how Scott’s experimentation with the ancient ballad
form essentially bound him to the movement in Germany, at least in the eyes of
literary critics of the day. It appears that Herder’s efforts to uncover
examples of ballad whose force of expression demonstrated a “Lebhaftigkeit und
Rhythmus und Naivetät und Stärke der Sprache”—in Friedman’s words, an
“untrammeled expression of the folk”—were realized in England, but that such
impulses were rejected as “mad” mistakes. The fact that such mistakes were made
at all, however, demonstrates that both England and Germany were ready for the
appeal to naïveté and nature that, so signification characterize the Romantic
project.
III. Simultaneous rejection of
and fascination with the supernatural in England
The
stage was set for a literary revolution in late-18th century
England. The satirical social realism that characterized the output of writers
such as Alexander Pope and John Swift, along with the epistolary format that
was championed by Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole, both symbolized a strong
impulse to defend and uphold high literary standards against the rising tide of
“middle-class” values and tastes. Yet by the end of the 18th
century, the strong interest in folk ballad and its attendant themes of the
supernatural had already completed its domination of the German literary scene,
and the revolutionary arc was already sweeping across the Channel toward
England.
The crystallizing
moment for this crossover arguably came in the form of the 1796 printing of
Matthew G. Lewis’s extraordinarily controversial gothic novel, The Monk.
An anonymous first edition of the work “received fairly favorable reviews, and
sold well enough for a second edition” (Gamer 74). Unfortunately, that second
version revealed the author’s title as “M.G. Lewis, Esq., M.P.,” a conceit that
provoked a firestorm of disapproval from the public, especially satirists and
clergy, many of whom “immediately joined in calling for the book’s suppression
for its supposed obscenity and blasphemy, sometimes even reversing their own
previous positive reviews of the book” (Gamer 74).
It is not entirely
surprising that The Monk would be so vehemently rejected by the
religious and literary authorities of the day due to the conflict between
Lewis’s position in the clergy and his deployment of gothic themes in the
novel, including borderline sacrilegious images of infernal pacts, the occult
arts, and renunciation of religion as a means of achieving immoral goals. What
did turn out to be particularly striking about The Monk’s reception in
England was in fact the overwhelmingly positive response that it generated
within the populace at large. Indeed, over 30 years after the publication of The
Monk, Scott’s 1830 “Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad” primarily
recalled the hysteria surrounding The Monk’s English reception (Scott, Minstrelsy
li-liv). And by 1800, The Monk was available in five English and two
Irish editions, as well as “numerous pirated chapbooks, stage adaptations, and
parodies” (Gamer 75). Clearly, there was a market among English readers at the turn
of the 19th century for the themes that the clergy especially was so
quick to condemn.
The intense
ambivalence toward Lewis’s novel was indicative of the changing mood in English
literature as it slowly reacted to the development of a more concrete Frühromantik
on the Continent. Indeed, many readers and critics in England immediately
looked to Germany as the source of The Monk’s unusual and
provocative gothic style, “encouraged by Lewis’s own invitation and by The
Monk’s nearly contemporaneous publication with three separate translations
of Bürger’s [1773 gothic poem] Lenore—by Poet Laureate Henry James Pye,
J. T. Stanley, and W. R. Spencer—in March of 1796” (Gamer 76). Germany was thus
increasingly being equated with gothic literature—an urge strong enough to
surface even 40 years later in the person of Lewis’s first biographer, Margaret
Baron Wilson. As Michael Gamer observes in Romanticism and the Gothic,
“Wilson had desired so strongly to identify as German the ‘overstrained
sentiments’ and ‘tales of most thrilling horror’ of The Monk and Castle
Spectre that she posited Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1779) as the primary inspiration for Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
(1764), thereby reversing time itself to give all supernatural fiction
and drama a German origin” (Gamer 78-9). The conflicted reception of The
Monk in many ways typified a peculiarly English hesitancy to embrace the
first tremors of Romanticism simply because of its apparently Germanic roots.
But just what was
it about the new form of writing that the English ruling hierarchy found so
objectionable? On a superficial level, “critics increasingly labeled Gothic
dramas like Lewis’s as unwanted German ‘importations,’ and therefore as
culturally invasive, morally corrupting, and politically Jacobin” (Gamer
144-5). In an 1801 letter to George Ellis, Sir Walter Scott referred to gothic
fiction as a “Germanized brat” (Gamer 206). And as Gamer observes, “German
drama, reviewers repeatedly proclaimed, was an admirable thing—so long as it stayed
in Germany on the German stage, and in the German language” (Gamer 148).
These accusations
indicate a striking defensive cultural nationalism that is strongly linked to
the literary mood of mid-18th century England, which as we have
already seen was dominated by the social realist novel and the desire to stem
the “rising tide of middle-class values and tastes.” Indeed, Lewis was not the
only prominent writer to receive criticisms for succumbing to “the German”—an
article in The Critical Review described Coleridge’s Rime of the
Ancient Mariner as having “more the extravagance of a mad German poet than
the simplicity of our ancient ballad writers” (Hutchinson xvii, xx). As
Friedman puts it, “The German stigma was immediately fastened on all
supernatural fabling” (Friedman 286).
Interestingly, the
nationalism evident in English criticism of “the German” bears some resemblance
to the nationalistic folk-celebrating impulses that led Herder to begin
collecting German folk ballads in the first place. Perhaps England’s circle of
literary critics felt threatened by the pre-Romantic movement toward simplicity
and transparency in verse, an impulse which was widely viewed as essentially
Germanic in origin, and disguised its discomfort by denouncing all of German culture
as “low” and “corrupt.” Yet this sort of categorical rejection on nationalistic
or cultural grounds seems to serve merely as a front for a more profound
initial English discomfort with the fundamental tenets of Romanticism. For one
thing, the accusation that Lewis’s works were “politically Jacobin” suggests
that Herder’s celebration of the lives and songs of simple country folk
represented a sort of French Revolution-era populism that was completely
repugnant to the English sensibility—a conclusion supported by the Anti-Jacobin
Society’s condemnation of German drama as “morally and politically subversive”
(Gamer 148). The English poet Joanna Baillie blasted the ballad form in
general, stating that drama should not reach “the lowest classes of the labouring
people, who are the broad foundation of society, which can never be generally
moved without endangering every thing that is constructed upon it, and who are
our potent and formidable ballad readers “ (Gamer 129). Yet as Coleridge
himself notes in reference to the alleged tie between German authors and the
French Revolution, the reality was that leading German literary figures
including “Klopstock, Goethe, Wieland, and Schiller had drawn back in horror at
the news of the terror” (Gamer 146).
Criticisms of
populism aside, English literary critics also expressed a revulsion to the sort
of “supernatural fabling” which, as Friedman notes, was immediately labeled
with the “German stigma.” The extent to which supernatural themes were seen as
a central component of the gothic and pre-Romantic works of the day can be seen
in a 1797 Monthly Mirror description of Lewis’s gothic style: “The
imagination is hurried away for a moment into the world of spirits, and
all the fictions of the nursery, and the bugbears of romance become
realized;—the illuminated oratory, the aerial music—magical every
note of it,—and the determined silence of the praeter-natural visitant”—
characteristics that the article proclaimed to be “all German” (Gamer
78). While modern readers now recognize these characteristics as vital to the
Romantic project, Coleridge denounced The Monk’s ready intermingling of
religious and supernatural topics in his 1797 Critical Review article:
“The tale is indeed a tale of horror, yet the most painful impression which the
work left in our minds was that of great acquirements and splendid genius
employed to furnish a mormo for children, a poison for youth, and a provocation
for the debauchee. Tales of enchantments and witchcraft can never be useful:
our author has contrived to make them pernicious, by blending, with an
irreverent negligence, all that is most awfully true in religion with all that
is most ridiculously absurd in superstition” (Gamer 77). Coleridge’s conflicted
relationship with the German and the supernatural will be more fully explored
in Part IV below.
The fact that many of the
English criticisms of folk ballad overlap with their objections regarding the
Romantic project in general is important to the task of this essay, insofar as
I hope to demonstrate that the revival of ballad in Germany and England played
a direct and critical role in shaping the works of the writers we know today as
“Romantic.” Indeed, while quintessential Romantics like Wordsworth and
Coleridge were among the most vocal in their condemnation of the German
movement, their poems are unmistakably influenced by the ballad revival, as I
will discuss in the next section. This seeming contradiction is typified by
Scott, who as noted above referred to gothic fiction as a “Germanized brat,”
but who nonetheless possessed “enormous admiration for the German artistic
imitations of the ancient style with their love of supernatural terrors”
(Friedman 287).
IV. Wordsworth and Coleridge:
The reluctant Romantics
Wordsworth
and Coleridge are now largely synonymous with English Romanticism. The poems
that appeared in these two poets’ joint 1798 publication, The Lyrical
Ballads, exemplify many of the central tenets of Romanticism, including
fascination with both nature and the supernatural, as well as a strong emphasis
on narration. Yet both of these poets initially voiced strong objections to the
German pre-Romantic movement, which, as discussed above, many of their English
countrymen also found disturbingly Jacobin in its excesses. In his Preface to
the 1800 version of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth complained, “The
invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of
Shakspeare [sic] and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels,
sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of vile and extravagant stories
in verse” (Owen 117)—a clear expression of distaste for the sorts of emotional
overkill to which certain German poets had fallen victim. Similarly, Coleridge
“stresses gothic’s status as ‘manufacture,’ and finds fault with its ‘gaudy’
and artificial diction, unnatural characterization, extravagant plots, and
obsessive fixation upon readerly stimulation rather than upon moral purpose”
(Gamer 99). The primary charge leveled against the German and the gothic, then,
is that of extravagance.
