HEINRICH VON KLEIST
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a single current of action, never broken by digression or comment.
The lyrical moment does not matter; and Kleist's short poems are
by far the weakest part of
his
work.
Kleist belonged to no literary school. His personal contacts with
his contemporaries, the Romantics, had little or no effect on his
work, though he shared some of their extravagances and some of
their ideals, notably nationalism. (And, from Goethe's point of view,
Romanticism too was reactionary.) Kleist attributed the decline of
European drama to the demands of women for moral and edifying
themes, proposing that women should be excluded from theaters as
in ancient Greece or confined to theaters of their own.
It
is true that
Kleist was at his worst when he consciously compromised with the
taste of his public, as in the case of
Kathchen;
but his own variety
of heroism owes much more to his age and country than he was
aware. While
it
was easier for him than for his humanistic predeces–
sors, Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, to arouse the tragic emotions, he
was at least as far as they were from renewing the religious and cul–
tural function of Greek tragedy. His distinction is that he treated bar–
barous subjects with a hard precision which is that of the scientific
intellect, disciplined to record phenomena with a steady hand, a cold
eye; yet the experiments he recorded were those of passion itself, of
passion endured in a social and metaphysical void. His excellence
as an artist is unmistakably modem in character: perfect control of
the means to an uncontrollable end.
