Novalis (1) (1772–1801)

As German Romanticism isn't my thing I know I'd struggle to read a longer piece by Novalis, so Hymns to the Night was perfect as it's relatively short and rounds off my recent The Blue Flower reading nicely (Novalis wrote this in his grief over his child-fiancée's death).

It's hard not feel for poor Sophie (Novali's muse), as not only did she die an early death at the age of 15, in life she seemed to be entirely vapid and lacking in anything remotely interesting to say. All the more bizarre show more that someone with Novalis' / von Hardenberg's brilliance should fall for this dull little child (and apparently her physical beauty was nothing to write home about either). Here's an extract from her diaries which give you an idea of Sophie's intellect:

March 1. Today Hartenberch visited again nothing happened.
March 11. We were alone today and nothing at all happened.
March 12. Today was like yesterday nothing at all happened.
March 13. Today was repentance day and Hartenb. was here.
March 14. Today Hartenber. was still here he got a letter from his brother.

Scintillating stuff. Anyone, beauty is in the eye of the beholder so they say, and Novalis obviously saw something in the young Sophie that eluded everyone else.

I was delighted to enjoy Hymns to the Night much more than I expected. Given how hard and inexplicably Novalis loved Sophie in life, it was unsurprising that his mourning of her should be nothing short of dramatic despair in the romantic tragedy of it. Yet this account of his pull to the night as he mourns her was nothing short of beautiful. A short mixture of prose and poetry, Novalis describes how in grief he is drawn to the night, when he feels much closer to Sophie through the mysterious spirituality of the darkness than he does in the cold light of day when his loss is most keenly felt. I expect that many who have lost someone close might argue that the night-time is the hardest part of the grieving day, when the sense of loss and isolation is at its most intense, but Novalis finds comfort in the single night-time dream that brought his Sophie once more 'to life', and the keenness of that spirituality which he feels only in the darkness.

Hymns to the Night mixes both religious spiritually with his spiritual sense of Sophie reaching out to him through the stars. It is fatalist writing, with Novalis comforted by his inevitable journey to his grave and the life beyond where love endures and pain is left behind. In the interim (which, bless him, wasn't long to wait), he writes of this heavenly comfort that the night-time brings:

Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my Life, lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable, powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery;--as there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing: then, out of the blue distances -- from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight -- and at once snapt the bond of birth, the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning; the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world.

4 stars - even for non-poetry lovers like myself, this is prose to romantically immerse oneself in. Indulgent reading out loud is mandatory. show less

This brief collection from the works of arch-Romantic Philosoph F.P. von Hardenburg ("Novalis") is more than worthy of attention. Charles Passage provides translations and an introduction for four distinct pieces.

"Hymns to the Night" itself is simply awesome. It consists of six introspective, elegiac and mystical "hymns." Though they were all originally drafted as free verse, their first publication -- reflected in this translation -- had them as a mixture of prose and poetry, with the show more former increasingly giving place to the latter in the progress of the text, so that the sixth alone is entirely in verse. Besides its plain aesthetic value, this text should speak quite strongly to those who have been initiated to the Life Within. Curiously, Passage's translations of the verse are stronger and more lucid than his work with the prose, where the English vocabulary is sometimes a bit off: e.g. "skyey" (9).

The second piece, here entitled "Klingsohr's Fairy Tale," is excerpted from a novel in which Novalis had embedded it, although it was probably first written independently. Passage in his introduction offers a long and rather detailed synopsis of the plot of the fairy tale, which notes I skimmed past at first, thinking that I would rather approach the story without extra editorial baggage. As it turned out, I ended up returning to the summary as a help while reading: the glut of fantastic imagery in the tale is so overwhelming that it is hard to keep track of the course of events. Also, Passage's allegorical reading is not at all tendentious. The story itself is wonderful, telling of a series of adventures leading to the reunion of the heavenly court of Arcturus with the terrestrial household of humanity, and the triumph of Eternity over Time. While it is reminiscent of the Hypnerotomachia and Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, I can easily imagine it as a Hayao Miyazaki movie.

"Christendom or Europe" is an essay attempting dialectical history, with a chiliast resolution. Passage notes how it anticipates Hegel, but it also recalls Joachim of Fiore. Novalis mourns decrepit and dead Catholicism, and he execrates divisive and degrading Protestantism. He looks forward to a "new, enduring Church" with a vision that I found alternately cheering and chilling, but in historical retrospect unfilfilled.

This volume concludes with a "purely random selection" (65) of fifty aphorisms by Novalis. They are indeed a mixed bag, but when he "hits," he does so solidly. "Man is a sun and his senses are his planets" (72). show less

The unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen is Novalis's best-known prose work. He only completed about half of it before his death, but it was intended as the first in a series of at least six major novels in which he would deal in turn with all the arts and sciences.

This first novel in the series deals with the most important art, poetry (i.e. "literature" in modern terms). It is set out as a classic Bildungsroman, a response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, dealing with the poetic show more education of the eponymous hero, the legendary 13th century poet who figures in the story of the Sängerkrieg at the Wartburg, and was sometimes credited with being the author of the Nibelungenlied, but is now generally considered to have been a fictional character.

In any case, Novalis doesn't pretend to be writing a realistic historical novel. Heinrich is moved to become a poet as a result of a dream in which he sees a mysterious, beautiful and unattainable blue flower, and he completes his poetic education in a series of encounters in the course of a journey from Eisenach to Augsburg and a one-day poetry workshop in Augsburg with the ubiquitous and equally legendary Klingsohr. During the coffee-breaks he meets, falls in love with and marries Klingsohr's daughter, Mathilde, who is identified with the blue flower image. Unfortunately, she has a child and dies offstage whilst we are busy with an allegorical story-within-a-story, and as Part Two opens, Heinrich is off on his travels again as a journeyman poet. And that's about as far as Novalis got.

Most of the text is taken up by the interpolated stories, songs and poems that Heinrich picks up in the course of his travels, and the foreground narrative consists of little more than short bridging passages. It's a book to read as a linked short-story collection, really, and each story adds a dimension to Novalis's vision of what literature should be and from where the poet needs to approach it. It's interesting to see how this isn't just a simple attack on the rationalism of the previous century, as we might expect, but a more complex invitation to the potential poet to study and learn as much as he can about the physical world, whilst being open to emotional and metaphysical ways of understanding and reacting to it.

Very interesting, and often also very entertaining (the first lesson Heinrich learns from his fellow travellers on the road to Augsburg is that the poet must be an entertainer), but what strikes you continually as a modern reader is how self-centred, even solipsistic, it all is. The poet isn't really meant to be interested in anyone except himself and his literary predecessors, with the possible exception of his love-object (who is anyway just a blank screen onto which the poet projects his idea of what a love-object should be). show less

More a treatise on poetry than a traditional tale, it has a simplicity of prose yet high mindedness of ideas. How dearly I despair that it was never finished. Yet even an unfinished painting may show beauty and so does Henrich Von OfterDingen