The revulsion of
the English poets for the emerging German ballad form is summarized by
Wordsworth’s negative reactions to the March 1796 publication of three English
translations of Bürger’s Lenore, a German poem in ballad form about a supernatural
romance. Wordsworth found the poem to be “simplistic and repulsive.” In fact,
“Stephen Parrish, Mary Jacobus, and James Averill have commented on the extent
to which ‘The Idiot Boy’ and other 1798 ballads mock poetry that exploits the
supernatural as a source of stimulation” (Gamer 113). Even some of the formal
elements of “The Idiot Boy” are clearly lifted from the original—Bürger’s “Und
außen, horch! ging’s trapp trapp trapp” (Bürger 97) bears a striking
resemblance to Wordsworth’s “She lifts the knocker, rap, rap, rap” (Wordsworth,
124). And as Gamer points out, “The Idiot Boy” contains a passage that clearly
satirizes Lenore, “with Johnny’s ride a pointed deflation of Lenore’s
midnight gallop to her grave with her skeleton bridegroom” (Gamer 113).
While
Wordsworth satirizes the German gothic ballad, he also expresses a profound
admiration for the traits of folk ballad that characterize much of German
pre-Romanticism. As discussed in Section II above, Wordsworth, like Herder,
places unusual store in the simple and natural feeling intrinsic to the folk
ballad. Indeed, he argues that “the metre of the old ballads is very artless”
(128), and he goes on to explain how this artlessness demonstrates poetry’s
power to “divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to
throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole
composition,” so that “more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those
which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in
metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose” (Owen 127-8).
Combined with his appeals to folk speech’s “simple and unbelabored
expressions,” which arise “out of repeated experience and regular feeling,” and
which he feels represent “a more permanent, and a far more philosophical
language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets” (Owen
115), it becomes clear that Wordsworth admires many of the formal features of
folk ballad. After all, it is not insignificant that the title of such a
seminal work should be “Lyrical Ballads” rather than the simpler “Lyrical
Poems.”
But far more
important than Wordsworth and Coleridge’s explicitly voiced praise of the
formal advantages of folk-balladic language is their implicit yet undeniable
appreciation for the fundamental concerns of the German pre-Romantic movement,
an appreciation that is evident throughout the Lyrical Ballads, despite
both poets’ best attempts to deny any such affinity. Along with a celebration
of the twin powers of nature and naïveté, which are thoroughly emphasized
throughout the Preface, many of the poems in this critical turn-of-the-century
poetic work directly concern the least acceptable of Romanticism’s themes, at
least in the eyes of English literary society—namely, the supernatural. In his
essay entitled Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History, Geoffrey
Hartman confirms the English Romantics’ hypocritical engagement of supernatural
themes when he writes, “Wordsworth’s new ballad [The Danish Boy]…is
still a ghost story, like so many traditional ballads or even Coleridge’s Ancient
Mariner” (Hartman 188). Hartman also describes the figure of the
Danish boy as “neither quite alive nor dead” (Hartman 183)—certainly a
supernatural gesture on Wordsworth’s part—and he goes on to suggest that
Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray” raises similar issues of questionable mortality.
When read in
juxtaposition with Coleridge’s grim pronouncement that “tales of enchantments
and witchcraft can never be useful,” Hartman’s conclusion—that Rime of the
Ancient Mariner is, at its core, a ghost story—seems oddly jarring. Yet it
is just this paradoxical dual impulse regarding the supernatural, as
exemplified by the uproar over Lewis’s The Monk, which in many ways
characterizes the English reception of the Gothic. Indeed, James Averill has
noted “that in the production of the second volume [of the Lyrical Ballads]
Wordsworth became increasingly uneasy about his own predilection for
sensational subject matter” (Gamer 122)—that is, he found the supernatural
material with which he flirted compelling enough to write about, but he also
retained an instinctual aversion to it.
Such conflicted
reactions to the supernatural project introduced by German ballad collectors
such as Herder or poets such as Bürger suggest that the folk ballad did far
more than simply impress the nascent English Romantic movement with its use of
simple language and nature imagery. It also became English literature’s most
powerful introduction to the darker, superstitious side of folk legend, a
largely fundamental characteristic of the ballad revival that prominent poets
of the day were quick to condemn as “corrupt,” but which nevertheless
ultimately found its way into their own writing. Indeed, Gamer writes, “The Lyrical
Ballads began in the company of the very ‘idle and extravagant tales in
verse’ that its Preface would later deride and dismiss” (Gamer 94). Thus,
despite Wordsworth and Coleridge’s publicly avowed distaste for the project of
the German folk ballad, it seems clear that they were both deeply influenced by
it as well. It would be naïve to ignore the connection that must exist between
the 1796 appearance of the Lenore translations and the two publications
of the Lyrical Ballads.
While examples of
both the sentimental feeling and the invocation of supernatural that are
derived from folk-balladic sources abound in Wordsworth’s poetry, I would like
to focus on a close comparison of a particular poem of his—Hart-Leap Well—and
Bürger’s Lenore, two poems that I feel strongly demonstrate the
characteristics of English and German Romanticism with which this essay is
concerned. I would then like to make use of the themes established from this
critical comparison to consider how another of Wordsworth’s poems, Lucy Gray,
as well as Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner both provide evidence
that those themes are crucial for later imitators of the folk ballad form, as
well as for the Romantic project in general.
Hart-Leap Well
was published in 1800—two years after the first printing of the Lyrical
Ballads. One interesting similarity between this poem and Lenore is
the theme of riding—of the distance between particular locations established in
the text. Lenore’s “midnight gallop,” which is parodied by Wordsworth’s Idiot
Boy, seems in some significant way to represent the dual function of the
riding theme. First, it ties humans to the natural world through an animal
mediator; second, it has a distancing effect, making the fantastical events
that take place seem to exist in a remote relation with the “real world.”
The fanciful
creation of alternate supernatural realms is an extremely common theme in what
we now consider archetypal Romantic works. Indeed, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der
Goldne Topf largely concerns itself with Anselmus’s attempts to transcend
his mundane student’s existence and enter the gloriously utopian realm of
artistic harmony and unfallen language presided over by Salamander Lindhorst.
In an even more striking instance of the emphasis on supernatural distance seen
in Lenore, Der Goldne Topf’s Veronica must travel to a wild heath to consult with Old Lizzie, an evil
witch who promises to help her win her beloved Anselmus’ affections. Hoffmann
strongly emphasizes the perilous conditions of Veronica’s journey to access the
supernatural arts. Similarly, even before the wildly imaginative second part of
Goethe’s Faust, in which all ties to reality seem extraordinarily
tenuous at best, there are clear demarcations between the regular and the
supernatural realms. The “Witch’s Kitchen” or “Walpurgis Night” scenes
are both good examples of the sort of alternate reality that characterizes most
Romantic poetry.
In Lenore, the disconnect between
worlds is represented by the ghostly Wilhelm’s stern explanation to his doomed
bride: “Der Rappe scharrt; es klirrt der Sporn. Ich darf allhier nicht hausen.
/ Komm, schürze, spring und schwinge dich / Auf meinen Rappen hinter mich! / Muß
heut noch hundert Meilen / Mit dir ins Brautbett eilen” (Bürger 122-8). Lenore
complains about the great distance they must travel and asks, “Sag an, wo ist
dein Kämmerlein? / Wo? Wie dein Hochzeitbettchen?”—to which Wilhelm replies,
“Weit, weit von hier!—Still, kühl und klein!” (Bürger 137-9). Beyond the morbid
innuendo of this passage, one is struck by the repeated emphasis on distance
and incompatibility between the worlds—Lenore’s and Wilhelm’s, the “real” and
the supernatural, life and death.
Hart-Leap Well
sets up a similar dichotomy of realms. We are informed that Sir Walter takes
“his best Steed” (Wordsworth, Hart 6) for his hunting trip, and that
these two soon outpace the rest of his party. The old shepherd in the second
half of the poem gives a rough sense of the distance the knight has traveled
when he says, “For thirteen hours he ran a desperate race” (Hart-Leap 155). Yet
regardless of the exact distance (the “100 miles” figure quoted in Lenore seems
somewhat unnecessary), the more important point is that the reader has entered
an entirely new world. The “darling spot” with which the knight soon becomes
enamored possesses a strikingly different nature from the rest of the scenery,
firstly because of its distinction as the final resting spot for the slain
deer, and secondly because of the attention and praise that Sir Walter showers
upon it. This sense of distinction is strengthened in “Part Second,” where we
learn that the dell has become ruined over time—“The trees were grey, with
neither arms nor head; / Half wasted the square mound of tawny green”
(Wordsworth, Hart 119-120)—and that “the spot is curst” (Wordsworth, Hart
134). As in Lenore or other Romantic works, then, Wordsworth’s poem
features the existence of a separate and largely inaccessible world primarily
under the sway of supernatural influences.
A
theme that runs largely parallel to this sense of supernatural worlds is that
of isolation or loneliness—a mood that is strongly evident in Hart-Leap Well.
Indeed, variations of the word “doleful” appear three times throughout the
course of the poem to describe the mood, and the narrator stresses that “Sir
Walter and the Hart are left alone” (Wordsworth, Hart 28) during the
course of the chase. In fact, after the knight succeeds in killing the hart,
the narrator says, “He had no follower, dog, nor man, nor boy: / He neither
cracked his whip, nor blew his horn” (Wordsworth, Hart 334-5). This
sense of intense silence and isolation is later transferred from the knight to
the glade itself, when the shepherd observes, “There’s neither dog nor heifer,
horse nor sheep, / Will wet his lips within that cup of stone” (Wordsworth, Hart
143-4). The theme of aloneness and isolation contributes to the supernatural
feeling of the poem, and it also establishes a vivid image that seems unique to
Romanticism in general—that of man alone in nature.
