I assure you that I do not repeat this very well-known and even rather famous story here either in any spirit of scoffing, or for the sake of a digression. I can far better suggest the inner sense and the essence of this whole romantic idealism, in all its beauty and its waywardness, by such a tale as this of the love of Novalis than by a much longer homily. Here, you see, is the romantic interpretation of Fichte’s doctrine. You see the spirituality, the tenderness, the perfectly honest sentiment of it all; and you also see the essential fickleness, the inevitable arbitrariness, of an idealism that has not yet found any truly objective standards. In a less gentle soul than Novalis this arbitrariness would become cynical. Such noble sentiments have, you see, their even ghastly dangers. Is it feeling that guides you in your interpretation of the world? Are your ideas simply plastic? Do you make your world solely through your own mind? Alas! as Hegel afterwards said, feeling is the mere soil of the forest of life; and from the same soil the noblest tree or the hatefulest weed may spring. Suppose the resolution of Novalis had been by chance not only less fickle, but also less noble; might not his subjective idealism have justified equally well a fierce rebellion against all that humanity justly holds dearest, instead of a mere indifference to what common sense calls obvious? In the later history of the romantic movement the fickleness of wayward idealism did indeed work itself out to the extreme of its painful dialectics, and if you want to know the results, Amadeus Hoffmann’s tales of horror, or our own Edgar Poe’s gloom, will tell you enough of the story to let you see one of its endings. The Nihilism and the Pessimism of more recent days will give you another outcome of that arbitrary idealism which knows no law. And the lightning of Heine’s scorn will show you yet further glimpses of the same lurid world in a fashion that will leave you undecided whether to laugh or to weep.
