Tag: Romanticism

Passion Put to Use: Richard Holmes’s This Long Pursuit

Richard Holmes is an extremely dangerous writer. He is dangerous to your wallet and to whatever fixed notions of a literary canon you may have. My copy of This Long Pursuit, a kind of companion volume to Footsteps, which I reviewed earlier, was a gift from my friend James, who is between blogs at the moment. The British are the main focus of this volume of biographical essays, though Holmes spends time with French-language writers too.  And as ever, Holmes is circling around that historical sweet spot, somewhere between 1750 and 1850, when the Romantics were busy being Romantics.

But “Romantics” not only in the sense of poets – though here we have Keats, and Coleridge, and Shelley – but in the sense of a worldview. Scientists are not excluded, and nor are the many women who have historically been locked out of the pantheon. Holmes, with his sympathetic biographer’s eye, makes everyone interesting. And in this lies his greatest strength – he makes us aware of the value of biography. Perhaps even more so than literature itself, biography teaches us that everyone, great and small, has an exciting history of their own. He makes us look at the world and people around us, and care.

Confessions

This Long Pursuit is broken up into three sections. The first of these, “Confessions”, is Holmes at his most personal. Firstly, he reminds us of his biographical principles. The first is “the Footsteps principle”, which states that “the serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past”. Footsteps saw Holmes tracing Stevenson among the French countryside; This Long Pursuit has him chasing Coleridge, though without any opium, through England, and Keats and Shelley through Italy. As readers, the text that Holmes presents is heavily influenced by this principle – we have a sense of the subject’s world as something lived in, precisely because Holmes has done just that.

The second principle is that of “the Two-Sided Notebook”. What this means is that Holmes devotes one half of a notebook’s page to the objective facts of his quarry, as he researches them, and the other half to the impressions and feelings that come to him as he does the work. This creates a subjective and objective biography, and the resulting work is a synthesis of these two strands. But their very existence means that reading Holmes is never dull or clinically lifeless as certain academic texts undoubtedly are. 

In the five essays of “Confessions” Holmes explores directly what a biography is, or ought to be. It is a thing that asks us “What was this human life really like, and what does it mean to us now?” It is not simply about trying to work out the past as fact, but rather there is an element of “imaginative faith” involved, for otherwise we would never realise what the past means to us now. Elsewhere he talks of biography’s “humanist ambition” – it aims to inform us of “a common human nature”. Holmes’s style, with regular quotations from the primary sources, serves this idea well. We always have a feeling that the people he is writing about are alive and are being brought back to life before our eyes. But not as pedestal-bound demi-gods so much as human beings.

Restorations

“Restorations”, the second section, is about precisely that. Holmes takes figures who have faded over time and recovers them, as best he can, from obscurity. And in “Restorations” his focus is on the women of the age. I remember reading a scathing review on Goodreads of Footsteps, in which the author denounced Holmes as a terrible sexist because of some off-hand remark that only became offensive a few decades after the book was written. It is ridiculous because focusing on such petty details obscures the great spirit underlying Holmes’ work in both Footsteps and This Long Pursuit – namely, to treat the inhabitants of the past with respect and justice. He rescues people like Madame de Stael or Zélide who I may have heard of but certainly wasn’t planning on reading, simply by engaging with them and relating their value.

One of the things I found most disheartening was the way that many of these women had been famous in their time, but had had their respect worn away by centuries of men deciding who was worth reading. Holmes goes from popular science, with Mary Somerville, to literary and philosophical reflections with Mary Wollstonecraft. He focuses on the heroism of these women at a time when they faced huge difficulties to finding success, but found it anyway. When describing the scientists, Holmes writes that “precisely by being excluded… they saw the life of science in a wider world”. For example, I had no idea that popular science writing in English was essentially the creation of a woman, Mary Somerville!

But Holmes does not shy away from darker themes either. His essay on Mary Wollstonecraft is particularly shocking. Wollstonecraft, who is famous for her “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, is perhaps the coolest of the characters featured here. But she had a difficult life, as Footsteps made clear, and an even less pleasant afterlife. Holmes describes how her husband, the naïve but well-meaning William Godwin, wrote a biography of her that was so honest it scandalised society and ruined her reputation for over a century. If this seems like an exaggeration, Holmes finds some choice quotes to back his assertion up. I particularly “liked” one newspaper’s comment that the biography was “the most hurtful book” of 1798. Ouch.

