Dieckmann - Metaphor of Hieroglyphics in German Romanticism (CL v7n4 1955)

7/29/2019 Dieckmann - Metaphor of Hieroglyphics in German Romanticism (CL v7n4 1955)

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University of Oregon

The Metaphor of Hieroglyphics in German RomanticismAuthor(s): Liselotte DieckmannSource: Comparative Literature, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn, 1955), pp. 306-312Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1769042

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THEMETAPHORFHIEROGLYPHICSNGERMAN OMANTICISM

LISELOTTEDIECKMANNHE young Andre Gide summarized, in his Traite du Narcisse(1891), the poetic theories of the French symbolists in the form ofa myth; he described Paradise in the following way:

Chaste Eden! Jardindes Idees ! ou les formes, rythmiqueset sfres, revelaientsans effort leur nombre; oi chaquechose etait ce qu'elleparaissait... Tout etaitparfait comme un nombre .. un accord emanait du rapport des lignes; sur lejardinplanaituneconstantesymphonie.Au centre de l'Eden,Ygdrasil, l'arbrelogarithmique,plongeaitdans le sol sesracines de vie... Dans l'ombre,contreson tronc, s'appuyait e livre du Mystere-ou se lisait la verite qu'il faut connaitre. Et le vent, soufflantdans les feuilles de1'arbre, n epelait, le long du jour, les hieroglyphesnecessaires.Gide was repeating here a symbol which had appeared frequently inthe prose writings of both Baudelaire and M\allarmeand which wasused by them to indicate mysterious and essential relationships be-tween nature, language, and poetry. I cannot hope to decipher in thispaper the mysterious words written in the great book of nature or toreveal the "truth that one must know." I shall indicate rather someof the historical traditions which form the partly conscious, partlyunconscious backgroundof Gide's rich image of Paradise.Well over a century before Gide another French writer, Diderot,used the metaphor of the hieroglyphic. In his Lettre sur les sourds etmuets he was concerned with some basic problems of language. Howcan language, analytical as it is by nature, express the oneness andsimultaneous existence in the mind of a complex conception? Diderotfinds the answer in poetic expression, that mysterious synthesis ofthought, imagery, and sound which simultaneously stirs all the facul-ties of the mind. Poetic expression is "a web of hieroglyphs whichdepict thought. In this sense one might say that all poetry is emblem-atic." Diderot attributed the creation of artistic hieroglyphics to themysterious power of genius, which he was one of the first eighteenth-century authors to recognize. He tried to penetrate the mystery ofartistic hieroglyphs by describing them as the peculiar and expressivesound of words and the position these words take in the melody of averse. This interpretation,however, dealt only with one of the aspectsof the hieroglyph of art, not with its unifying force or form.Between Diderot's very original and lucid use of the metaphor andits much more mystical use by Baudelaireand Gide there is a historicalgap. We cannotbridgethis gap by assuming the mysterious influence of

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THE METAPHOROF HIEROGLYPHICSan isolated term such as hieroglyphic. The history of this term is ratherthe history of an idea which appears at certain times in certain authorsin connectionwith a variety of other ideas and in a particularintellectualclimate. The German romanticists take, in some respects, a positionbetween Diderot and the French symbolists. But, while their intellec-tual climate is very close to that of the symbolists, it is strikingly dif-ferent from Diderot's. We must therefore seek Diderot's sources forthe metaphoras well as other sources which inspired both the Germanromanticists and the French symbolists.We shall have to go back to antiquity. A historical survey, howeverbrief, is needed for an understanding of the great fascination whichthe metaphor had for the German romanticists, a fascination duepartly to the mystery surrounding the Egyptian hieroglyphics beforethey were decipheredin 1822, but mainly to the fact that, through thecenturies and throughout the countries of Europe, the Near East, andNorth Africa, the metaphor had been used to designate symbolicforms of divine mysteries and philosophic thought. Because it wascharged with historical tradition it was particularly appealing to theromanticists.Plato had still understood that the Egyptian hieroglyphics were, inpart, letters of the alphabet or grammatical symbols; but this knowl-edge was gradually lost, mainly because a late type of Egyptian hiero-glyphics, the so-called enigmatic hieroglyphics, were indeed no longermere alphabetic characters but symbols expressing, and at the sametime veiling, religious and philosophic ideas. In the year 1419 Hora-pollo's Hieroglyphica, a book of late antiquity, was found. Written inGreek, it described in detail these Egyptian symbols and their mean-ings and pointed out the intrinsic and, as Gide would call it, necessaryrelationship between the symbol and the idea symbolized. The bookcontained fantastic descriptions of animals and emphasized the par-ticular attributes which make them fit to become symbols. While itpreservedthe Egyptian symbols, it missed their relationto the Egyptianlanguage. It had a tremendous influence, not only on the Renaissance,but throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of theauthors whom I shall discuss, mainly William Warburton and Herder,quoted abundantly from it; even as late an author as Johann JakobWagner, in his Ideen 2u einer allgemeinen Mythologie der alten Welt(1808), was profoundly and uncritically fascinated by it. The Hiero-glyphica was a source and a stimulus for the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury so-called emblem books, which were often called hieroglyphicaland with which most eighteenth-century authors were familiar. Theseemblembooks presented proverbs or topoi, general ideas of one kind oranother, in words accompanied by symbolic drawings; the drawingswere addedto the words, not only to makethe idea more clearly under-stood, but also to show the correspondence between various media of

