The weather-eye on probability is what in later times has helped the
Romanticists to slip so easily into Realism--and to reactionary views.
Of all the great mass of material left by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
(1777-1843), only a lyric or two and the fairy tale _Undine_ have any
value for the present day. Fouque represents the talent which develops
in the glare of the world, is popular for a decade, but soon withers
when the sun is set. His relations to Romanticism are largely
external; he frequented the salons of Rachel Levin and Henrietta Herz
in Berlin, was aided by August von Schlegel, and was praised by
Jean Paul; but in his heart he was not inspired by any of the deeper
longings that characterize the true Romantic spirit. Even though he is
to be credited with the first modern dramatization of the Nibelungen
story, _The Hero of the North_ (1810), and though he took subjects
from the Germanic past and from the chivalric days, he brought no new
life to his rehabilitations. Fouque was too productive, too facile,
too external, too indifferent to psychological motivation to be real.
He diluted Romanticism and sentimentalized it. In him patriotism
becomes chauvinism; love, philandering; and his age of chivalry, a
thinly veiled and sentimental picture of his own times. The strength
and the indigenousness of Arnim are gone, and that power to throw a
Romantic glamor over life which Tieck and Hoffmann had, is lacking.
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