Afterlifes

Going back to the past in search of a new way of looking at people does not only extend to those who have been almost forgotten, though when we deal with canonical figures there is much less urgency. In the final five essays under the heading “Afterlifes” Holmes deals with the classic figures – Keats, Coleridge, Blake – who had sat out of the earlier sections. But rather than go over the lives once more, he is more interested in how their lives were treated once they were beyond the grave. This is all fascinating stuff. The case of Shelley is a good example. His tragic death and classic Romantic death by drowning became a biographical leitmotif. People could no longer look at his life except as something tending towards an early grave, giving it a sense of predeterminism that in reality it lacked. This rather obscures who Shelley really was, at least in Holmes’s eyes.

He traces the first biography of William Blake and the figures, male and female, who made it possible. (I had heard of Anne Gilchrist in connection with Walt Whitman, but I had no idea that she had also wrote part of the biography that perhaps saved Blake from being forgotten forever). He explores the joy of friendship that animated Humphrey Davy and Coleridge’s scientific experiments together, and the ebb and flow of the painter Thomas Lawrence’s reputation.

Conclusions

And he does all this with grace and humour! The entirety of This Long Pursuit is a joy to read – as a writer Holmes is every bit a match for his subjects. Of the Scot, Oswald Lord Nelvil, he writes that his is “a name truly redolent of damp tweed”. One of Blake’s old friends is described as “a well-meaning but gushing middle-aged raconteur, who embroidered freely on the facts”. And then there is this magnificently pithy description of a mental crisis Thomas Lawrence underwent in 1797: “What exactly this involved remains obscure, except that he embarked on a strangely melodramatic affair with both of Sarah Siddon’s daughters simultaneously, and then threatened to commit suicide”.

Holmes, better than any historian, makes the past and its characters alive. And in so doing he does something more than just entertain – he teaches us. This quote from Coleridge is perfect for describing what makes This Long Pursuit special: “Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love”. Holmes’s sympathy and love for his subjects makes us more engaged than even the most incisive monograph ever could. I finished the book determined to read Keats, Coleridge, Blake, Zélide, Madame de Stael, and all the rest as soon as possible. This is why Holmes is so dangerous. He shows us that reading and learning are truly never-ending processes. That there is always someone new to discover, another writer or life worthy of attention. Every single one of these essays bursts with passion. And Holmes’ passion is absolutely contagious. Read it!

Thinking Too Much: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, whose heyday in the English language was in the 19th century, thanks to the efforts of men and women like George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle, is a writer whose greatness we hear about more often than we actually sit down and read him. He was an indisputably superhuman being: writer of plays, poetry, prose, a statesman, a scientist, a man who saw battle in the Napoleonic Wars – Goethe seemed to have the experience and the talents and the range of a hundred others. He even, unlike his contemporaries, Schiller and Hölderlin, managed to live the entirety of his life without dying prematurely or going mad – no small feat for someone whose dates might make us term him “Romantic”. But still, we don’t read him. We know his main works – Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and of course Werther, and perhaps a smattering of his poetry – but only second-hand.

I don’t know why that is. The common explanation is that Goethe ultimately came to embody a distant, lofty, Enlightenment-era sensibility that makes him boring to the modern reader, growing up in the shadow of emotional, irrational, Romanticism. Perhaps there are simply a dearth of good translations? In my time at Cambridge I have read precisely two works by Goethe – Urfaust, an early version of Faust: Part 1, and Iphigenia, a play. Yet for the German tradition he is as central as Shakespeare is in our own. And so I went and bought myself a 14-volume collected edition of his works, and hope to read at least some of them, over the coming year(s). Being interested in canonical European literature and not knowing Goethe is rather embarrassing, after all. And if he is really a genius, I am sure he will have something interesting to say to me.

It’s just a shame he doesn’t in Werther!

The Sorrows of Young Werther

With the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther Goethe became an international sensation. But often what is initially popular doesn’t stand the test of time. Werther is perhaps more notorious now than anything else, on account of the various copycat suicides it inspired. I have to say, for me, a 21st century sad person, I find it strange how this book could have brought anyone to end their life. The gulf of sensibilities seems huge here. This story is not a semi-respectable literary love-triangle so much as one idiot’s selfish, solipsistic, obsession for another human being which brings torment to her and destruction to him. But, as always with German, it could just be that my understanding of the text was negatively impacted by my knowledge of the language. Anyway, Werther is important, so I suppose I must try to find what’s good and interesting in it. Let’s see.

