Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, and Novalis
John O’Meara
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In my book, The Way of Novalis, I put forward the view that “Schlegel’s novel [Lucinde] reads like a romantic parody of Novalis’s case in an impressively paradoxical way” (Preface, xvi), by which I meant, by “Novalis’s case,” the whole of the complex, grief-stricken life he had inherited. Among other things, I made the point that the relationship Schlegel’s novel paints in the case of its hero Julius and his beloved Lucinde, who are but thinly veiled if significantly displaced versions of Schlegel and his newly beloved Dorothea, “in its depths of fulfilled life … parallels the happy life Novalis had anticipated with his Sophie but was suddenly denied by her death.” Schlegel, as Novalis’s close friend, was much impressed by this death, at once personally sympathetic to Novalis in his grief, while at the same time strangely envious of the fate he had inherited. This last had put Novalis in touch with profound realities far beyond the oppressively uneventful life Schlegel continued to have, not having yet met Dorothea. Two months after Sophie’s death in a letter to Novalis, Schlegel put it this way:
You cannot believe how completely and closely I am with you, and how completely I can enter into your present state of mind. But I assure you that I could often feel envious to have had such a loss myself. You cannot believe how oppressively I feel that emptiness that shall perhaps remain (167)
At this point Schlegel was about two months away from meeting Dorothea. He began Lucinde a year or so into his new relationship. A little before that, Novalis had launched into his Hymns. Lucinde would be published just about the same time Novalis completed the Hymns, though they would not be published till several months after that, in the journal Schlegel had created and was now editing.
My purpose here is not to enter into a more elaborate presentation of the details of Schlegel’s novel, but rather to offer further clarifications of my point of view on how Schlegel will have intended it. Clearly in the quite emphatic, even deliberately challenging, sensuality Julius boasts of them, (the running term in our text is “voluptuousness”), Schlegel’s lovers divagate widely from Novalis and his Sophie, whose relationship takes on a decidedly more purely spiritual cast though there is a certain sensual basis also to this relationship, which Novalis would have acknowledged, for his intention was after all to marry Sophie, and not to go into religious seclusion with her.1 In my book, I duly acknowledge these differences in the comparative representation of the two sets of lovers. At the same time, there is no doubt that the novel is celebrating in its lovers, at great length, what Julius quite rightly describes as “the religion of love” (49) that bears its influence in them (here the novel draws on a long tradition of a “religion of love,” with its own frankly sensual dimension, to be found in European literature generally2). Of special note, however, is what Julius makes of a dream he has had on learning that Lucinde has contracted an illness that shows serious signs of being fatal: “no longer dangerous but hopeless” (115) or so he suspects, from the sense of it he has received on several fronts. This episode takes place towards the end of the novel, more than three quarters of the way through, and may thus be thought as offering a crucial focus for our judgment of this novel’s world The dream, as Julius stands by his beloved’s grave, is a virtual re-make of Novalis’s own experience when at Sophie’s grave:
I stood silent and alone and saw nothing but the features I loved … your pale face smiling its last in a final slumber … Only your holy eyes remained in the vacant space and hung there motionless like the friendly stars glimmering forever on our misery … a piercing pain
1 We find Novalis, also, decidedly struggling with the relics of his sensual impulses after Sophie’s death, impulses which he yet characteristically masters. See The Way of Novalis, 29-30.
2 Petrarch, who virtually inaugurates the tradition, being the classic case of this.
from dark suns burned me with unbearable brilliance, now a beautiful luminosity hovered and flowed as if to lure me on …
I looked at your picture and saw it transfigured more and more into a serene purity … completely you and yet no longer you … like the terrifying light of visible omnipotence, the next a friendly gleam of golden childhood …
(115-117)
Here is Novalis in the third part of the Hymns:
Once when I was shedding tears, when dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound … then … came a shiver of twilight … the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit … and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed … Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years … (40)3
Julius’s dream closely parallels the pattern of Novalis’s experience in still other respects. Novalis’s thought of following Sophia into death (a very complex thought) is overcome4; he returns to the world (Schlegel had been instrumental in bringing him back), though only to feel there his separateness from everything all the more. Julius’s dream goes the same route:
I was already rushing to follow you …
However,
3 With the last part of this quote compare Julius: “This image stayed with me ineradicably … suddenly these different memories would become confused. Their outlines changed incredibly quickly, resumed their previous shape, and changed again until everything vanished… Only your holy eyes remained…” (115-116)