In
Lenore, the title character is not so physically alone as is Sir Walter
in Hart-Leap Well. Much of the first part of the poem is devoted to
describing Lenore’s conversations with her mother concerning her despair over
Wilhelm’s death. Nonetheless, there is a deeper sense in which Lenore is
isolated from others. Her rejection of all earthly things betrays this inner
solitude: “O Mutter, Mutter! Hin ist hin! / Nun fahre Welt und alles hin! / Bei
Gott ist kein Erbarmen” (Bürger 37-9). And while this theme is not explicitly
developed in Lenore, it is absolutely critical to longer works
like Goethe’s Faust or Byron’s Manfred, in which the protagonists
make their most crucial decisions alone—whether it be in an isolated study or a
mountaintop. How can this desire for isolation be reconciled with both the
project of the folk ballad revival and Romanticism in general? One possibility
is that the concern among both of these movements for encounters with the
natural and the supernatural worlds is essentially an impulse away from a
literary view of man as a social creature and toward a more intimate
understanding of man’s interaction with nature on an individual level. In fact,
Faust and Manfred both essentially begin with a fundamental
rejection by the great Romantic protagonists of the society of men and an
embrace of the more primeval powers of nature and the supernatural. Such a
rejection of more sociological concerns fits into the literary movement in
England (described in the previous section) away from social realist novels and toward more fanciful Romantic works.
The last theme
that I would like to outline here is an obsession with death. In “Hart-Leap
Well,” the shepherd informs us, “Some say that here a murder has been done, /
And blood cries out for blood: but, for my part, / I’ve guessed, when I’ve been
sitting in the sun, / That it was all for that unhappy Hart” (Wordsworth, Hart
147-50). Indeed, the macabre feeling that pervades the poem lies largely in the
fact that the glen derives its charms for Sir Walter from the gruesome death
that took place there. Wordsworth is quick to maintain that his intent is not
to tell a ghost story: “The moving accident is not my trade; / To freeze the
blood I have no ready arts” (Wordsworth, Hart 97-8). Yet these words
belie the fascination with death that this poem readily conveys, and
ultimately, the reader must recognize within Wordsworth’s haunting strains—last
few stanzas about God notwithstanding—an impulse toward the supernatural
similar to the one that guided Bürger.
Indeed, by the end
of Lenore, the title character seems to have taken on just the sort of
Wordsworthian aspect that Hartman refers to as “neither quite alive nor
dead”—as the narrator informs us, “Lenorens Herz, mit Beben, / Rang zwischen
Tod und Leben” (Bürger 247-8). Beyond the blending of life and death in the
physical form of the title character, there is an interesting progression in
her reaction toward the dead in general throughout the course of the poem.
Wilhelm questions Lenore three times, “Graut Liebchen auch vor Toten?” The
first time, Lenore replies, “Ach nein!—Doch laß die Toten!” A little while
later, after much riding, he poses the question again, and she replies, “Ach!
Laß sie ruhn, die Toten!” After yet more intense riding, the crucial question
is posed a third and final time, and she cries out in anguish, “O weh! Laß ruhn
die Toten!” The progression evident in Lenore’s emotional state is interesting
because the question “Graut Liebchen auch vor Toten?” seems to refer not just
to their band of unearthly riders, but indeed to Wilhelm himself, and her
increasing discomfiture seems to reflect a steadily mounting regret over the
zeal with which she yearned for the return of her deceased betrothed. This
downward trend is neatly summarized by the first phrase that appears in each of
Lenore’s responses—first “Ach nein,” then just “Ach!”, and finally “O weh!” By
the final passionate cry of woe, it is evident that Lenore realizes her mistake
and repents of her wish to consort with the dead.
This interesting
interplay of life and death, and its attendant implication of the possibility
of life after death, in some ways parallels the themes of mortality and
resurrection raised in Wordsworth’s Hart-Leap Well. The shepherd’s decree that “blood cries out
for blood” is phrased in very contractual terms—i.e., actions have
consequences, even beyond the grave. Similarly, Wilhelm’s abduction of Lenore
seems to suggest that even despite an untimely death, the marriage vows must
still be honored. This notion will be explored in further detail in the
discussion if Coleridge’s Rime below.
The three themes
that emerge from a critical juxtaposition of the English “Hart-Leap Well” and
the German Lenore— solitude, the creation of a supernatural world
separated by physical or metaphorical distance, and a fascination with the
notion of life after death—can be seen in another of Wordsworth’s lyrical
ballads, Lucy Gray. Again, the theme of the journey—of physical or
emotional travel—is strongly evident in this poem. Lucy’s father instructs her,
“To-night will be a stormy night— / You to the town must go; / And take a
lantern, Child, to light / Your mother through the snow” (Wordsworth, Lucy
Gray 13-16). Although it is unclear why a child is being sent through a
storm to fetch her mother, the stage for an eerie occurrence is once more set,
stormy backdrop to a lengthy journey and all. The only component that seems to
be missing is a horse. Of course, Lucy ends up disappearing—“the sweet face of
Lucy Gray / Will never more be seen” (Wordsworth, Lucy Gray 11-12)—just
as in Hart-Leap Well, “horse and man are vanished, one and all”
(Wordsworth, Heart 15) and in Lenore the title character is, by
implication, swallowed up by the wild ghostly dance that concludes the macabre
tale.
The theme of
solitude is also strongly evident here. In fact, the poem’s full title is
actually “Lucy Gray: Or, Solitude.” The narrator spends much of the
introduction describing Lucy’s lonely existence: “I chanced to see at break of
day / The solitary child. / No mate, no comrade Lucy knew” (Wordsworth, Lucy
Gray 3-5). Even after death, Lucy’s shade “sings a solitary song / That
whistles in the wind” (Wordsworth, Lucy Gray 63-4). As discussed above,
solitude is not a theme unto itself, but instead seems to provide the backdrop
against which man can interact with nature (or the supernatural) on the most
basic level, without the complications that inevitably accompany the presence
of other people.
Finally, the theme
of life after death is of course central to “Lucy Gray.” As Hartman points out,
the presence of a ghostly image who still haunts “the lonesome wild” (Lucy Gray
60) is emblematic of the ambiguous distinction between life and death found in
many of the Romantic ballads. In fact, the narrator informs us, “Some maintain
that to this day / She is a living child” (Wordsworth, Lucy Gray 57-8).
Whether or not Lucy’s spirit takes on a corporeal form while haunting the
heath, there is a strong sense that she retains the very same sense of purpose
that she possessed while still alive: “O’er rough and smooth she trips along, /
And never looks behind; / And sings a solitary song / That whistles in the
wind” (Wordsworth, Lucy Gray 61-4). The image presented to the reader is
one of a child still heading off to a distant town to fetch her mother. Like
the unfortunate deer in Hart-Leap Well or Wilhelm’s skeleton in Lenore,
Lucy’s spirit has unfinished business on earth that forbids it from attaining
final rest.
To conclude this
section on the “reluctant Romantics,” I would like to focus on the major work
of Coleridge’s published in the Lyrical Ballads, namely The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner. Just as Lucy Gray provided a neat summary of
the characteristics of the Romantic ballad that were observed from a comparison
of Lenore and Hart-Leap Well, Coleridge’s Rime
demonstrates similar affinities to the Romantic project from a different poetic
perspective.
First, a feeling
of solitude is almost palpable in Coleridge’s poem. The unfortunate wandering
figure who narrates the story says of his own plight, “Alone, alone, all all
alone / Alone on the wide wide Sea; / And Christ would take no pity on / My
soul in agony” (Coleridge 224-7). Furthermore, in retrospectively describing
the horrors of his experiences on the ship, the mariner cries out, “O
Wedding-guest! this soul hath been / Alone on a wide wide sea / So lonely
’twas, that God himself / Scarce seemed there to be” (Coleridge 630-3). While
Coleridge uses this feeling of absolute abandonment—even by God—primarily to
advance the poem’s strongly Christian message, it also serves to emphasizes the
absolute absence of other normal human characters which, as we have seen in the
previous examples, is necessary for an understanding of man’s interaction with
the natural and the supernatural worlds.
The strong sense
of isolation evident in these lines conjures up images of Sir Walter in Hart-Leap
Well, all alone with his horse in the enchanted glen. In fact, a closer
comparison of the stories of the ancient mariner and Wordsworth’s knight yields
some interesting parallels. Both characters actively persecute the natural
world, as symbolized by the slaughter of innocent animals, and the result is a
supernatural occurrence. In the case of Wordsworth’s poem, the perpetrator of
the violence against nature is not actively pursued by the spirit of the slain
animal, but there is nevertheless a sense in which some sort of retribution is
required—or, as the mysterious shepherd figure puts it, “blood cries out for
blood.” The theme of a curse is much stronger in Rime because not just
the albatross, but also the dead men’s bodies seem to cry out for vengeance:
“But O! more horrible than that / Is the curse in a dead man’s eye! / Seven
days, seven nights I saw that curse, / And yet I could not die” (Coleridge
251-4).
Second, the motif
of a distance between two separate worlds is well represented within Rime.
The boat on which the ancient mariner travels aligns well with the alternate
realms represented by Lenore’s mysterious and fatal destination or Sir Walter’s
enchanted glen, since it is stranded on the ocean and does not bear any clear
relationship to the world ordinary of men. Indeed, the ship seems almost
suspended in time: “Day after day, day after day, / We stuck, ne breath ne
motion, / As idle as a painted Ship / Upon a painted Ocean” (Coleridge 111-4).
Furthermore, the way in which the mariner returns to the world of the living is
shrouded in mystery. “How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare”
(Coleridge 398-9), he says. After he recovers, he discovers that the boat is
moving and shortly thereafter sees recognizable landmarks. This hazy account
further strengthens the sense of physical and metaphorical separation the
reader feels between the ill-fated ship and the ordinary world.
Finally, like all
of the other works discussed above, Rime also demonstrates a fascination
with the notion of life after death. The most striking manifestation of this
theme is in the character of the ancient mariner himself, whose own mortality
is completely unclear by the poem’s end. His prolonged fainting spell while
still on the ship and then revival once close to recognizable land suggests a
sort of resurrection-after-death experience. Furthermore, the issue of
mortality is complicated by the presence of the ghostly crew with which he must
share the boat: “’Twas night, calm night, the moon was high; / The dead men
stood together. / All stood together on the deck, / For a charnel-dungeon
fitter” (Coleridge 437-40).
