Soon after that, Hardenberg composed both his fragments and his Hymns.
An early manuscript shows us that Novalis first wrote all six of his hymns as verse. But later he reworked and condensed the first four (and much of the fifth) into a hard, glittering, quintessentially modern German prose-poetry. It was only the final hymn, the sixth, “Sensucht nach dem Tode” (“Yearning for Death”) that Novalis let stand as traditional poetry. The prose-poetry version was the one published by the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel in their magazine Athenaeum 3, n. 2, in 1800.
By inverting a traditional metaphor, the Hymnen (a series quite as notable in its ways as The City of Dreadful Night, The Waste Land, and The Bridge, though it lacks the two modern series’ urban specificity) introduce an astonishing trope into the galaxy of European — and finally Western — rhetoric: To those of a certain sensibility (often those in deep grief, or those with a secret sorrow not to be named before the public), the day, sunlight, and the images of air and light that usually sign pleasure are actually hateful and abhorrent. Night alone is the time such souls can breathe freely, be their true selves, and come into their own. For them, night is the beautiful, wondrous, and magical time — not the day.
In the second half of that extraordinary fifth Hymn, in which both prose and verse finally combine, Hardenberg even goes so far as to Christianize his “Nachtbegeisterung” (“Enthusiasm for the night”): Night, not day, is where the gods dwell as constellations. It was through the night the three kings traveled under their star seeking Jesus, and it was in the night they found Him. Similarly it was during the night that the stone was rolled away from the tomb and, thus, it was the night that the Resurrection occurred.
Writers who were to take up this trope of the inversion of the traditional values of night and day — in both cases, directly from Novalis — and make it their own include both Poe and Baudelaire. And the great Second Act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde has been called simply “Novalis set to music.” Certainly Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night is the poetic moment through which it erupted into the forefront of English poetic awareness. The Christianizing moment makes the trope Novalis’s own, but writers were to seize that basic night/day inversion — Byron for Childe Harold and Manfred, Poe for C. August Dupin — till we can almost think of it as the romantic emblem.
By comparison to Novalis (or Thomson), Crane’s Bridge is overwhelmingly a poem of the day — yet it has its crepuscular moments, where one is about to enter into night:
From Crane’s opening “Proem,” addressing the Bridge:
Though Crane is the author, this is Novalis (does Crane’s capital “C” in “City” consciously link it to Thomson’s?) — and Novalis by way of Thomson, at that!
As well, in The Bridge, there is the pair of aubades, “The Harbor Dawn” and “Cutty Sark,” when night is being left behind.
But let us linger on the Thomson/Novalis connection a little longer. Eventually it will lead us back to Crane, and by an interesting circumlocution:
Thomson not only took Novalis’s pen name and Novalis’s famous poetic night/day inversion for his own. Working with another friend, he taught himself German and translated Novalis’s Hymns: though his translation has never been published in its entirety, the sections reprinted by various biographers are quite lovely; the manuscript has been at the Bodley Head since 1953. Thomson also appropriated, however, a bit of Novalis’s biography.
When he was eighteen and an assistant army schoolmaster in Ballincollig near Cork, Thomson met the not quite fourteen-year-old daughter of his friend Charles Bradlaugh’s armourer-sergeant, Mathilda Weller, with whom he was quite taken. They danced together at a young people’s party; presumably they had a handful of deep and intense conversations. Two years later, before she reached her sixteenth year, Mathilda died.
In later years, Thomson claimed that her death wholly blighted the remainder of his life. (Mathilda just happened to be the name Novalis had given to the character inspired by Sophie in his novel of the mystical quest for the blue amaranthus in Heinrich von Ofterdingen.) On his own death from dipsomania, at age forty-seven in 1882, Thomson was buried with a lock of Mathilda’s hair in the coffin with him. But it’s quite possible Thomson used this suspiciously Novalis-like fable to excuse the fact that he did not marry, also to excuse his increasing drunkenness, and quite possibly as a cover for promiscuous homosexuality in the alleys and back streets of London, where he eventually finished his life. While Friedrich von Hardenberg survived Sophie von Kühn by only four years — tuberculosis killed him shortly before he turned twenty-nine (as it would kill the twenty-three-year-old Greenberg) — James Thomson survived Mathilda Weller by nearly thirty.
An incident in Thomson’s young life that may have come far closer to blighting the remainder of it than Mathilda’s death occurred in 1862, however, when Thomson was twenty-seven — and still teaching in the army. Thomson and some other schoolmasters were at a pond. Though it was a private lake and no bathing was allowed, someone dared one among them to swim out to a boat in the middle. Thomson was recognized but, when questioned about the incident later, refused to give the names of his companions. For this, he was demoted to schoolmaster 4th Class, then dismissed from the army.
Whether any of the other schoolmasters involved were dismissed has not been recorded.
Thomson’s earliest biographer, Henry Salt, makes little of the incident and claims Thomson was not guilty of any personal misconduct but was simply unlucky enough to be part of “the incriminated party.”
But Thomson’s 1965 biographer, William David Schaefer, feels the explanation is wildly improbable, detecting about it some sort of Victorian cover up — possibly involving alcoholism: Thomson’s drinking had already established itself as a problem as far back as 1855. Perhaps the young men at the pond were both rowdy and soused. I would go Schaefer one further, however, and suggest there was some sort of sexual misconduct involved as well, for which the swimming incident was, indeed, used as the official excuse to expel the group of possibly embarrassing fellows. But we do not know for sure.
What we do know is that Thomson now went to London and began a career of writing scathingly radical articles for the various political journals of the times — often living off his friends, and drinking more and more. And it was only now that (some of) his poems began to refer to a secret sorrow — presumably Mathilda Weller’s death. In London Thomson lived with his friend Charles Bradlaugh (and Bradlaugh’s wife and two daughters) on and off for more than twelve years as a kind of tolerated, even fondly approved of, if occasionally drunken, uncle — until a year or so after The City of Dreadful Night was published in the March and May issues of Bradlaugh’s magazine, The National Reformer. (Bradlaugh skipped the April issue because of objections from readers; but still other readers, among them Bertram Dobell, wrote to ask when the poem would continue; and publication resumed.) But with Thomson’s newfound fame, the poet-journalist’s drinking escalated violently — and the two men finally broke over it.