4 See The Way, 31-34.
The duty to live had won, and I was once again in the turmoil of human life … Then a feeling of terror overcame me, like that of a man finding himself suddenly alone in the middle of an immeasurable waste[land]… (116)
There are indications in Schlegel’s text also of an awareness of the creative fruitfulness of illness such as one may experience from the effects of grief, as Novalis experienced this overwhelmingly when he took up residence at Teplitz.5 Schlegel’s hero draws out the larger value of such an experience from his own illness at this time:
I was ill and suffered a great deal, but I loved my illness and even welcomed pain … I was feeling and seeing the eternal discord through which all things come into being and exist, and the lovely forms of peaceful creation seemed to me dead, and trivial in comparsion to this … unending struggle and strife down to the furthest depths of existence. (116-117)
As I put it in my book :
Thus even while enjoying his own good fortune [I am assuming here that the situation between Julius and Lucinde refects that of Schlegel and Dorothea] Schlegel cannot help but turn his thoughts, almost enviously, to the fate that his closest friend is living through, as if somehow it held the deeper and more far-reaching truth about the meaning of our human lot.6
5 See my account of Novalis’s experience of this in The Way, 91-93. As for Novalis brought into the world and his own ongoing experience there of separateness/difference, see, notably, the transition from the chapter “A New Ongoing Project” to “Novalis Brought into the World,” The Way, 40-46.
6 See, Preface, xvi Novalis’s words to Schlegel about the grandeur of his experience would have reinforced the impression: “What a heavenly event her death has been a key to everything a wonderful forward step of destiny … My love has become a flame that consumes everything that’s merely earthly…” Cited in The Way, 27.
In coming to a point of view on Schlegel’s efforts with his novel, we do well to keep in mind the actual chronology of developments in the lives of Schlegel and Novalis at this time. Novalis’s Sophie dies in March of 1797; Schlegel is closely involved in Novalis’s tragedy, and would have continued to bear the impression of that event. Four months later Schlegel meets and takes up with Dorothea, and comes into the fulfilled life Novalis has been denied. The large differences between these two couples notwithstanding, mutatis mutandi, Schlegel could not have helped having Novalis’s case in mind when, a year later, he commences work on Lucinde. No doubt he wished to offer a work that would serve as a celebration of the romantic love he now shared with Dorothea. However, in imagining Lucinde’s “death” along with Julius, as we have seen Schlegel acknowledges a point of view that clearly undercuts the basis of his romantic narrative as the celebration of a fulfilled life. Lucinde’s “death” is a decisive intervention in Schlegel’s narrative, and it leads us to wonder to what extent an undercutting of his romantic theme enters Schlegel’s presentation as a whole. Reading more closely, one begins to appreciate just how much critical irony, in the best sense Schlegel would have intended this, seeps into his narrative, in fact, from the start. With the tragedy of Novalis’s life so strongly in the picture, any romantic narrative on the fulfilled life offered by Schlegel at this point could only have turned out a parody of itself. It is, more precisely, in this sense that I intended the view that Schlegel’s novel “reads as a romantic parody of Novalis’s life ”7
This novel’s quite peculiar narrative situation, in fact, played only too happily into Schlegel’s highly elaborate, already highly developed, and quite ideosyncratic sense of the “irony” he would make famous. The editor of our text has it just right where, expounding on the point of view underlying Schlegel’s characteristic irony, he says:
7 Here we might bear in mind further that at the time Lucinde was published Schlegel was on the verge of himself publishing Novalis’s great Hymns, which build so productively on his experience of Sophie’s death Schlegel may, indeed, already have been privy to Novalis’s writing when the latter part of Lucinde was being composed.
