Brentano’s Godwi (1801), the sub-title of which, “An Unmanageable Novel by Maria,” shows its character, is a far better production.  It has the strong, full-blooded, passionate love of life characteristic of its author, “the many-souled” Brentano, whose Romantic irony resulted from his being ashamed of his sentimentality, and whose hatred of philistinism was caused by his fear of his own latent tendency toward that point of view.  The plot of Godwi runs wild, but the satire and the interspersed lyrics make it interesting reading.  Romantic irony can go no farther than in this book, in which the author’s own death-bed scene is portrayed and in which the preceding parts of the work are referred to by page and line—­“This is the pond into which I fall on page so and so.”

If Brentano’s Rosary cycle (1809) is somewhat unpleasantly superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes sex and religion like a mystic of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or when he expresses the note of the people.  His use of the supernatural, of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as The Lore-Lay, the legend of which was actually invented by Brentano.  Like all Romanticists, Brentano was a poet of incomplete works, of moods which abandoned him before the artistic perfection of his effort was reached; but his suggestive touches, and, above all, his constant use of the refrain in all phases and genres, especially to emphasize and summarize his musical consciousness, are a striking proof of the French adage, “Quand le coeur chante, c’est toujours un refrain.”  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.