Furthermore, the
resurrection imagery is strengthened by continual mentions of Christ throughout
the poem. The mariner depicts the luckless albatross as “a Christian Soul”
(Coleridge 63), and at one point describes a sensation that “the Cross of the
Albatross / About my neck was hung” (Coleridge 137-8). The metonymy between the
albatross and Christ is also developed by one of the two voices that the
mariner hears near the end of his faint: “The spirit who ’bideth by himself
/ In the land of mist and snow, / He
lov’d the bird that lov’d the man / Who shot him with his bow” (Coleridge
407-10). Clearly, the albatross is no ordinary bird, since he apparently feels
some love toward the mariner. The imagery of this description again very much
relates the albatross to a Christ-figure who is brought low by the sinful hand
of mankind.
One last
interesting resonance between Rime and some of the other poems discussed
above is the necessity for life after death as a means of fulfilling some sort
of binding compact. This theme was also seen in Lenore and, to some
extent, in Lucy Gray. Whereas it is the lasting bonds of marriage that
induce the skeleton of her undead lover to whisk the title figure of Bürger’s
poem away into the night, the narrator of Coleridge’s Rime is required
by some mysterious compulsion to repeat his tale to all whom he encounters. As
the mariner puts it, “Since then at an uncertain hour, / Now oftimes and now
fewer, / That anguish comes and makes me tell / My ghastly adventure”
(Coleridge 615-8). The theme of life persisting after death to allow a central
character to fulfill a particular obligation once more proves to be an
important aspect of the Romantic poem.
And that brings me
to the point I am ultimately trying to make, which is not simply that the poems
produced during the time period in question shared a number of strikingly
similar characteristics. Rather, I would argue that the common themes of
isolation, distance between worlds, and the uncertain boundaries between life
and death are all intimately related to one another, and they all stem from a
radically altered way of viewing the world that is very much representative of
the Romantic project. It seems to me that all three themes discussed above can
be linked together by a basic fascination among Romantic poets for the ultimate
journey between worlds—namely, the one that conveys us from life to death.
Mortality is the great unknown destination toward which Lenore is driven by her
ghastly would-be bridegroom, and it is also what characterizes the mysterious
locales of the other poems—Rime’s “charnel-dungeon,” Lucy Gray’s
barren heath, and Hart-Leap Well’s haunted glade. As I will discuss in
the next section on Goethe and Lewis, such weighty concerns very much
characterize the works of later writers who continue the tradition of adopting
both the forms and themes of the supernatural or folk ballad into their own
writing.
V. Goethe and Lewis’s
adaptations of the ballad tradition
Of
all the writers associated with the development of Romanticism, Goethe and
Lewis stand out for their remarkable avidity in collecting ballads and for
their attempts to appropriate the form into their own writing. Indeed, both of
these poets were quite successful in producing their own versions of ballads
patterned after the works in the “ancient style,” thereby instigating a ballad
revival in the truest sense of the phrase. Lewis’s 1801 compilation entitled Tales
of Wonder is an excellent example of this dual-pronged project. While he
devotes much of the collection to translations of foreign ballads, both
traditional and contemporary, he also includes original ballads by himself,
Scott, and Bunbury, among others. Similarly, Goethe experimented with the
traditional ballad form by writing Erlkönig in 1782, a poem that proved
an immediate success in Germany.
I
would like to argue that some of the pre-Romantic themes that arose from a
revival of the supernatural folk ballad and that are to be found in the work of
poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge can also clearly be seen in the works of
Goethe and Lewis, two writers who demonstrated a clear interest in creating
ballads in the ancient style. Such a conclusion is first of all evident in some
of the formal features of the poetry of Goethe and Lewis. Through the use of
simple language to describe supernatural occurrences, poems such as Goethe’s Erlkönig
or Lewis’s The Gay Gold Ring attain a folkloric quality that
emphasizes both the narrative and the lyrical components of poetry. The
connection to folk ballad is also strongly evident within the subjects about
which these poets choose to write—namely, untimely death and supernatural
occurrences.
The action of both
poems is primarily described through constant spoken exchanges between the
characters—the knight and the maiden in The Gay Gold Ring, and the
Erl-king, the boy, and his father in Erlkönig. Both Goethe and Lewis
frame this central running dialogue with comments by an external narrative
voice that contextualizes the events of the story for the reader. In The Gay
Gold Ring, the narrator ends the poem with a didactic aphorism about the
importance of keeping one’s vows, while the narrator of Erlkönig speaks
both at the beginning and end of the poem and establishes the setting and the
conclusion of the father’s midnight ride with his child. This meta-narrative
technique of including an external narrator imbues the events that transpire in
each poem with an almost legendary or fable-like feeling, which in turn relates
to the folkloric character of the early-19th century lyrical
ballads.
Yet
the narrative presence does not overwhelm either poem—within Erlkönig,
for instance, one certainly does not get the same strong sense of the poetic
“self” that is evident in some of Goethe’s later hymns. Similarly, The Gay
Gold Ring’s closing platitude appears to reflect the attitude of some
collective voice rather than that of the narrator in particular. The effect of
this incorporation of the storyteller within a broader cultural context once
again emphasizes these ballads’ folk inspirations.
As
suggested above, both poems also possess a strongly lyrical quality. The Gay
Gold Ring, for instance, begins with the maiden’s spirit uttering the
following rhythmic verses: “There is a thing, there is a thing, / Which I fain
would have from thee! / I fain would have thy gay gold ring; / O! warrior, give
it me” (Lewis, Gold Ring 1-4). This insistent appeal repeats itself,
refrain-like, throughout the poem, resulting in an almost singsong quality.
Such close attention to rhythm is also evident in Erlkönig, in which the
verse’s iambic tetrameter is strongly felt almost to the point of a
nursery-rhyme—a simple, childlike quality that is further emphasized by
repetition of certain phrases—i.e., “Mein Vater, mein Vater.”
Sir
Walter Scott, who has already been discussed as a leading figure in the English
ballad revival, clearly pays special attention in his own translation to the
problem of capturing the unique rhythmical qualities of Goethe’s ballad. His
first stanza reads, “O who rides by night thro' the woodland so wild? / It is
the fond father embracing his child; / And close the boy nestles within his
loved arm, / To hold himself fast, and to keep himself warm” (Scott, Erlkönig
1-4). While the first line retains the iambic tetrameter of the German
original, it does so only with the help of additional syllables—11 instead of
9. In fact, Scott’s verses take on an almost “triplet” feel, with three
syllables to each stress—“who rides by / night through the / woodland so / wild?” Similarly,
“It / is the fond / father em- / bracing his / child.
Goethe’s original, on the other hand, has much more of a duplet feeling: “so spät
/ durch Nacht / und Wind.”
Despite such
questionable rhythmic choices, Scott does manage to retain an appropriately
vivid sense of urgency, partly through his repetition of the poetic “O” at the
beginning of all but the last stanza. This driving feeling further emphasizes
the sense of a journey, which as we have seen is so important to other Romantic
ballads such as Hart Leap Well or Lenore. Hartman observes in Wordsworth
and Goethe, “It is as if some passage-trial were taking place: the rider
must run, with the boy in his arms, a gauntlet of ghostly trees” (Hartman 190),
a sentiment that is strongly reminiscent of the theme of travel and
metaphorical or physical distance. Furthermore, Hartman suggests that in Erlkönig,
“the victim lives between two realms, nature and supernatural, reasonableness
and ecstasy” (Hartman 190). This conclusion once again bears a striking
resemblance to the fascination with an ambiguity of life and death found in the
above-mentioned poems.
I
would like to focus on another of Goethe’s ballads, his 1797 Die Braut von
Korinth, which, while less-well explored in the critical literature than Erlkönig,
is nonetheless instructive in viewing the long-term impact of the folk ballad
revival. Firstly, as has been the case for many of the poems discussed so far, Braut
centers around the subject of death and the ambiguity of mortality. The
ghostly paramour who visits the unnamed central male protagonist of the poem
declares, “Wie der Schnee so weiss, / Aber kalt wie Eis/ Ist das Liebchen, das
du dir erwählt” (Goethe, Braut 220-2). The chill of the grave can
already be sensed in this short spoken passage. This bride’s undead nature
becomes all too clear when the two would-be lovers embrace and the narrator
reveals, “Seine Liebeswut / Wärmt ihr stares Blut; / Doch es schlägt kein Herz in ihrer Brust” (Goethe, Braut 234-6).
The invocation of the heart as a symbol of life is similar to that found near
the end of Lenore, at the end of the title figure’s eerie
ride with Wilhelm: “Lenorens Herz, mit Beben, / Rang zwischen Tod und Leben”
(Bürger 247-8).
As
we discovered from comparing the poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Bürger,
the phenomenon of life after death occurs only when a significant task remains
unaccomplished. Just as Wilhelm comes back from beyond the grave in order to
claim his bride, the semi-undead Braut von Korinth returns for the sake of the
marriage bonds that bind her to the young man. As she matter-of-factly informs
him, “Schöner Jüngling! kannst nicht länger leben; / Du versiechest nun an
diesem Ort. / Meine Kette hab’ ich dir gegeben; / Deine Locke nehm’ ich mit mir
fort. / Sieh sie an genau! / Morgen bist du grau, / Und nur braun erscheinst du
wieder dort” (Goethe, Braut 293-305). In this case, there is an exchange
of physical tokens that seems to symbolize a sort of unbreakable commitment
that death cannot annul.
Just as there is a
strong sense of futile but eternal life after death in the ending of Lucy
Gray, where Lucy’s ghost is forced to wander in perpetual search of her
mother, or in Rime, where the narrator must unceasingly tell his story, Braut
von Korinth suggests that the Braut’s ghost has been forced
to wander the earth: “Aus dem Grabe werd’ ich ausgetrieben, / Noch zu suchen
das vermißte Gut, / Noch den schon verlornen Mann zu lieben / Und zu saugen
seines Herzens Blut” (Goethe, Braut 286-9). This sense of fatality is
heightened by the implication that no alternative to the young man’s death
exists, because, according to the Bride herself, “Dieser Jüngling war mir erst
versprochen” (Goethe, Braut 279). Thus, promises made in life must be
kept even in death.
