"
Brentano surrenders himself passionately to his mood. His surrender
and his distorting irony, like Heine's, arise from his desire to
assimilate all of the outside world; it explains, in part, the
Romantic desire to mediate, to translate, to bridge the cleft between
oneself and the world. In part, too, it explains the desire for
musical imitation so apparent in both Tieck and Brentano. It is an
attempt to express in terms of one sense the ideas or apperceptions
of another. But where Tieck falls into meaningless jingle, Brentano
succeeds, not merely in suggesting but in producing the effect, as in
his _Merry Musicians_ (1803), or in bringing about its latent mood,
as in his _Spinner's Song_ or in his version of the old
folk-epithalamium, "Come out, come out, thou lovely, lovely bride."
Brentano's prose tales vary in quality from the over-allegorized
latter part of _The Fairy Tale of the Rhine and the Miller Radlauf_
(1816) to the simple and homely _Kasper and Annie_ (1817), with its
elemental clash of soldiers and citizens. Through many of the tales
there runs a note of satire and of symbolism, but the fancy is
exuberant and the interest well maintained. Brentano's discovery
of the Rhine as an object of poetry and veneration is completely
summarized in _Radlauf_, where the Rhine lyrics are often of wonderful
beauty and definiteness and the river becomes a benevolent _deus ex
machina_, who--significantly--in dreams, guides and aids the simple,
honest miller in his search for a bride.
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