and the Prince of Homburg, were published, edited by the eminent poet and critic Ludwig Tieck, who also brought out, in 1826, the first collection of Kleist’s works.  Long before this time, the patriotic uprising for which he had labored with desperate zeal in his later works, had brought liberation to Germany; it was on the thirty-sixth anniversary of Kleist’s birth that Napoleon’s power was shaken by the decisive Battle of Leipzig.

Heinrich von Kleist was born into a generation that was dominated by the spirit of Romanticism.  Tieck and the Schlegels were a few years older, Fouque was of the same age as he, and Arnim and Brentano somewhat younger.  His acquaintance was largely with the authors who represented this tendency.  In his own works, however, Kleist was singularly independent of the romantic influence.  This is the more remarkable inasmuch as his character had many traits in common with the ardent spirits of the Romantic group.  His uncompromising individualism and overweening ambition, his love of travel, his enthusiastic acceptance of Rousseau’s gospel of Nature, are characteristically Romantic, and so, we may say, is his passionate patriotism.  Eccentricities he had in plenty; there was something morbid in his excessive reserve, his exaggerated secretiveness about the most important interests of his life, as there surely was in his moroseness, which deepened at times into black despair.  Goethe was most unpleasantly impressed by this abnormal quality of Kleist’s personality, and said of the younger poet:  “In spite of my honest desire to sympathize with him, I could not avoid a feeling of horror and loathing, as of a body beautifully endowed by nature, but infected with an incurable disease.”  That this judgment was unduly harsh is evident enough from the confidence and affection that Kleist inspired in many of the best men of his time.

Whatever may have been Kleist’s personal peculiarities, his works give evidence of the finest artistic sanity and conscience.  His acute sense of literary form sets him off from the whole generation of Romanticists, who held the author’s personal caprice to be the supreme law of poetry, and most of whose important works were either medleys or fragments.  He was his own severest critic, and labored over his productions, as he did over his own education, with untiring energy and intense concentration.  A less scrupulous author would not have destroyed the manuscript of Robert Guiscard because he could not keep throughout its action the splendid promise of the first act.  His works are usually marked by rare logical and artistic consistency.  Seldom is there any interruption of the unity and simple directness of his actions by sub-plots or episodes, and he scorned the easy theatrical devices by which the successful playwrights of his day gained their effects.  Whether in drama or story, his action grows naturally out of the characters and the situations.  Hence the marvelous fact that his dramas can be performed with hardly an alteration, though the author, never having seen any of them on the stage, lacked the practical experience by which most dramatists learn the technique of their art.