Another
theme in Braut that bears a striking resemblance to the poems discussed
in part IV above is the sense of separation between realms or worlds. “Ferne
bleib, o Jüngling! bleibe stehen,” the ghostly bride commands. “Ich gehöre
nicht den Freuden an” (Goethe, Braut 50-1). The notion that the undead
are incompatible with the world of the living occurs repeatedly in Coleridge’s Rime,
in which the central narrator figure is doomed never to enjoy the company of
men; in Goethe’s Erlkönig, in which the child is torn between the realm
of fantasy and reality and is eventually destroyed by his inability to reside
in one or the other; and in Bürger’s Lenore, in which Wilhelm informs
his living love, “Ich darf allhier nicht hausen” (Bürger 124). The distance
between incompatible worlds in Braut, as in these three examples, is not
physical but metaphorical.
One
last point to make about Braut concerns its interesting treatment of
religion. Whereas Bürger adopted a much more traditional Christian stance in Lenore—“Mit
Gott im Himmel hadre nicht! / Des Leibes bist du ledig; / Gott sei der Seele
gnädig!—Goethe consciously distances himself from Christianity in Braut.
Regarding the religion of her own former household the ghost of the Bride
states, “Und der alten Götter bunt Gewimmel / Hat sogleich das stille Haus
geleert. / Unsichtbar wird Einer nur im Himmel / Und ein Heiland wird am Kreuz
verehrt; / Opefer fallen hier, / Weder Lamm noch Stier, / Aber Menschenopfer
unerhört” (Goethe, Braut 57-63). Furthermore, the Bride informs her
mother at the poem’s end, “Wenn der Funke sprüht / Wenn die Asche glüht, /
Eilen wir den alten Göttern zu” (Goethe, Braut 304-6). Goethe’s clear
reference to an older pantheistic very much begs the question of religion as it
relates to the supernatural. The treatment of Christianity within this
particular poem—or in fact any of the larger Romantic works discussed in this
essay, including Faust, The Monk, Rime, and Manfred—could
easily provide the basis for another very involved and fascinating essay. I
merely mention it here in passing in order to point out this potentially rich
area of study.
Like
Goethe, Matthew Lewis also concerned himself with imitations of folk ballads.
As discussed above, his Tales of Wonder compilation contains a number of
translations of folk lyric, as well as several of his own experiments with the
form based on popular legends. One of each—an original and a translation—make
their way into his longer narrative piece, The Monk, and the
implications of this incorporation will be discussed in section VI below. I’d
like to focus now on another of Lewis’s original ballads, The Gay Gold Ring,
which, like Goethe’s Braut, highlights some of the central points of
this essay.
As
in Braut or Lenore, Lewis’s poem concerns itself with a
supernatural or ghostly love affair. The beautiful ghostly visitor who demands
Lord Elmerick’s gold ring, which had been given to him as a token of his
intended marriage to Emmeline, resembles the undead bride of Goethe’s Braut
von Korinth who demands an exchange of physical tokens to ensure the
preservation of a particular union with her betrothed. And indeed, we learn by
the end of the poem that the ghost is none other than the shade of Emmeline
herself, who has died of love and sorrow for another.
Interestingly, Lewis’s poem
shares much of Goethe’s supernatural imagery. While Goethe’s bride describes
herself as “Wie der Schnee so weiss, / Aber kalt wie Eis,” Lewis’s narrator
states, “But soon as by hers his hand was press’d, / Changed to ice was the
heart in his breast; / And his limbs were fetter’d in frozen chains, / And
turn’d to snow was the blood in his veins” (Lewis, Gold Ring 47-50). The
use of the words snow/Schnee and ice/Eis here creates a very specific feeling
for the supernatural situation being described, especially with the repetition
and variation of the cold “S” sound in surrounding words like “weiss,” “press’d,”
and “breast.”
Another
similarity in the two works is the almost moralizing tone of their conclusions.
Lewis ends The Gay Gold Ring with the following aphorism: “Damsels!
Damsels! Mark aright / The doleful tale I sing! / Keep your vows, and heed your
plight, / And go to no warrior’s tent by night, / To ask for a gay gold ring”
(Lewis, Gold Ring 205-9). Near the end of Braut von Korinth, the
ghostly woman declares, “Mutter, habt Ihr doch das Wort gebrochen, /
Weil ein fremd, ein falsch Gelüd’ Euch band! / Doch kein Gott erhört, / Wenn
die Mutter schwört, / Zu versagen ihrer Tochter Hand” (Goethe, Braut 281-5).
The emphasis in both of these passages seems to lie on the vital importance of
keeping one’s word, and again reminds the reader of the frenetic devotion to
marital vows that permits the possibility of life after death.
VI. Incorporation of the ballad
within Faust and The Monk
As we have seen,
Goethe and Lewis both wrote some of their most important poems in the folk or
supernatural style. Yet another factor in my decision to select those two poets
in particular for a critical analysis was the fact that they both also
incorporate certain of their own original ballads into their longer works,
which are not primarily balladic in composition. In his romance The Monk,
the critical and popular reception of which in England has already been
discussed, Lewis manages to insert two ballads: one that he wrote himself, Alonzo
the Brave and Fair Imogine, as well as one that he translated from the
Danish entitled The Water-King. Goethe also made use of two ballads,
both originals: Der König in Thule and an untitled ballad that Gretchen
speaks while sitting at her spinning wheel.
The fragment of Faust
Part I, in which both those ballads can be found, was printed in 1790, six
years before the printing of Lewis’s The Monk—and indeed, although Lewis
is credited for having provided Byron with an oral translation of Faust,
there is no evidence that Goethe also knew Lewis’s work (Boyd 162). Thus, both Faust
and The Monk can be seen as independent yet somehow comparable
products of a particular literary age that was very much influenced by both the
folk sentiment and the fascination with the supernatural that were adapted from
the ballad tradition.
The Water-King is
the first ballad to appear in The Monk, and Lewis acknowledges it as a
“fragment of an original Danish Ballad” (Lewis, The Monk Advertisement).
Both The Water-King and Alonzo the Brave also find their way into
Lewis’s Tales of Wonder collection, though the former is a translation
from the Danish, while the latter is an original ballad composed by Lewis in
imitation of the ancient style. Like The Gay Gold Ring, another of
Lewis’s poems that was discussed above, The Water-King ends with a
rather pedestrian aphorism—“Warned by this Tale, ye Damsels fair, / To whom you
give your love beware! / Believe not every handsome Knight, / And dance not
with the Water-Spright!” (Lewis, Water-King 77-80). Thus, one could
argue that in Water-King, as in Lenore or The Gay Gold Ring,
the moralizing tone from an anonymous third-person narrator with which the
poem ends symbolizes a collective folk consciousness that once again places the
poem squarely within the domain of the folk ballad.
Yet as the poem’s
title implies, the subject at hand in The Water-King is thematically
much more closely allied with Goethe’s Erlkönig. Indeed, both the poem’s
rhythmical, exclamatory language and the themes of abduction and untimely death
appear almost exactly adapted from Erlkönig, a poem which Lewis actually
translated and included in Tales of Wonder. Lewis’s translation of Erlkönig
is similar to Scott’s in its persistent repetition of the Romantic exclamation,
“Oh!,” and this feature can also be found in The Water-King, in which
the word “Oh” is invoked nine times. Lines such as “Oh! Mother! Mother! now
advise” (Lewis, Water-King 9) are strongly reminiscent of lines in
Lewis’s own translation of Erlkönig, such as, “Oh! Father! My
father! and dost thou not hear” (Lewis, Erlkönig 13). All this evidence
strengthens the comparison between Erlkönig and The Water-King.
Also, the constant
back-and-forth of protest and reassurance that comprises much of the dialogue
between the Water-King and the maiden bears a striking resemblance to the
interaction between the boy and his father in Erlkönig. In The
Water-King, the maiden’s protest, “Stop! Stop! my Love!” (Water-King 57),
which occurs three times, mirrors the boy’s repeated expressions of anxiety to
his father. Similarly, the Water-King’s deceptive responses—“Oh! Lay aside your
fears, sweet Heart! / We now have reached the deepest part” (Lewis, Water-King
57-60)—are reminiscent of the almost dismissive tone with which the father
downplays his son’s anxiety: “Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh’ es genau: / Es scheinen
die alten Weiden so grau” (Goethe, Erlkönig 23-24). Finally, within the
maiden’s appeal to the Water-King—“Stop! Stop! my Love For now I see / The
waters rise above my knee” (Lewis, Water-King 53)—one can almost hear
echoes of the young boy saying, “Oh! father! my father! and dost thou not see /
The Erl-King and his daughter are waiting for me?” (Lewis, Erlkönig 21-2).
Finally
The Water-King also exhibits some of the characteristic themes that were
uncovered from the earlier comparison of the Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Bürger
poems, especially that of a separation between worlds. The image of the
innocent maiden riding away to her death with the supernatural Water-King is of
course closely related to the fate of the title character in Bürger’s Lenore—a
poem which, incidentally, also contains the rhythmic “O Mutter, Mutter” figure
that we have now seen in both Erlkönig and The Water-King.
Lenore’s skeletal bride informs her, “Muß heut noch hundert Meilen / Mit dir
ins Brautbett eilen” (Bürger 127-8), a travel invitation of sorts that is
echoed by the Water-King when he says, “Oh! lovely Maiden, go with me!” (Lewis,
Water-King 8). Along with the similarity in physical situations between Lenore
and The Water-King, with both brides being abducted on horseback to
their dooms, the Water-King’s appeal to the maiden to “go with me” is of course
very similar to the Erlkönig’s invitation to the boy—in Lewis’s translation,
“Come, baby, sweet baby, with me go away!” (Lewis, Erlkönig 9).
