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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
THE ART of interpreting literary works written in German is not an accomplishment for which contemporary literary critics can claim a monopoly; it is an old field, older than formal German literary criticism itself. Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Schiller in his letters about Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe in many reviews, Herder and Lessing in a number of articles produced interpretations of great sensitivity, often using methods that might now be excusably mistaken as modern. Dilthey, Scherer, Haym, and Hehn were also masters in this area, although they themselves might have had different notions about this characterization of their work. There is probably no literary historian of importance who did not address the problem that engages us. To be sure, as a scientific movement with all the usual polemics and the programmatic formulations, interpretation—that is, intrinsic text criticism, the criticism of style—began to assert itself only ten to fifteen years ago. Not until recently has it become clear that the investigator is to be concerned exclusively with the word of the poet and is to attend solely to what is present in language. Biography, for example, is outside the domain of his work. Life is not concerned with art, as Goethe believed and wanted others to believe. Under no circumstances is a poem to be interpreted by the use of biographical data. Similarly, the personality of the poet is also without interest for the philologist who takes his own role seriously; it is psychology that occupies itself with the puzzle of art's occurrence. No less does Geistesgeschichte miss the goal: it surrenders the literary work of art to the philosophers and then only sees what any thinker understands much better than any poet does. The positivist, who inquires about the difference between what is inherited and what is learned, misuses the scientific law of causality and appears to forget that creativity, precisely because it is creative, can never be deduced. Overall, then, the nature and distinctive value of the poetic world are slighted. Only the critic who interprets without looking to the right or to the left and especially not behind the poem does the problem full justice and maintains the integrity of the science of German literary studies.
1 Is this word meant as an archaic term? In its only citation in Grimm's dictionary from the seventeenth century, it refers, together with Lusthaus, -garten, -ort, to the French “maison, lieu de plaisance.” Is it a rendering of the Latin locus amoenus?
2 One should note here the extent to which the form of the circle must have been a symbol of security and balance for this poet, who rounds off everything angular and who remained always in the “narrowness of a purely drawn circle” (Maync 1: 11). In the poem “Die schöne Buche,” many examples of this protective form appear:
In the same way, the beautiful dancer in Corinna appears in a “sisterly dance,” smiling, as an image of measure and contentment within itself:
Not only the verse before the last (which Maync alludes to) recalls “Auf eine Lampe” but also the entire motif of the dance that suffices for itself through the (year)-round.
3 It should be gratefully noted here how Heidegger, with unusual philosophical sensitivity, recognized the philosophical atmosphere in which our poem is at home—notwithstanding Staiger's proof that there is no possibility of Hegel's direct influence.
4 The principle nomina consequentia rerum was valid, it seems to me, as long as it was believed that the Godhead had inserted arcane and deep meaning into the words of human speech and had hidden that meaning from the human eye. But how, in our contemporary “godless” philosophy, is one to uncover or prove objective reference on the basis of linguistic reference? If language is our only “house,” we human beings have unduly anthropomorphized it. … Many philosophical readers of Heidegger have been repeatedly astonished at his use of etymology as a form of thought (and especially at the use of German etymology to derive or assert universal states of affairs). For the philologist, it is amusing to see the usual philosophical network of word games extended to what is philologically dubious….
5 In such cases the specific discipline of the philologist becomes evident in the exclusion of what is not expressed in the text and in the inclusion of resonances with the poet's own words (this has nothing to do with perceiving the “unheard” that Heidegger postulates in respect to poetry). Only long training and that je ne sais quoi known as philological tact can provide even an approximate warrant for such decisions and distinctions. Here the German philologist has much to learn from the English cultural milieu, where to understand means humbly “to stand under something in order to know it,” where understatement is a virtue, and where an open distaste for overinterpretation rules.
6 The reference is to the 1831 Swabian dictionary by Joh. Christoph von Schmid, which characterizes these expressions as customary in Stuttgart and its environs. Cf. also Fischer, Schwäbische Worterbuch, “Du scheinst”: “you are dressed nicely.”
7 Does not Logau (cf. Deutsches Worterbuch, under scho-nen) write in this style?
Fürstin, euer reines schön hat ein fieber jetzt verhöhnet: aber schemes ruhet nur, dasz es nachmals schoner schönet. [Spitzer's emphasis]
Princess, a fever has now mocked your pure beauty: But what is beautiful rests only in order again to be beautiful more beautifully.