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COMPARATIVELITERATUREart. Diderot's conception of the oneness of the aesthetic experiencefound here a first though rather primitive expression.Another line of tradition starts with the Jewish-Alexandrian alle-gorical interpretationof the Bible, specificallywith Philo. For him thestories of the Old Testament were hieroglyphics of a deeper meaning,which he set out to decipher. Christian as well as Jewish Biblicalinterpretation in the Middle Ages followed in his footsteps; and awealth of Christian and cabbalistic symbolism developed, which waswelded together in sixteenth-century mysticism and in the secretsocieties of the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. The term hiero-glyphic itself, as well as certain Egyptian symbols, was kept alive forcenturies in this mystic symbolism.Following this tradition, Swedenborg, the influential eighteenth-century mystic, wrote a book in which he described the analogies ofmind and body. He called it An Hieroglyphical Key to Natural andSpiritual Mysteries, by Way of Representations and Correspondences.In Novalis, Baudelaire, and many other writers of the late eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries,we find the metaphorof the hieroglyphiclinked with these very problems of analogy and correspondences be-tween nature and spirit.

A third line of tradition, aside from the emblematic and mystical,started with Plato and continued through the Platonic schools. TheCambridge Platonists and many others used the term hieroglyphic toexpress their views on the relation between the world of reality andthe world of ideas.In the eighteenth century, the metaphor was revived through thediscussions on the nature and origin of language. The well-knownproblem of "signs" and their arbitrary or necessary character withregard to the thing designated provided the metaphor with new life.These latterdiscussions are the basis of William Warburton's learnedDivine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, which served as a sourcefor both Diderot and Herder. Warburton intended to prove, in strictlyrationalisticterms, that Moses' legation was indeed divine. He stronglyattackedmysticismas well as Platonism. Moses' great learning stemmedfrom Egypt and he brought with him the knowledge of hieroglyphicalwriting, altering it to suit his purposes. In other words, Warburtonexplained Hebrew writing as derived from Egyptian writing. Writingis, according to him, a strictly human achievement. He gives up hisrationalisticmethod, however, when he explains the origin of languageitself. In contrast to writing, language was given to man by God at themoment of creation. Warburton's very informative book servedDiderot's friends of the Encyclopedie as a source for their articles onEgypt. But, whereas Warburton repeatedly asserted that the hiero-glyphics were not created as sacerdotal writings meant to conceal thedivine mysteries, the Encyclopedists misconstrued his thought to mean

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THE METAPHOR OF HIEROGLYPHICSprecisely that a cast of priests used this writing for their secret pur-poses.Strangely enough, Herder misinterpreted Warburton in the sameway, although for entirely different reasons. In 1774 Herder turnedtoward mysticism. In this mood he wrote his Alteste Urkunde desMenschengeschlechts, in which he explained that the First Book ofMoses was indeed the oldest document of mankind since it was writtenby God himself. Nature is God's first hieroglyph, i.e., His sensuousmanifestation intended to be read and understood by man. The wordsof the Bible are also God's own hieroglyphs meant to interpret naturefor man. God taught Adam to feel and understand nature; and man,in his first enthusiastic shock at seeing the creation, learned to speak,write, and read in one moment. Therefore the origins of language andof writing, being the necessary expression of man's first perception ofnature, are not, as Warburton had claimed, separate actions, partlydue to man's own inventiveness. All of man's intellectual activity isdue to God. In his chapter, "Unter der Morgenrote," whose title re-calls Jakob Boehme's Aurora, Herder says that we re-experience theseparation of light and darkness every morning in the rising of thesun; every dawn, therefore, is a hieroglyph of the original creation.And he continues: "The morning painter is the only painter of creation,and the morning singer, who praises God in the entire living, awakeningnature is the poet of creation."Against a genuine religious backgroundHerder emphasizes here the aesthetic aspects of nature. He sincerelyendeavoredto combine Shaftesbury'saesthetic thought with the mysti-cal thought of Hamann who, by the way, also speaks of the hieroglyphi-cal Adam. The Alteste Urkundeprovidedthe generation of the romanti-cists with a wealth of enthusiastic thoughts, images, and feelings-oneof the foremost being the idea that nature is a symbol and a hieroglyphof God.The morning painter who fulfilled the hieroglyphic function assignedto him by Herder was Philipp Otto Runge. Of all his allegoricalsketches and drawings only one painting was carried out in color:"Morning." It abounds in symbolism; colors and flowers, the gesturesof the allegorical figures, and the ornamental arabesques which sur-round the painting sing, in a hieroglyphical way, the praise of God'screation. Runge's paintings, meant to be symbolical, contain sucheminently literary thoughts as that of different levels of symbolic in-terpretation. In his "Lehrstunde der Nachtigal" he claims that thesame idea occurs three times, "becoming more and more abstract andsymbolic the more it is freed from the painting." Runge painted land-scapes with the idea in mind that landscape, too, is only a symbol, anexternalization of the eternal spirit, God. However, like Herder, hisaesthetic interest in nature often covered and concealed his sincerereligious thoughts. He even goes beyond Herder when he claims that