Only the ironic attitude enabled man to commit himself wholly to finite reality and at the same time made him realize that the finite is trivial when viewed from the perspective of eternity. (30)
The following statement from Julius about the life he has come into with Lucinde, in this respect, strikes the keynote of this narrative:
This is marriage … not simply for what we call this world or the world beyond death, but for the one true, indivisible, nameless, unending world, for our whole eternal life and being. (48)
At the same time, Julius’s account of such a “marriage” can only land him in irony and paradox in Schlegel’s strictest sense, for, as Julius/Schlegel puts it, “Man’s spirit is his own Proteus: it transforms itself and won’t account for itself when it comes to grip with itself” (104) This “irony” seeps as far as the whole sensual basis of the romantic life that is “celebrated” here:
What’s the point of all these allusions that I won’t say play but conflict nonsensically, with incomprehensible comprehension, at the heart of sensuality and not just its border? (121).
Characteristically again, no answer to this question is offered, because none is finally possible.
This leads us, further, to the very peculiar “ironic” basis of the narration in this novel, which at some point confounds Julius in Schlegel and Schlegel in Julius: his narrative shows Schlegel, in the end, in fact happily confounded in himself (“happily” inasmuch as he would have thought this true to reality). In my book I refer to Julius, somewhat shorthandedly, as this novel’s “narrator” (xvi), which in a sense he is, for it is he who, for the larger part, narrates, on their behalf, the story of these lovers; it is he who also articulates virtually the whole of the substance and import of their love. But he is not the only narrator; at some point, he is confounded in a speaker whom we can take to be Schlegel and yet it is not Schlegel, it is Julius. I am calling attention here to two substantial sections of the novel in
particular: “A Reflection” and “Dalliance of the Imagination.” These sections are so intensely philosophical in their idiom (along the lines of Schlegel’s writings in his Fragments) as to be pretty clearly beyond the scope of Julius’s own mind, and yet they are attributed to him: it is he who is technically speaking here. It is, in fact, the voice of Schlegel himself “ironically” displaced. There is, at the same time, yet another implied narrator in this novel, for Julius communicates the life of these lovers in a purely epistolary fashion, through the letters and notes he writes Lucinde. These letters, as well as a few dramatized scenes between the lovers, point to the additional collating presence of an “editor,” who yet never speaks for himself, though he does make an appearance in two places in what is the technical role of an omniscient “narrator,” as where he narrates the story of Julius’s life and history of love-affairs before the latter meets Lucinde, in the section “Apprenticeship for Manhood.” (As an omniscient narrator, he also nowhere intrudes or comments on this life, the story of which comes across as Julius reviewing the matter with himself.) This is a far more typical narrative procedure which would seem to be additionally intended by Schlegel as “irony.” It is himself, in addition, ironically playing the usual narrative role that would be expected to account for the disparate forms (letters and speeches) in which the action of the novel is conveyed. Decidedly there is a highly protean shiftiness to this narrative’s presentation that reflects Schlegel’s highly peculiar sense of the “irony” of human existence as such. It is what explains how he can be at once there in the material he presents and at the same time not there, a matter of being and not being at one and the same time. Although for all intents and purposes, it is Julius’s narration of this romance that we are getting in this novel, Schlegel is yet indirectly (or, in quite the peculiar way representative of him, “ironically”) present in everything that is being (and not being) finally conveyed …
Works Cited
Novalis. Hymns to the Night and Spiritual Songs. Tr., George Macdonald. Kent UK: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2010.
O’Meara, John. The Way of Novalis: An Exposition on the Process of His Achievement. Ottawa: HcP Ottawa, 2014.
Schlegel, Friedrich. Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Lucinde’ and the Fragments. Tr. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971.