Werther

Werther is structured predominantly as a series of letters from young Werther to his friend Wilhelm. Later on, the novel also includes a few letters to Lotte (the heroine), some of Werther’s translation work, and some third person narration. All of these formal elements are perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel, and I’ll write about them towards the end of this post.

The initial impression Werther’s letters make is that of an overwhelming emotional consciousness. Werther is emotional about absolutely everything. Even a decision like trying to live in the present is fraught with feelings: “I want to enjoy the present, and what has past should stay there in the past”. One of the central ideas of Werther is stated early on in a lamentation from Werther – “oh best of friends, what is the human heart!” The answer to the question, at least the one the book offers, is profoundly limited – we can’t really know the human heart. Werther’s letters, emotional, increasingly deranged, are only ever his letters. We are drawn into a world of pure subjectivity, so that it’s impossible to have any confidence about what is actually going on outside Werther’s head.

But we should have a go. Werther has ended up in a small village, there to do absolutely nothing. I believe the reason for his exile involves a romantic entanglement with Wilhelm’s sister, but I can’t be sure because the whole thing takes up a single page and is promptly forgotten. Here, in the peace and quiet, he makes friends with the locals, and eventually comes across a young lady, Charlotte – or Lotte, to her intimates. Lotte is, in Werther’s eyes, so absolutely amazing that to call her an angel is not enough. She is perfect, not just in her beauty, but in embodying a kind of idealised feminine existence: her mother is dead, so she looks after her younger siblings in her place. How amazing, how wonderful! Did I mention that she is engaged? Well… yes… but “I received the news somewhat indifferently”. Lotte reads, Lotte is natural and “artless”, a pure being plucked from Rousseau dreams.

Lotte

Yes, Werther is head-over-heels in love. What passion! But is it really passion, given that “often I didn’t even hear the words she spoke to me”. Werther’s imagination is so great, so hard-working, that it envelopes poor Lotte. They do have their moments, like when they are heading home after a storm and it’s all very spooky and intense. Memorably, she utters the name “Klopstock”, a well-known German poet of the day, while looking at the sky. Wilhelm, wisely, picks up on what Werther himself doesn’t, and suggests he leave before it’s too late. Werther, of course, does not. And at this point we have the first of his letters to Lotte: ridiculous, emotional, and dangerous too. Her husband-to-be has been away so far, but what will come of it when he returns?

“Wilhelm, is it just a phantom speaking, when we think all’s well?” Werther switches with alarming regularity from the deepest of joys to the deepest of sadnesses. “We long, ah, long to give our entire being over to something, and be filled with the bliss of a single, great, and powerful feeling”. He is an artist, who naturally barely gets anything done. He manages three incomplete portraits of Lotte. At one point he blames the peace and quiet of the rural idyll for his failure to work, but once he has tempestuous feelings he doesn’t become that much more successful either.

We hear Lotte rarely, at least while the narrative still consists of Werther’s letters. The effect of this is suffocating. We struggle to see her beneath Werther’s description of her, which is always filled with the possibility that he is deceiving himself (“Yes, I feel, and in this I am sure I can trust my heart… that she loves me!”).

Albert

In the first edition of Werther, published in 1774, Lotte’s fiancé Albert is a less sympathetic character than he appears in the revised version of Werther from 1787 which most people read these days. The thirteen years clearly gave Goethe time to mellow and let him turn upon his hero more than his youth once allowed. Albert is in many ways Werther’s opposite. Where Werther is emotional and prone to extremes, Albert is dour and serious and practical. Unlike Werther, who doesn’t appear to do any work at all, Albert’s main characteristic is his “Emsigkeit”, or industriousness. When the topic of passion comes up, Albert’s views are predictably sensible: “a man who lets his passions throw him about loses all his self-control and appears as a drunk or else as a madman”. For Werther, the Romantic, this is sacrilege. But Werther loves Lotte, so he keeps visiting their house.