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COMPARATIVE LITERATUREit is man's creativeness which breathes the living spirit into everything."Man urges his own feelings onto the objects thereby giving to every-thing meaning and language." The shift of emphasis is from God toHis creation, i.e., to man and nature.Runge was more firmly grounded in mystic tradition than his ro-mantic friends realized. His allegorical plates contain a number oftraditional emblems, such as the serpent who devours his own tail-that age-old symbol of the universe. In more than one respect hisartistic impetus is similar to that of Blake, with whose work he hadbecome acquainted while studying art in Copenhagen. Both artistsliked to illustrate poetry, thus consciously and intentionally followingthe emblematic tradition which expressed an idea simultaneously inwords and in drawings. But above all, both, although each painted inhis own personal and highly individualistic fashion, were still part ofthe Renaissance tradition with its strong tendency toward symboliza-tion.

Runge himself, as well as his contemporaries, Tieck, Gorres, andFriedrich Schlegel, repeatedly called his paintings hieroglyphical.And Runge strongly influenced his friends, as the following passagefrom Friedrich Schlegel's Ansichten und Ideen von der christlichenKunst (summer 1804) shows:Hiitte nun ein solcher [i.e., an original genius] erst den richtigen Begriff von derKunst wiedergefunden,daBdie symbolischeBedeutungund Andeutungg6ttlicherGeheimnissehr eigentlicherZweck,alles iibrige aber nur Mittel, dienendesGliedund Buchstabesei, so wiirde er vielleicht merkwiirdigeWerke ganz neuer Arthervorbringen:Hieroglyphen,wahrhafteSinnbilder,abermehraus Naturgefiihlenund Naturansichten oder Ahnungen willkiihrlich zusammengesetzt,als sich an-schlieBend an die alte Weise der Vorwelt. Eine Hieroglyphe, ein g6ttlichesSinnbild soil jedes wahrhaft so zu nennendeGemahldesein; die Frage ist abernur,ob der Mahlerseine Allegorie sich selbst schaffen,oderaber sich an die altenSinnbilderanschlieBensoil, die durchTradition gegeben und geheiligt sind...

Schlegel had used the metaphor of the hieroglyphic already in hisGesprdch iiber die Poesie (1800). All spiritual allusions and Spieleof art are for him only distant copies of the infinite Spiel of the world,that work of art of the Creator which continually reshapes and reflectsitself. Every beautiful mythology is nothing but the hieroglyphic ex-pression of the surrounding nature, "in that illumination of imagina-tion and love which is produced by the spark of ecstasy." Therefore,individual passions, events, and situations do not in themselves con-stitute a work of art; to the true artist all these are only allusions tosomething higher and infinite; they are "hieroglyphics of the oneeternal love and of the sacred life of formative nature."We are here at the very center of romantic thinking. The work ofart, although the focusing point of most romantic theories, is never"the thing itself," but always a reflection of the higher truth as re-vealed in nature. Nature is a hieroglyph of God; and art is a hieroglyph

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THE METAPHOR OF HIEROGLYPHICSof nature and God. God himself, in the act of creation, wrote, as a workof art, the book of nature; man, the image of God, writes, in his creativeact, the book of art. Both God and man write their books in hiero-glyphics that can be understood by the initiated. Diderot's idea ofthe connection of the genius with the hieroglyphs of art is elaboratedhere in Christian terms. In his very last lectures, given in Dresdena few weeks before his death, Schlegel still included these significantwords:Die Kunst... selbst ihrem innersten Wesen nach.. .ist] eine hihere geistigeNatursprache [the word Natursprache is taken from Jakob Boehme], oder wennman will, eine innere Hieroglyphen-Schrift und Ursprache der Seele... Denn derSchliissel dazu liegt nicht etwa in einer vorher getroffenen Verabredung, wie beider sinnreich sch6nen, aber doch bloB conventionell sinnbildlichen orientalischenBlumensprache,sondern in dem Gefiihl und in der Seele selbst; deren ewigeGrundgefiihlehier, soil man sagen-erweckt, oder wieder erweckt werden, indieseminnernSeelenworteder wahrenKunst...Thus, the hieroglyph of art is not an "arbitrarysign"; it is the verykey that opens the path to the truth of the soul; it is, in Swedenborg'slanguage, a hieroglyphic key leading to, and expressing, the innermostsecrets of life.

