The one novel of Eichendorff which has lived, From the Life of a Good-for-nothing (1826), is a last Romantic shoot of Friedrich Schlegel’s doctrine of divine laziness—­a delightful story, abounding in those elements which perennially endear Romanticism to the young heart, for it is full of nature and love and fortunate happenings.  What could be more charming than the spirit in which the hero throws away the vegetables in his garden and puts in flowers?  What more naive than his spyings, his fiddlings?  The strength of the story lies in the fact that while its head is in the clouds, its feet are on the ground.  There is no sentimentalizing, no breaking down of class distinctions; the good-for-nothing marries his lady-love, but she is of his own rank.  The pseudo-Romanticism of modern novels is avoided; the hero neither wins a kingdom nor is he the long-lost heir of some potentate—­he remains just what he was, a lovable good-for-nothing.  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.

Only in his charming fairy-tale, Undine (1811), does Fouque rise above his milieu.  Undine, the source of which, according to Fouque himself, is to be found in a work of Paracelsus on supernatural beings, remains one of the best creations of the Romantic school and, like Eichendorff’s novel, has become international, not only in its original form but in the opera by Lortzing (first performance, Hamburg, 1845).  The value of the story lies in the author’s power to make the reader believe in Undine, the water sprite, and in the presentation of a new nature-mythology.  All Romanticists have consciously or unconsciously attempted to satisfy Friedrich Schlegel’s demand for anew mythology:  Fouque’s earth, air, and water spirits people the elements with graceful forms from the world of nature; the nymph Undine in the form of a flowing stream embraces even in death the grave of her lover.