Alonzo
the Brave, the other ballad that Lewis inserts into The Monk, similarly
possesses many of the characteristics of the folk-influenced lyrical poem. The
strong sense of rhythm that derives partly from repetition and that was
discussed above in the case of Erlkönig is also strongly evident in this
poem in lines such as the following: “The worms, They crept in, and the worms,
They crept out, / And sported his eyes and his temples about” (Lewis, Alonzo
58-9). Interestingly, Lewis’s Alonzo utilizes both the iambic
tetrameter and the 11-syllable triplet pattern evident in his and Scott’s
translations of Erlkönig: “Warrior so / bold, and a / virgin
so / bright” (Lewis, Alonzo 1). Additionally, repetition of the
word “Oh,” while not so pronounced as in The Water-King, is nevertheless
still evident.
Most
interestingly, Alonzo possesses clear connections to many of the poems
discussed above, including Lenore and The Gay Gold Ring, as well
as the legend of the Bleeding Nun, which Lewis includes in The Monk and
describes as a “tradition still credited in many parts of Germany.” He adds, “I
have been told that the ruins of the Castle of Lauenstein, which She is
supposed to haunt, may yet be seen upon the borders of Thuringia” (Lewis, The
Monk Advertisement). The connection to Lenore comes near the poem’s
opening, when Imogine foolishly pledges that if she is ever unfaithful to
Alonzo, his “Ghost at the Marriage may sit by my side, / May tax me with
perjury, claim me as Bride, / and bear me away to the Grave!” (Lewis, Alonzo
19-21). With an oath as suggestive as this one, the reader is perhaps not
so very surprised when Imogine does end up breaking her marriage vows and gets
towed away to her untimely demise. Another striking similarity between Alonzo
and Lenore is the macabre nature of both of their closing scenes—in Alonzo,
Lewis writes, “Dancing round [Alonzo and Imogine] the Spectres are seen: /
Their liquor is blood, and this horrible Stave / They howl: ‘To the health of
Alonzo the Brave, / And his Consort, the False Imogine!” (Lewis, Alonzo 92-5).
Bürger describes the scene thus in Lenore: “Nun tanzten wohl bei
Mondenglanz, / Rundum herum im Kreise, / Die Geister einen Kettentanz, / Und
heulten diese Weise: / ‘Geduld! Geduld! Wenn’s Herz auch bricht! / Mit Gott im
Himmel hadre nicht! / Des Leibes bist du ledig; / Gott sei der Seele gnädig!”
(Bürger 249-56). In both poems, then, the two ill-fated lovers are surrounded
by a whirlwind of dancing spirits who summarize the moral of the poem in a wild
howling chorus.
The
presence of the terrifying stranger at the marriage feast, who of course turns
out to be none other than the deceased Alonzo, bears some resemblance to the
shade of Emmeline in The Gay Gold Ring or the ghostly bride in Braut
von Korinth, insofar as all three of these characters appear
mysteriously back in the land of the living to demand the fulfillment of some
binding oath. The references to the bleeding nun also relate to this
otherworldly need to keep vows even beyond the grave, which we also saw in Rime
of the Ancient Mariner and, to a lesser extent, in Lucy Gray. In
revenge for the unfulfillment of a marriage contract, the Bleeding Nun of
Lewis’s The Monk haunts the castle halls “on the fifth of May of every
fifth year, as soon as the Clock strikes One” (Lewis, The Monk 60). The
Bleeding Nun in fact bears a striking resemblance to the unbidden guest at
Imogine’s wedding, who “uttered no sound; He spoke not, He moved not, / He
looked not around, / But gazed earnestly on the Bride” (Lewis, Alonzo 38-40).
As Lewis describes the Nun, “The Apparition seated herself opposite to me at
the foot of the Bed, and was silent. Her eyes were fixed earnestly upon mine”
(Lewis, The Monk 67).
I
would like to begin my discussion of Goethe’s Faust ballads with the
strongly lyrical poem that Gretchen sings while at the spinning wheel. The
lilting quality of this monologue has made it a popular object for musical
settings, the most famous of which was done by Schubert in 1814. Nonetheless,
according to Cyrus Hamlin’s note in the Norton Critical Edition of Faust,
the poem is not actually a song. Rather, Gretchen “apparently speaks the lines
of this scene, the short, rhymed lines of which intensify and formalize her
emotions” (Goethe, Faust n.94). The tie to Lewis’s poems comes in
Gretchen’s lament, “Wo ich ihn nicht hab’, / Ist mir das Grab, / Die ganze Welt
/ Ist mir vergällt” (Goethe, Faust I.3378-81). Here, Gretchen expresses
a desire to be united with her love even in death, a theme that we have already
seen on numerous occasions in Lewis’s writing.
Gretchen’s
particular word choice also seems influenced by Bürger’s Lenore, in
which the title character repeatedly wails, “O Mutter, Mutter! Hin ist hin!”
(Bürger 37), a phrase that seems to anticipate Gretchen’s plaint, “Meine Ruh’
ist hin” (Goethe, Faust I.3374). The sense that life is meaningless in
the absence of one’s love is further emphasized by Lenore’s lament, “O Mutter!
Was ist Seligkeit? / O Mutter! Was ist Hölle? Bei ihm, bei ihm ist Seligkeit, /
Und ohne Wilhelm Hölle!” (Bürger 81-4). Lenore’s passionate rejection of the
living in favor of the world beyond the grave related to the theme of a
blurring of the line between life and death discussed in reference to the
Wordsworth and Coleridge poems. Gretchen’s version of this complaint, “Wo ich ihn
nicht hab’, / Ist mir das Grab, / Die ganze Welt / Ist mir vergällt,” similarly
conveys a strong sense that whenever Faust is absent, she can neither fulfill
her oaths of love nor remain content with her own solitude. Goethe’s
interpretation of the classical supernatural ballad, of course, displays a
great deal more subtlety than earlier versions. Whereas both Bürger’s Lenore
and Lewis’s Imogine are whisked away to an untimely demise by their undead
husbands, Gretchen is left to suffer through her existential dilemma on her
own.
Also notable
within the Gretchen am Spinnrade ballad is Goethe’s use of the narrative
voice. The constant repetition of personal pronouns, such as in the “Meine Ruh’
ist hin” line, as well as the confessions of erotic desire make it clear that
the reader is being made privy to Gretchen’s most private and heartfelt
feelings. In Schubert’s setting of the poem, this welling of emotion is
emphasized by an insistent crescendo to the line, “Und ach sein Kuß!” (Goethe, Faust
I.3401)—an almost violent exclamation that is certainly the musical climax
of Schubert’s piece, both in terms of dynamics and phrasing, and is immediately
followed by a dramatic grand pause. This line also represents the poetic climax
of the ballad because it comes at the end of a steadily intensifying
progression in Gretchen’s memories of Faust. Though these memories begin
modestly enough with descriptions of Faust’s gait and step, they grow ever more
intimate, eventually culminating in the kiss as a directly physical realization
of erotic desire.
Not only are
Gretchen’s inner emotions expressed to a greater extent here than in previous
ballads, but this is also the first instance thus far of a ballad told from the
first-person point of view. Coleridge’s Rime comes close in that it
centers around the mariner’s first-person retelling of his tale of woe. Yet
even this story is couched within a larger frame narrative in which the mariner
relates his tale of woe to a wedding guest who happens to be in the area.
Coleridge’s narrative technique may be calculated to defend him from attacks by
especially intolerant critics of his day who would not have been willing to
countenance such a supernaturally macabre tale were it to be told strictly in
the first-person, since this would implicate the author to some degree. Perhaps
some of the furor over The Monk arose precisely because Matthew relates
his story almost as though it occurred in contemporary times, rather than
shrouding it in the far more accepted veil of folk ballad and superstition.
Lewis does employ this latter method in Gay Gold Ring and Alonso by
affixing banal platitudes to both poems’ endings as a means of alerting the
readers that the fantastic tale they have just heard belongs in the realm of
fairy tales and folk wisdom rather than to “real life.” By setting Gretchen
am Spinnrade in the first-person, then, Goethe consciously implants all
aspects of the folk ballad directly into the lives of his characters and into
his constructed fictional world.
The other poem
that I would like to discuss from Faust, commonly known as Der König
in Thule, is also sung by Gretchen—but this time not in the first-person.
Both thematically and stylistically, this ballad follows a much more
conventional ballad format than Gretchen am Spinnrade. On the most
superficial level, the theme of death is again strongly evident—especially as
compared to Lewis’s The Gay Gold Ring, in which there is also a
reference to a physical token of Romantic attachment that survives beyond the
grave. This time, however, the lover who lives on remains completely faithful
and is therefore not subject to the ire of any vengeful spirits. Referring to
Goethe’s description of the old king as “gar treu bis an das Grab,” Ernst
Beutler writes in Der König in Thule, “Diese zweite Zeile durcheilt das
ganze Gedicht bis zu seinem Ausgang und gibt schon all seinen Inhalt: die Treue
bis hin zum Tode. Denn auch das Sterben verbindet die Liebenden” (Beutler 21).
That is, death unites the two lovers, just as it does in so many of the other
instances that we have considered above. Both love and death are encapsulated
in the central image of the golden cup, the “feierlich goldenes Symbol treuer
Liebe” (Beutler 13).
Along these lines,
one especially noteworthy feature of König in Thule is its demonstration
of a naturalization of the supernatural that is also evident in several others
of Goethe’s poems. In Erlkönig, for example, the discovery of the
young boy’s death in the last stanza represents the culmination of his
ever-intensifying expressions of fear that a malevolent spirit intends to
forcefully steal him away—fears which his father insists on ascribing to
entirely natural causes. The boy’s passing can be viewed either as a
vindication of the Erlkönig’s actual existence or as a statement about the
ability of the supernatural to exert a very real form of control over the
natural world through the power of the imagination. Similarly, in König in
Thule, we are told that the faithful king “sah [den Becher] stürzen,
trinken / Und sinken tief ins Meer, / Die Augen täten ihm sinken, / Trank nie
einen Tropfen mehr” (Goethe, Faust I.2779-2782). The association that
Goethe sets up here between the king’s death and the goblet’s journey to the
bottom of the sea seems to parallel Erlkönig’s suggestion that physical
events are somehow tied to the supernatural. Beutler writes, “Nur damit noch
einmal die Verbundenheit zwischen Liebessymbol und Liebenden aufleuchtet, wird
von beider Geschick mit dem gleichen Worte berichtet. Der Becher sinkt, und
auch die Augen sinken” (Beutler 24).