Although Schlegel was fascinated by Champollion's deciphering ofthe Egyptian hieroglyphics and studied his publication thoroughly,he felt that Champollionhad only taken the first step; he had, accord-ing to Schlegel, only deciphered those hieroglyphics that stand forletters of the alphabetand had omitted the much more importanthiero-glyphics that are symbols of ideas. The conception of the Egyptianhieroglyphics, cherished by the Renaissance, namely that they aremere unlinguistic symbols of ideas, still prevailed. Even for Baudelaire,who certainly knew about Champollion'sdiscovery, the hieroglyphicsstill retained their old mysterious charm, years after this charm hadbeen dispelled by scholarship.Novalis' use of the metaphor is closely linked with a number ofrelated terms and ideas, and appears, in the Fragments, in very com-plex contexts. It cannot therefore be discussed here in detail. Novalis'key word is analogy, that "magic wand" which opens the meanings ofmany of nature's and man's hieroglyphics. Novalis transforms in histhinking Fichte's ideas about the Ich and the Nicht-Ich and blendsthem with the old Christian thought of the analogy that exists betweenthe visible and the invisible world. He can therefore say that the Nicht-Ich is a symbol of the Ich; or, conversely, that man is a source of analo-gies for the world, and that the Ich has an hieroglyphical power. Oftenhe prefers such terms as Zeichen or Chiffern to the term hieroglyphic,or he speaks of Sanskrit where we would expect Egyptian. This vacilla-tion indicates that language,no matter in which specific form it appears,is for Novalis a "microcosm of signs and sounds" revealing the mys-

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COMPARATIVE LITERATUREteries of life. He says in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, which has an Egyptiansetting:

MannichfacheWege gehen die Menschen. Wer sie verfolgt und vergleicht,wird wunderlicheFiguren entstehensehn; Figuren, die zu jener groBenChiffern-schrift zu geh6renscheinen,die man iiberall,auf Fliigeln, Eierschalen, n Wolken,im Schnee ... erblickt.In ihnen ahndetman den Schliissel dieser Wunderschrift,die Sprachlehrederselben,allein die Ahndungwill sich selbst in keine feste For-men fiigen, und scheint kein hoherer Schliissel werden zu wollen... Nicht langedaraufspracheiner: Keiner Erklarungbedarfdie heilige Schrift. Wer wahrhaftspricht,ist des ewigen Lebensvoll, und wunderbarverwandtmit echten Geheim-nissen diinkt uns seine Schrift, denn sie ist ein Akkord aus des Weltalls Sym-phonie.The details of this quotation remind us of the quotation from Gidewith which we started. This is, indeed, the spiritual climate in whichmany of the French symbolists, most of all Baudelaire, lived. Baude-laire probably never read Schlegel or Novalis, but rather theirsuccessors, E. T. A. Hoffmiann, Richard Wagner, and Heine; weknow that Gide read Novalis only after the completion of the Traitedu Narcisse. Nevertheless we may say that Baudelaire's and the earlyGide's views on nature, art, and language are on the whole so closeto those of the German romanticists that the symbolists' metaphor ofthe hieroglyphic receives from the romantists' its true perspective.In addition to Schlegel, one might also consider Wackenroder,Fichte, Schelling, and Gorres, and above all Franz von Baader, whotranslated and promoted the works of St. Martin, that late eighteenth-century French mystic whose importance for the romanticists and thesymbolists needs to be emphasized. The metaphor occurs in connec-tion with mystic number symbolism, or it is a simple nietaphor forlanguage in the innumerablelanguage theories of the period. It occursas a metaphor for mythology and fable in the equally innumerablehistories and theories of ancient mythology. It is found most often inconnection with religious thought, but it is also used in idealistic philos-ophy. Wherever it appears,it representsthe nexus between the tangibleand the intangible, the finite and the infinite. It had meaning for a gen-eration that tried to reconcile the dualism of the spirit and the flesh,and to establish a correspondence between idea and form. In themany trends of thought which meet in German romanticism, it is thekey metaphorthat connects them all. In discussions of Shaftesbury andPlato, of idealistic and mystic philosophy, of mythology and linguistics-in all there was a central place for hieroglyphical thinking.1

Washington University1 This paperwas read before the Germanic Section of the Modern LanguageAssociation at the New York meeting in December1954.

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Dieckmann - Metaphor of Hieroglyphics in German Romanticism (CL v7n4 1955)