The thought has just come to me that Werther and Theodor Storm’s Immensee have a lot in common. Both feature a love triangle where the emotional man loses out to the industrious man in the pursuit of the somewhat emotional girl. But the key difference is that Reinhard, the hero of Immensee, fails to propose to Elisabeth on time because of his sensibilities (he wants the proposal to be something special), while Werther arrives too late to make a proposal at all. Immensee is the tragic story of how emotions and hesitancy spoil a beautiful romance; Werther is the story of how a refusal to think rationally lets Werther imagine into being a romance where he has no right to, leaving him a far less sympathetic protagonist.

In the comparison between Albert and Werther we have played out what is one of the fundamental dramas of the 19th century – namely that of feeling against reason. In an increasingly industrial, increasingly business-driven world, feeling becomes a liability while hard-work and cool intelligence assume a dominant position in bourgeois society. In Werther, Lotte may regret that she is not with Werther, but she does not leave Albert, and Werther takes his own life. His sensibility dies with him, while Albert and Lotte will no doubt have plenty of little industrious children of their own. But perhaps all this is eminently sensible – only through the marriage of reason with feeling can feeling hope to survive. Werther, who wouldn’t know reason if it hit him over the head, just isn’t right for this world.  

Style and Structure

Werther’s second half, which details Werther’s precipitous decline into the abyss, is more interesting than the first, which had ended with him at last managing to leave Lotte’s village and do something else for a month. It is here that Goethe starts playing around with form. As long as we inhabit Werther’s insane letters, we are forced to accept his worldview: “What else is human fate but to go beyond its bounds, to drink the cup right to the dregs?”

But at about three quarters of the way through the book the letters stop and we have a message from the publisher, which comes as something of a shock. After the closed world of Werther’s letters, suddenly we have a sense of objectivity. It gives the reader the necessary perspective to realise that Werther really is going mad, just in case they hadn’t realise this earlier. We continue reading letters from Werther, but now they are broken up with information about how they were received, or what Werther was doing. We hear Lotte’s voice, her fear that perhaps “it is only because you couldn’t possess me that your desire gained so much power over you.” What a sensible thought. It is too bad that Werther is unwilling to listen to her.

The third person narration naturally allows us to hear about Werther’s suicide, as being dead makes it hard to write a letter (though of course there are plenty of literary workarounds). I think that the main effect of this narrative rupture is to ironize what had otherwise been deadly serious – Werther’s love. As the publisher goes through the letters left on Werther’s desk, including at least two letters that purport to be the last one’s he’ll ever send to Lotte, it’s hard not to feel that Werther is much less the emotional hero of the novel, and more a fool who came and destroyed the peace and happiness of others. His translation of part of the Ossian poems, by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, is beautiful, but at the same time hints at the unoriginality of his own feelings. Is Werther just imitating others, even at his most emotional?

Conclusion

I have written before about how writing a blog post makes me appreciate works of literature in ways I would not have otherwise and find enjoyment in works that otherwise frustrated me. But I am not sure that this is one of those times. Werther is too imbalanced – too much feeling, not enough reason. For the modern sensibility, Werther’s failings are too much his own. There are plenty of things to be sad about in life, in love as in everything else, without letting our imaginations create additional difficulties for us.

Werther was my first prose experience of the almighty Goethe, but it is a young man’s work, and I am glad I have finished it and can move on to something else. I am certain that better things await, if not in volume 6, then in one of the others! So, dear reader, know that the battle with Goethe has only just begun.

Readers, should you have read more Goethe to me and had a better experience, or indeed had a better experience with Werther, do let me know in the comments.

Theodor Storm’s Immensee – Summary and Analysis

Immensee is perhaps the best known of Theodor Storm’s novellas, and like many of them it is a tale of thwarted love and missed opportunities. Unlike Storm’s Aquis Submersus, which I have written about here, and which is characterised by elements of tragedy and drama, Immensee is a much more symbolic work where the main focus is on “Stimmung”, or mood. What follows is a summary of the story of Immensee, followed by some ways of looking at the meaning of the tale. Translations from the German are mine.

A picture of a book cover for Immensee, showing a white lily.
An old American cover for Immensee. It shows one of the novella’s key symbols – the white lily.

