GERMAN ROMANTICS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 877, 25 May 1956, Page 12

GERMAN ROMANTICS

GERMAN ROMANTIC LITERATURE, by Ralph Tymms; Methuen, English price 25 ’-. HEINE, THE NORTH SEA, translated by Vernon Watkins; Faber and Faber, English price 10/6, "W. ITH romanticism," writes Mr. Tymms, "an undying component of German art found its most explicit expression." Few would dissent from this judgment. The subjective, imaginative and idealistic qualities we associate in literature with this. rather unsatisfactory label, appear very early in German writing, and are never far

away even in periods of classical or realist reaction. The golden age of German Romanticism lasted from the end ) of the 18th century to about 1830Heine’s Buch der Lieder was almost its swan-song. So these two new books are both useful auxiliaries to any student of the period: each, in its own way, has the virtues of a fresh Approach to material grown rather shop-worn in the | lecture-room. Mr. Tymms, who is Reader in German in the University of London, is | patient, methodical, seldom eloquent, | but always acute in his examination of the growth of romantic ideas from the Enlightenment and the cult of the Marchen, through the theorising of Tieck and the Schlegels, and the notable practice of Novalis and Brentano, to | Hein’s Atta Troll and the end of the | major romantic impulse. Goethe and Schiller do not appear in this book, except as influences; after an attempt to define the concept of "Romanticism" in German usage, and a most useful chapter on the social background of the period, Mr. Tymms puts the strangely assorted specimens of the avowedly and self-consciously Romantic writers under his microscope, one by one. He is not, unsympathetic-in a notable revindication of Brentano he sets the posthumous Marchen in perspective as major works; he turns thumbs down only on Fougué-but he’ studiously avoids the extfavagant judgments of earlier critics. He has a few fashionable clichés: a favourite word of appreciation, for ex- | ample, is "baroque." But he has .read the philosophers, he does belated jus-_ tice to the importance of Schelling; and he is drily amused by the psychological | and amorous eccentricities of some of | his subjects. ) Heine, whose limpid songs with their bitter-sweet after-taste are so familiar to the merest beginner in German poetry, might seem a curious choice for a fastidious English (or Welsh) poet: but the Heine of the Nordsee cycle is a much bolder and freer versifier than the turner of so many neat, smooth and regrettably hackneyed stanzas. "Adventurous experiments in free rhythms, fresh and breezy,’ Mr. Tymms calls these poems: Mr. Watkins insists rather on their affinity to the unrhymed odes of Goethe. Certainly, his pellucid translation gives them a strange coolness and clarity: the German is often rougher, more uneven in texture. But these are very beautiful poems indeed, in Eng- lish; and the German text is printed beside them for all to check, if so dis-

posed,

James

Bertram