8 In this context, the question arises of whether the epithet “golden-green” attributed to the bronze at the border of the marble bowl does not lay the ground for the inner shining (the term would then have a function similar to that of “laughing” in respect to “blissful”). According to the Deutsches Worterbuch, “golden-green” (under entry 2) should be read here as “two-colored, golden and green.” I cannot agree with this reading, however. Why should the color adjective not mean what is proposed under entry 1: “the golden tone is caused by a metallic mirroring shine, as is likely in the fur coats of animals” (as seen in an example from Mörike: “the golden-green lustful snake”)—and why should Mörike, in addition to speaking of animal fur, not also speak of the metallic shine of an ivy wreath reproduced in bronze as “golden-green” as other Romantics or later Romantics do in reference to nature, where “the golden tone … is brought out by the glimmer of a translucent or a striking yellow light.” Cf. also a parallel in Jean Paul's “in the gold-green evening” and in his mention of a “morning-wise, golden-green bower” (Jugendbriefen, ed. R. Krauss, 1: 102). But why should we not be able to find both meanings of the adjective, 1 and 2, in the work of the same poet?
I would also cite the poem “Im Frühling,” where we find the “golden kiss of the sun,” which “enters deep into life's core,” presented at the end as a contrast:
Here, as well, “golden-green” is less than directly experienced—the form-giving, framing, dark element of plant life.
9 It must, of course, be remarked here that Mörike changed the valuation. In Faust ii 5.7403, in accordance with the instruction of Lessing and Schiller and also with La Fontaine's wisdom—“la grâce plus belle que la beautá”—cold beauty, complete within itself, is devalued in favor of the “gay and the joyous,” the graceful, the “charming” (5.7425), that is, beauty that is in motion. For his part, Mörike has in mind a synthesis of the beautiful and the charming: the children's dance depicted on the lamp is beauty in motion, in contrast to the calm of the frame. Accordingly, blending and mediation also occur here.
10 Compare in “Die schöne Buche” the exclamation that follows the description of the tree, before the interpretation of the tree's appearance: “Welch Entzükken!” ‘What a delight!‘
11 Heidegger admirably presented the interpretation of the “yet.”
12 Why should the “son of Horace and a refined Swabian woman” not have presented his ars poetica (softly) in Swabian dialect?
13 Heidegger's “linguistic error” consists in his tearing “ist” out of its concrete context in the “was” clause and then presenting it as contrasting with the “scheint” of the main clause. He did not realize that “ist” forms an inseparable part of the expression “was schön ist,” which in turn has a place in the entire system of similar forms of expression in German (“ailes Schöne” (“everything beautiful”], “was Schönes” [“something beautiful”], “das Schöne” [“the beautiful”]). In other words, he omitted what Charles Bally would call the “dálimination et identification du phánomène linguistique.” A similar mistake would be to claim a contrast in the French sentence “Cela vous semble juste, n'est-ce pas?” [“That seems right to you, doesn't it?”] between “sembler” [“to seem”] and the “est” [“is”] that is absorbed in the expression.
14 The parallel verse from Corinna, “sich selber so zu seliger Geniige” [“toward oneself in blissful self-completion”], shows even more how the voiced s sound becomes symbolic for the poet of the calm that nature tamed by art conveys. But in our poem Morike reduces the rustle of alliterations to merely two, corresponding to the pair of sch sounds.
In the light of this observation, the explanation of “in ihm selbst” becomes clear: “in sich selbst” would have disrupted the alliterative balance According to Behagel (Deutsche Syntax 1: 298), even in dialects like the Allemanic that preserve the older “ihm,” the preposition should call for the more recent “sich” (reflexive pronoun). Thus, special grounds must be sought for Morike's “in ihm selbst.” Beyond the motive of limiting the alliteration, I would mention the resulting objectification: a reflexive “sich,” expressed in the third person in reference to a second person, can readily evoke caring empathy for this person. Our poet entirely removes his general statement about beauty from man; the “beautiful ‘what’” is supposed to appear entirely unanthropomorphic—“in ihm selbst.” (Staiger seems to feel similarly about this but finds in the objectivity a melancholy shading that does not seem warranted.)
15 5The Biedermeier-idyllic quality of our poem would become still more evident in a comparison with Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Theophile Gautier's “L'art.” Everything large-scaled, blatant, or rhetorical that figures in these poems is avoided by Morike; the classical references to eternity and the immortalizing power of the work of art would be contrary to his intentions, as would Gautier's emphasis on the artist's struggle with the recalcitrant material of nature. In the end, he is concerned with a functional or household object that has no historical significance and attests to nothing other than itself (Morike probably had an antique lamp in view, but—in contrast to the two non-German poets—he makes no mention of this in his poem). For him, the “object of art” has become an organically woven and timeless “object of nature” with which man should not meddle.