The Plot of Immensee

Immensee tells the brief story of two children, Reinhard and Elisabeth, who at first seem destined to marry. Through ten vignettes, each no more than a few pages, we follow the two as they grow from children into adults, and then become separated through Elisabeth’s marriage to another man, Erich. The opening and final vignettes, both titled “The Old Man” are set considerably later than the rest of scenes, and show Reinhard as an old man, lonely and unfulfilled as he reminisces upon the disappointment of the past and his own role in sealing his fate.

The first of the reminiscences is entitled “The children” and shows the two children – Reinhard aged ten, and Elisabeth only five – playing together in the height of summer. Their joy with each other is palpable – they dance and sing, and the section ends with them returning home, “springing hand in hand together”. The next section, “In the Forest” takes place seven years later, as Reinhard is preparing to leave for further study in a different town. The two children are tasked with locating strawberries and Reinhard claims he knows a place, but when they arrive, exhausted, it is dark and there are none left on the bushes. A brief division is seen between the children, as Elisabeth says the place makes her afraid, while Reinhard talks of its beauty. In either case, they leave empty handed, and Reinhard’s final day is a disappointment.

“There Stood the Child on the Road” sees Reinhard already at university on Christmas Eve. Like a good student we find him drinking in a bar, where a gypsy woman is playing music. Reinhard stands and makes a toast “to your beautiful, sinful eyes!” and tries to give her money, but she rebuffs him when he refuses to stay for her. He leaves the bar and goes outside onto the street, and then home, where he finds a gift of cookies from Elisabeth has arrived. In her letter she berates him for not having written or sent her any fairy tales as he had promised. Overcome with guilt, Reinhard goes out and buys a coral cross for her, and then begins writing letters home to her and his mother.

“At home” sees Reinhard home and with Elisabeth, but he finds her changed. There are pauses where earlier there would be conversation, and she often turns her back to him. He also discovers that in the place of the bird he had sent her another boy, Erich, has given her a luxurious cage with a canary inside it. She doesn’t seem interested in what he has written either. But before he departs, he seems to rekindle his passion for her, and reassure himself of her faithfulness. He tells her he has a secret, “and when in two years I am back here you shall learn what it is!” – undoubtedly a proposal. But in “A Letter”, the shortest of the vignettes of Immensee, we learn that Elisabeth has agreed to be married to Erich, after refusing for some time. Reinhard, perhaps to build expectation, hadn’t written to her since they parted…

“Immensee” has Reinhard come to Immensee, the estate that Erich has inherited and which has given him the means to win over both Elisabeth and (more importantly) her mother. He has come at Erich’s invitation, not his wife’s, because Erich wishes to surprise Elisabeth by showing her her old friend. And for most of the scene we don’t even see her. When Reinhard finally does, she appears unfamiliar, as “the white and girlish form of a woman”. Both of them appear changed to one another, and Reinhard ends up starting to go for walks alone in the evenings, where on one occasion the heavens break open and he is soaked.

“My Mother Wanted It” has the family – Erich, Elisabeth, and her mother – sitting around one evening with Reinhard also present. Together Elisabeth and Reinhard sing a popular Romantic ballad, and then, emboldened, Reinhard reads one of his poems – he is a writer – which is clearly about Elisabeth’s marriage to Erich and her loss of Reinhard. She grows embarrassed and leaves the room. Reinhard also goes outside, and approaches the lake that lies in the centre of the Immensee Estate. There he sees a white lily, and he tries to swim out to it. He gets very close, but is unable to make it to the lily. He leaves, sodden and disappointed.

In “Elisabeth”, the final vignette, Reinhard tries to reminisce upon the past together with Elisabeth, but she rejects him, even the idea of going looking for strawberries – “it’s not the time for strawberries now”. Having failed, Reinhard heads back to the house. On the way he meets the gypsy, now an old woman, who asks for alms. He gives her his money and then asks her what else she wants, but she says there’s nothing else. At the house Reinhard finds he cannot write anymore and decides to leave as soon as possible. The next morning he aims to leave without notice, but she finds him in time to confirm her suspicions that he will never come again. And then Reinhard is gone.

His memories exhausted, the aged Reinhard sees before him the water lily again and decides to get to work. His creativity is gone, but there remains within him a capacity for academic study. This is to be his fate.

So that’s the plot of Immensee. Now for a few bits and pieces towards thinking about it.