Interesting though it is to
explore each of these four ballads as poetic works independent of context, it
is still important to try and deduce Goethe’s and Lewis’s reasons for including
these particular poems within their longer, non-primarily balladic works. This
task represents a culmination of this study insofar as it ties together the
various conclusions and generalizations I have drawn regarding the folk or
supernatural ballad’s influence on the project of Romanticism and examines the
work of two authors widely considered central to the age in question.
Let us begin with
Lewis, whose gothic romance The Monk directly catalyzed much of the
literary upheaval in England during the late-18th century. As
mentioned above, Lewis inserts his own translation of a fragment of a Dutch
ballad called “The Water-King” into his text of The Monk. Raymond’s
page, Theodore, sings the ballad in the hopes of establishing contact with
Raymond’s love, Agnes, should she still survive somewhere within the depths of
the convent. Lewis writes, “[Theodore] chose a Ballad which [Agnes] had taught
him herself in the Castle of Lindenberg: She might possibly catch the sound,
and He hoped to hear her replying to some of the Stanzas” (Lewis, The Monk 117).
Thus, intriguingly, Theodore uses the ballad as a form of communication, a move
that seems to invoke the sense that folk ballad is recognizable and belongs to
a collective cultural sensibility.
“But before I
begin,” Theodore tells the nuns who have assembled to hear him sing, “it is
necessary to inform you, Ladies, that this same Denmark is terribly infested by
Sorcerers, Witches, and Evil Spirits” (Lewis, The Monk 117). Here, the
page sets an eerie supernatural tone intended to heighten the listening experience
of his audience, even though such a narrative tactic is unnecessary given his
secret purpose of attracting Agnes’s attention. By describing the various
malevolent beings that inhabit the land of the Water-King, Theodore very much
takes on the role of Goethe in Der Erlkönig whose tempestuous opening
line, “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?” already prepares the reader
for some sort of frightening encounter. Similarly, Wordsworth prefaces the
second part of his Hart-Leap Well with the following ominous warning:
“The moving accident is not my trade; / To freeze the blood I have no ready
arts. / ’Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, / To pipe a simple song for
thinking hearts” (Wordsworth, Hart 97-100). Like this preface, which
readies the reader for a description of the supernatural while professing to do
the opposite, Theodore’s invocation of “Sorcerers, Witches, and Evil Spirits”
is intended to prepare the imaginations of the gullible nuns who comprise his
audience.
Theodore continues
his prologue by recounting the legend of the “Erl- or Oak-King,” whom he
describes as “an old Man of majestic figure, with a golden Crown and long white
beard” whose “principal amusement is to entice young Children from their
Parents, and as soon as He gets them into his Cave, He tears them into a
thousand pieces.” This conscious invocation of Goethe’s most famous ballad sets
the stage for his introduction of the figure of the Water-King, who “wears the
appearance of a Warrior, and employs himself in luring young Virgins into his
snare” (Lewis, The Monk 117). In a prefatory note to ‘The Erl King’ in
his 1799 volume Apology for Tales of Terror, Sir Walter Scott describes
a number of elemental spirits whose specialty was to lure unsuspecting human
victims to their doom. Scott writes, “One of these is termed the WATER-KING,
another the FIRE-KING, and a third the CLOUD-KING. The Hero of the present
piece is the ERL or OAK-KING—a Fiend who is supposed to dwell in the recesses
of the forest, and thence to issue forth upon the benighted traveller to lure
him to his destruction’ (Scott, Apology 1). This description of the
various elemental spirits, clearly borrowed from Lewis’s Monk, neatly
ties into the Romantic theme already developed before of a distance that
separates the human and supernatural realms. It is not insignificant that
Theodore’s descriptions of the Erl, Water, and Fire kings all revolve around
those characters’ common goal of enticing human victims to their doom.
It
is only after this extensive preamble that Theodore actually launches into his
retelling of The Water-King, a ballad that was analyzed above. Already
we have seen some indication of the reasons behind Lewis’s decision to weave
this otherwise anachronistic bit of folklore into The Monk. Along with
invoking the supernatural tradition to win his audience’s attention, Theodore
also unwittingly narrates a story with a moral that can be applied to the
larger story going on around him. After all, the Monk himself, Ambrosio,
behaves very much like the Water-King with his various female conquests.
Through a combination of winning words and supernatural force, he inadvertently
drags his paramours to their doom. In an interesting inversion, however,
neither Antonia nor Matilda ultimately end up as poorly off as Ambrosio
himself, who spends six days at the end of his life “maimed, helpless, and
despairing, venting his rage in blasphemy and curses, execrating his existence,
yet dreading the arrival of death destined to yield him up to greater torments”
(Lewis, The Monk 176). Thus, it is the aggressor who ultimately gets
carried to his doom in this longer narrative. Ambrosio, of course, is no
elemental spirit—and it is perhaps his all-too-human failure to resist the
temptation of the supernatural that leads him, like the “false Imogine,” to
destruction.
The
other of Lewis’s ballads that I have discussed above, Alonzo the Brave,
is not spoken aloud as The Water-King is. Rather, Antonia comes
across it in “a volume of old Spanish Ballads” (Lewis, The Monk 128) in
her deceased mother’s room. Lewis notes that before stumbling upon this book of
poetry, Antonia is “the prey of Ennui” and filled “with a melancholy awe” at
the desolation of the chamber—“the total silence prevailing through the
chamber, the Bed despoiled of its furniture, the cheerless hearth where stood
an extinguished Lamp, and a few dying Plants in the window” (Lewis, The Monk
128). The feeling of intense solitude that Lewis cultivates in this scene
can be linked directly back to the theme of isolation and its corresponding
access to the supernatural observed in the early Romantic poems discussed in
Section IV above.
Antonia’s
ennui seems to be cured by the Romantic ballads that she comes across, for they
“excited her curiosity” (Lewis, The Monk 128). The poem she reads, of
course, is none other than Alonzo. Yet we also learn that “The perusal of this story was ill-calculated
to dispel Antonia's melancholy” (Lewis, The Monk 130). If anything,
reading about the macabre doom that results from Imogine’s infidelity makes
Antonia only remember the terrors for which she still “nourished a superstitious prejudice in her bosom”
(Lewis, The Monk 130). Clearly, Antonia is susceptible to the flights of
fancy that characterize much of the supernatural ballad project. The theme of
death that was seen in all of the earlier poems is also present here, as Lewis
writes, “It was the dead of night: She was alone, and in the chamber once
occupied by her deceased Mother” (Lewis, The Monk 130). Lewis’s choice
of “dead of night” as a description of the hour takes on a particularly morbid
tone given the frightening circumstances of the room.
Also interesting
to note is the following passage: “The Taper, now burnt down to the socket,
sometimes flaring upwards shot a gleam of light through the room, then sinking
again seemed upon the point of expiring. Antonia's heart throbbed with
agitation” (Lewis, The Monk 130). As in Goethe’s König von Thule,
an ordinary object appears to possess a supernaturally affinity for the deepest
human emotions—in Goethe’s case, love, and in Lewis’s, fear. The agitated
throbbing of Antonia’s heart also conjures up the frightening scene near the
end of Bürger’s gothic poem in which he writes, “Lenorens Herz, mit Beben /
Rang zwischen Tod und Leben” (Bürger 247-8).
As was the case
for The Water-King, the content of Alonzo also proves to be
directly relevant to the larger story itself. The parallels between Imogine’s
ghostly consort and Lenore’s undead groom in Bürger’s poem as well as the
bleeding nun in The Monk have already been discussed above. Also, the Alonzo
ballad seems to prefigure the startling appearance of the ghostly
apparition of Antonia’s mother within her former bedchamber. Lewis writes in The
Monk, “The Figure stopped opposite to the Clock: It raised its right arm,
and pointed to the hour, at the same time looking earnestly upon Antonia”
(Lewis, The Monk 131)—an eerie situation that bears a striking
resemblance to the wedding scene in Alonzo in which the skeletal
bridegroom comes to claim Imogine for himself: “He spoke not, He moved not, /
He looked not around, / But earnestly gazed on the Bride” (Lewis, Alonzo 38-40).
As discussed above, the image of “earnest gazing” is also seen in the legend of
the Bleeding Nun. The feeling of perverse longing that emerges from these
ghostly staring scenes heightens the sense of disconnect between the realms of
the living and the dead—the sense that the spirits of both Alonzo and Antonia’s
mother desire to communicate, but are ultimately unable to in a normal way.
Thus, the two
imitations of folk ballad that Lewis incorporates into his longer prose work
serve a dual function. First, both poems help to establish a supernatural or
gothic mood, which in turn allows Lewis to appeal to an imaginative yearning
for the extraordinary within his audience. Second, they invoke the entire
supernatural and folk ballad tradition to which they pay homage, and
simultaneously conjure up all the attendant themes of solitude, distance
between worlds, and the uncertain distinction between life and death which, as
discussed above, necessarily accompany early-Romantic imitations of folk
ballads. One further observation that can be made regarding poetic interludes
in The Monk is that Lewis does not necessarily attempt to revise the
ballad tradition in any way. Indeed, all four of Lewis’s poems discussed above
appear to be closely modeled after earlier examples of the folk and
supernatural ballads that had emerged from the Continent.
