HEINRICH VON KLEIST
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foreign power. Kleist's sense of isolation within the Prussian State
eventually brought about a complete reversal of his former attitude: it
caused him to seek compensation in extreme nationalism. Unlike
Goethe, whose all-embracing philosophy of permanence within change
was proof against every form of fanaticism, Kleist became a reaction–
ary.
In the same way, Kleist's disillusionment with the various ra–
tionalistic and idealistic philosophies that were the current substitutes
for a religious creed precipitated a violent reaction in favor of the
mysterious, the monstrous and the chaotic. True, after the Kant
crisis he almost became a Catholic convert, though as a Lutheran by
birth, upbringing and mentality, he had previously expressed the
strongest antipathy to the ritual and influence of the Catholic Church.
This
conversion would have been in keeping with the spirit of the
age, for-as many of Kleist's contemporaries, especially the Roman–
tics, discovered-Roman Catholicism could accommodate and recon–
cile all those violent antinomies which were to tear Kleist piecemeal,
much as Penthesilea and her hounds dismember Achilles in his
tragedy. But there was something in Kleist that forbade him to com–
mit himself to any discipline but that of
Art.
His attitude remained
that of a man who never ceases to look for absolute values, both
moral and metaphysical, but insists on looking for them in dark and
uncharted places. It is the attitude summed up by Sylvester in Kleist's
first tragedy,
Die Familie Schroffenstein:
I must have light,
Though it were Hell itself I fetch it from-
except that these words do not reveal Kleist's predilection for Hell.
His moral perversity can be traced back to an early conflict between
the two moral codes which he was brought up to observe like any
well-mannered tightrope-walker of his class but confused by growing
giddy: the Protestant's reliance on
his
own conscience and the Prus–
sian officer's unquestioning loyalty to a secular authority. Most of
Kleist's works derive their moral tension from a conflict between two
incompatible codes; many of them arrive at a state of deadlock that
can be broken only by a frantic plunge into one extreme or the
other. This plunge could consist in the complete defiance of secular
authority' on the part of an individual conscious of being in the right,