The Novella’s Structure: Poetry and Vignettes

I mentioned above that Immensee is divided into ten vignettes, or scenes, ranging from Elisabeth and Reinhard’s youths up to Reinhard’s old age. What is the significance of the structure? Each of the scenes is able to function as an independent unit, similar to separate poems in a cycle. Each scene brings with it a different mood, with its own symbols and ideas. They function as separate memories, while nonetheless forming part of a coherent whole – Reinhard’s understanding of his failed relationship with Elisabeth. The containment of these scenes within Reinhard’s memory serves to contain his central despair over his failure and bring order to the meaninglessness and chaos of his life. By organising his memories Reinhard can come to understand them and move on. The novella thus moves from the first scene’s initial pain at being reminded of Elisabeth, to Reinhard moving on through academic work at the end.

By using vignettes and focusing on the mood, the structure of Immensee has significance outside of Reinhard’s perspective too. Not only does the structure bring order to Reinhard’s life, it also makes it beautiful. In this way Storm takes what is ultimately a tragic story and imbues it with a redemptive quality – he makes it into art. In this way, he predicts Nietzsche’s command that our suffering must be made into art so that it can have value.

Immensee also makes use of poetry. Storm was a wonderful poet as well as a writer and a few of the poems in Immensee are also found in my collection of his poetry. The use of poetry serves to enhance the feeling that the vignettes are poetic themselves. The song of the gypsy is important because it stresses the fragility of existence, warning Reinhard of the danger of his hopes for Elisabeth and his ultimate fate.

Today and just today,
Am I so beautiful.
Tomorrow, oh tomorrow,
All this will pass away.
And only in this hour,
Can I call you my own.
For death, alas my death
Will find me all alone.

The poetry that Reinhard reads to Elisabeth is also significant. Reinhard thinks, perhaps, that the beauty of his artistic talent will be enough to win the old Elisabeth back to him. But he is sorely mistaken. In this way we see that poetry and the artistic structure of Immensee more broadly is designed to redeem the world but not grant us riches in it.

The Symbols and Details of Immensee

Immensee is full of symbols and symbolic content and here I’ll only focus on the things that strike me as particularly significant. After all, our essays are only so long.

Colours, Light and Dark. According to my notes from the first time I read Immensee the colours of the novella get progressively darker as it progresses. Reading it through this time, I don’t think it’s an exact science. Nonetheless, there is a clear movement from light to dark. When the children are first playing it is summer and bright outside. But by the time of their first problems, in the forest, it is dark. Immensee itself, for Reinhard at least, is marked by its darkness. The weather there is always bad and stormy, reflecting his own increasingly sad state of mind.

An illustration from an American edition of Immensee. It shows Reinhard giving Elizabeth a flower
From an early American edition of Immensee, I find the picture accurately shows the kind of (perhaps excessive) Romanticism of the story.

Names. I’m not sure what the significance of any of the characters’ names in Immensee is, but there is one point I’d like to mention. In “A Letter” we learn that Reinhard’s second name is Werner after his landlady brings in the letter from Elisabeth’s mother. It is something of a jarring moment for the reader, as up till then Reinhard has only been called Reinhard – we come to know him by that name. It is significant because it reflects the jarring nature of the news the letter contains: the person Reinhard thought he knew, Elisabeth, has changed completely from his idea. The intimacy they had shared is lost, and Reinhard thus becomes (albeit temporarily in the text) Mr Werner. But it is enough.

Immensee itself is also a significant name. “Imme” is a poetic variant of the German word for bee, so the estate’s name is something like “bee-lake”. Bees are used throughout literature for their associations with productivity and hard, collective work. This is exactly what we see on Erich’s estate: a world of practical achievements in his factory and workers that stands in complete contrast to Reinhard’s unacknowledged, intellectual world. So in its own way, even the novella’s title is there to show what Reinhard lacks.

The Bird. Reinhard sends Elisabeth a linnet, a small bird. But the bird, we learn in “There Stood the Child on the Road”, has died. And when Reinhard goes home he sees a new bird, a canary, in a new golden cage. The cage represents the riches of Erich, having inherited the estate at Immensee, and perhaps the bird in the cage may be read as Elisabeth herself, her heart now caught by another. In any case, the incident with the birds shows clearly how Reinhard’s role in her life is being usurped by another.