Goethe’s
incorporation of the ballad tradition into Faust contrasts strikingly
with the somewhat more passive technique employed by Lewis. As we have already
seen, both König in Thule and Gretchen am Spinnrade are extremely
musical in their composition. While Theodore does apparently perform The
Water-King as a song for the assembled nuns, that particular ballad does
not have quite the same musical intensity as either of the Goethe poems. And Alonzo,
of course, is not even read aloud, but is simply discovered by Antonia within a
volume of ancient Spanish ballads. The songlike quality of Goethe’s poems—the
repetition of certain key phrases in Gretchen am Spinnrade as well as
the intensely rhythmical verses of König in Thule—further sets them
apart from the rest of the text.
In fact, Beutler
describes the König in Thule ballad as possessing “so viel schwebende
Zartheit, solche Fülle der Empfindung und vor allem so viel Melodik gewonnen,
dass der Dichter selbst es in die Sphäre des erhöht Musikalischen gesteigert
wissen will. Er lässt es singen” (Beutler 13). For Beutler, then, the fact that
Goethe presents the poem as a song is a significant indication of its vitally
musical qualities. Pointing to the similarity in atmosphere and the opposition
of outer and inner spaces reiterated in both halves of the scene he writes, ”Der
zweite Teil der abendlichen Szene, der Gretchen gehört, wiederholt wie in einem
Musikstück alle Themen der ersten” (Beutler 17)—a description that extends the
musical analogy to the scene in its entirety. The insertion of a musical
element into a dramatic work has another precedent in the fourth act of
Shakespeare’s Othello, in which Desdemona sings the Willow Song, which
is also essentially a folk ballad about love and faithfulness. The association
between the two works is strengthened by the fact that Gretchen, like
Desdemona, sings her song while preparing for bed.
Beutler neatly
ties the various manifestations and adaptations of folk ballad discussed in
this essay together when he suggests, “Vielleicht unter dem Einfluss
Shakespeares, im Gedenken an den greisen Dänenkönig in Helsingör oder in
Erinnerung an Herdersche Gespräche über altgermanisches Sagen- und Heldentum
hat sich die Szenerie nach Norden verschoben” (Beutler 12-13). König in
Thule, then, is a clear continuation of the folk balladic tradition that we
have discussed in such great detail thus far. Significantly, just before
Gretchen begins singing, she declares a premonition of heightened unease: “Ich
wollt’, die Mutter käm’ nach Haus. / Mir läuft ein Schauer übern ganzen Leib— /
bin doch ein töricht furchtsam Weib!” (Goethe, Faust I.2756-8).
Gretchen’s inexplicable anxiety is very much reminiscent of the scene in The
Monk in which Antonia reads the volume of Spanish ballads alone in her
mother’s room. Thus, both scenes share a similar sense of isolation and
lateness which, as we have seen in poems such as Lucy Gray or Rime of
the Ancient Mariner, has the effect of introducing a fragile human
character to the possibility of interaction with the supernatural realm.
Beutler suggests
that the significance of the König in Thule ballad lies in its
reinforcement of Gretchen’s innocence and purity. Already, Faust has found
himself rebuffed by the modesty of his would-be lover. “Die Kindlichkeit ihres
Herzens, die Unschuld ihres Seins erfüllt [Faust] ganz,” Beutler writes. “Reue
fast ihn, Reue vor der Tat. Er will fliehen” (Beutler 17). Gretchen’s ballad
about a king who remains faithful to his love until the end further
demonstrates the purity of her inner world. Unfortunately for Antonia, Ambrosio
is seized by no such sense of decency before he drugs and then ravishes her.
His guilt comes only after the fact—“The very excess of his former eagerness to
possess Antonia now contributed to inspire him with disgust; and a secret
impulse made him feel how base and unmanly was the crime which He had just
committed” (Lewis, The Monk 155).
I would take
Beutler’s argument one step further and suggest that Gretchen’s innocence is
highlighted by the ballad’s precise placement within the scene. Faust and
Mephistopheles have just engaged in an argument about Faust’s potential
misdeeds, a discussion whose proximity to Gretchen only serves to emphasize her
complete unawareness and isolation. After the song’s conclusion, Gretchen
discovers the jewelry box that has been deposited by Mephistopheles for the
precise purpose of tempting her, and she once again demonstrates her innocence
in exclaiming, “Was ist das? Gott im Himmel! Schau, / So was hab’ ich mein’
Tage nicht gesehn! / Ein Schmuck! Mit dem könnt’ eine Edelfrau / Am höchsten
Feiertage gehen” (Goethe, Faust I.2790-3). The corrupting influence of
these precious jewels on Gretchen’s otherwise pure character is evident by the
end of her speech, where she rejects “Schönheit” and “junges Blut” and
declares, “Nach Golde drängt, / Am Golde hängt / Doch alles” (Goethe, Faust I.2802-4).
The marked change in Gretchen’s attitude is even more significant when compared
to the König in Thule ballad she just sang, in which the king throws his
goblet—which also happens to be made of precious gold—into the sea as a symbol
of his lasting love. The ballad stands as a symbol of Gretchen’s unpolluted
naïveté before being corrupted by Faust.
Furthermore,
themes of innocence and purity are reinforced by the very medium of the poem
itself. After all, the folk ballad symbolized for both Herder and Wordsworth a
return to nature and a folk sentimentality uncomplicated by human affairs. The
fact that Gretchen recites a poem in this style only serves to heighten her own
separation from Faust’s all-too-ignoble and human machinations. Thus, Goethe’s
insertion of this particular folk-like ballad is carefully calculated to
strengthen the reader’s impression of Gretchen’s purity before Faust ruins her.
Unlike König in
Thule, the Gretchen am Spinnrade ballad is not inserted within a
scene in which unrelated action takes place. Rather, it occupies its very own
scene, a technique that emphasizes Gretchen’s feelings of isolation and
abandonment. Indeed, the stage directions for the scene read, “Gretchen am Spinnrade
allein” (Goethe, Faust pg. 107). As discussed above, the poem is
characterized by a strong narrative voice due to a constant repetition of
personal pronouns. The first-person tone is balanced out by a parallel
repetition of third-person pronouns referring to Faust—“Sein hoher Gang, /
Sein’ edle Gestalt, / Seines Mundes Lächeln, / Seiner Augen Gewalt” (Goethe, Faust
I.3394-7). This narrative technique serves to heighten the inner-outer
dichotomy associated with Gretchen’s formerly innocent world—all mentions of an
“I” are contrasted with outward-moving words like “he” and “his.” Overall,
then, the intense feeling of isolation that Goethe cultivates in this scene
heightens the intensity of Gretchen’s emotion, providing a dramatic backdrop
for her heartfelt expressions of longing for Faust.
Goethe and Lewis,
then, were able to incorporate their own original ballads into longer literary
works, and to take advantage of both the thematic and formal features of this
folk tradition to enhance the story. In The Monk, Lewis invokes the
tradition of the supernatural ghost ballad to create an atmosphere of unease
and anxiety, as well as to provide examples of the penalties of unfaithfulness.
His insertion of the Danish Water-King legend serves as a warning lesson
regarding “knights” with dishonest intentions—in this case, Ambrosio. In Faust,
Goethe uses the folk ballad’s simple format and innocent nuances to cast
Gretchen in a sympathetic light, and he consciously invokes many of the ballad
tradition’s associations with mortality and the binding ties of love to
increase the drama’s thematic complexity.
VII. Last remarks
As I have
attempted to show in this essay, the so-called ballad revival that Herder
pioneered in Germany during the mid-1700s had far-reaching effects on German
and English literature well into the next century. While his contemporaries in
England, including Percy and Scott, also demonstrated an interest in finding
examples of ancient songs and ballads, it was Herder’s championing of the
simple language of nature and the countryside that led to the rejection of
French formality and the means, in Scott’s own words, “of giving free scope to
the genius of Goethe, Schiller, and others.”
While many among
England’s literary elite rejected the German movement as “vulgar” or
“politically Jacobin,” the hugely popular reception of gothic productions such
as Lewis’s The Monk demonstrated that the English populace was largely
receptive to the literature influenced by the ballad revival. Wordsworth and
Coleridge, two of England’s most preeminent literary figures, were among the
first to condemn the “German excess”—yet as I have shown in the “Reluctant
Romantics” section, the writing of both of these poets was indisputably
influenced by many of the themes found in early Romantic writing on the
Continent, as exemplified by Bürger’s gothic ballad, Lenore. Some of the
major themes that I discussed included isolation or solitude as a means of
accessing the natural and supernatural worlds, a spatial or metaphorical
distance between realms, and an obsession with morbidity. Ultimately, I argued,
these three themes all relate to a changing view of mortality and an interest
in the distinctions between life and death.
Finally, I
analyzed a number of ballads written by Goethe and Lewis as representative
writers from Germany and England who were interested in adapting the folk
ballad within their own writing. First I examined ballads by these two authors
that were intended to stand alone, including Goethe’s Braut von Korinth and
Lewis’s The Gay Gold Ring, and discussed how both poems reflected some
of the themes developed during the comparison of Bürger, Wordsworth, and
Coleridge. Finally, I touched upon the issue of both Goethe and Lewis’s
incorporation of their own original ballads into their longer literary works
and discussed how each of these two very important writers was able to make use
of some of the characteristics of the folk ballad discussed above.
I have saved one
last possible interpretation of the importance of the folk ballad in
Romanticism until this concluding paragraph. While I suggested above that the
most significant journey of all was the one that separates life and death, and
I characterized the struggle over mortality as the primary occupation of the
Romantic project, I believe another possibility remains. As the unidentified
narrator of Hoffmann’s Der Goldne Topf puts it at the very end of the
novel, “Is Anselmus’s happiness anything other than life in poetry, where the
holy harmony of all things is revealed as the deepest secret of nature?”
(Hoffmann 83). Perhaps the return to naïveté and a folk sentimentality that
characterized the ballad revival was ultimately tied to this hope in the power
of poetry to let life triumph over death, with the last journey not being the
one to the grave but rather the one to a utopian unity of poetry, nature, and
humanity. This gloriously optimistic hope is what makes Romanticism, for me at
least, so eternally captivating.
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