The Coral Cross. The significance of the coral cross seems to me rather to be its lack of significance to the plot. In a work full of echoes, symbols and connections the cross is notable in that it does not reappear, but rather is forgotten. The faith that the cross implies turns out not to be present in Elisabeth – or at least, the faith is eventually overcome. It is, in a sense, a red herring among symbols because of its lack of use. Instead, it comes to symbolise Reinhard’s failure.

The White Lily. This is the main symbol of the whole of Immensee. It appears both in “My Mother Wanted it” but also in the final vignette, as a vision before Reinhard’s eyes. Reinhard swims into the centre of the lake to try to capture the beauty of the lily, but he is defeated. And thus it comes to represent all that is unreachable, unattainable, especially in terms of beauty. But at the same time, its beauty is great, and thus when Reinhard thinks about it towards the end of the novella it comes as a sort of consolation. It cannot be reached, but it remains in his memory, just as Elisabeth herself does.

Ways of Approaching Immensee: Romanticism and Social Constraints

There are lots of different ways of approaching writing about Immensee and here are those that caught my eye while thinking about the novella.

Parent-child conflict. How very banal. Nonetheless, there is a social angle to the novella that’s well worth exploring. Elisabeth is put under a lot of pressure by her mother to be with Erich, rather than with Reinhard. The reason for this seems to be that Erich is far more monetarily successful and has a greater social status, while Reinhard is simply a writer. When Reinhard comes to visit Immensee, Erich shows him all of the industry being built on the land, including a spirits factory. Reinhard, however, ends the novella still renting rooms, rather than owning houses.

Reinhard’s failure to be with Elisabeth is the result of his reluctance to tell her his feelings outright – instead he wants to wait too years before surprising her with a proposal. But Reinhard’s failure is also the failure of the Romantic sensibility more broadly. Immensee, in the version we now read, was published in 1851, some time after the Romantics of the German lands, such as Heine, had already given up on Romanticism or died. The novella is far enough beyond Romanticism to treat its ideas with scepticism and irony.

A photo of Storm when he was younger.
A relatively young Theodor Storm. Immensee was an early-career hit, but it’s not my favourite story of his. The Rider on the White Horse (Der Schimmelreiter) takes that prize. I also love his poems.

This attitude manifests itself in the way Reinhard is treated. He makes up fairy tales for Elisabeth and writes poetry, and seems to see great power in gestures and in art. But as a result, he waits to tell Elisabeth of his feelings, including making the ridiculous decision not to send any letters for two years, all of which means that Erich is able to propose instead. When, at Immensee itself, he comes to sing with Elisabeth, he tries to talk about his passion for the music, but nobody pays any attention to his lyricism on the subject. Reinhard, the Romantic, is out of touch and unable to communicate properly with the modern people surrounding him. His passionate verses fail to seduce or please Elisabeth – instead they only upset her. Immensee thus presents the collision of the Romantic sensibility with reality and its subsequent failure to impress.

No doubt the art is beautiful, as Immensee itself is. But it is also useless for Reinhard’s pursuit of his worldly aims. He needs money and status if he’s to get anywhere when he has a rival like Erich.

Conclusion

Storm’s novella has remained popular for over one hundred and fifty years, and given what I’ve discussed above I hope it’s possible to see why that’s the case. Not only is the work short and structured in a way that makes it easy to read a few pages of at a time, it is also highly symbolic, making it richly rewarding to read it repeatedly. Its clearly symbolic quality makes it prime fodder for classroom syllabuses, because it’s hard to find something in the work that doesn’t mean something. I would know about that – I first had to read it back in school, though I’m not sure I actually did, as my copy was eerily devoid of annotations when I came to read it through last week.

The topic of the novella also helps it. Frustrated love is something that is easy to relate to, and as a result the distance between Storm’s time and our own seems far less than it actually was. For who hasn’t found, in the course of their lives, some small regret for a relationship that could have been, if only we’d just stopped and had the confidence to act in time? A gloomy memory, no doubt, but at least in Immensee old Storm turns the sentiment into art. In a way, our sufferings are thereby redeemed.

For more Theodor Storm, check out my thoughts on Aquis Submersus here. For other German novellas, check out Meyer’s Marriage of the Monk, Eichendorff’s From the Life of a Good for Nothing or Thomas Mann’s Gladius Dei.

If you’re looking for a translation of Immensee, here’s one I found. If you want to read some of Storm’s poetry, I’ve translated some poems here.