The prematurely dying Romantics did not simply die — they, so to speak, threw down the gauntlet to fate and did violence to death. Life slipped out of their hands (“It is truly odd that nowadays everything to which I set my hand miscarries; every time I decide to take a certain step, the ground slips from under my feet,” Kleist wrote in the year of his death [Werke und Briefe, 4:485]), and they sought refuge from life in death. “Death is life’s main prize,” said Novalis (Ausgewählte Werke, 3:6), who possibly experienced the relativity of life and death more deeply than anyone. Since the world is fraught with disappointments, failures, and limitations, it does not permit even death to unfold its full nature. Heidegger came to the following view on the notion of death held by everyday consciousness, surmising as it does a rigid contrast between life and death and thinking on a mutually exclusive basis in all things:
The analysis of the phrase “one dies” reveals unambiguously the kind of Being which belongs to Being-towards-Death. In such a way of talking, death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for oneself, and is therefore no threat. . Dying is leveled off to an occurrence which reaches
Dasein
, to be sure, but belongs to nobody in particular. . In the way of talking which we have characterized, death is spoken of as a “case” which is constantly occurring. Death gets passed off as always something “actual”; its character as a possibility gets concealed, and so are the other two items that belong to it — the fact that it is non-relational and that it is not to be outstripped. . This evasive concealment in the face of death dominates everydayness so stubbornly that, in being with another, the “neighbors” often still keep talking the “dying person” into the belief that he will escape death and soon return to the tranquillized everydayness of the world of his concern.
(Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, § 51).
For Romantics who died early, death itself was life come to fruition; it was not something that would ensue sometime in the future but that threatened one day by day. Confronting death was by no means a flight from life: for Romantic melancholics, there was nothing to escape from. Death thereby became a possibility, an experiment in which the individual was finally able to find himself; only in death was he able to become absolute, since life is full of failures and dispersions. “No more let Life divide what Death can join together,” Shelley wrote on the death of Keats (“Adonais,” 53). We successors are of the opinion that an ebbing of the vital force is responsible for premature death. But anyone who, even if only fleetingly, has instinctively felt his own ephemerality and irreplaceability, and has come to realize that there are boundaries beyond which solitude is the sole possible state, is well aware that at such moments the “life force” does not ebb but springs forth. For the Romantics, the whole of life was one such moment; the explosion of the vital force destroyed degenerated life on behalf of Life, as it were, under the spell of another state that was, on all counts, more promising than the one at hand. They acquired superhuman strength merely in order to die like that; they bore witness not only to the freest death but also to the bewilderment and seclusion in which they, too, could recount, along with no less melancholic Job, the words he addressed to God: “My face is foul with weeping, and on my eyelids is the shadow of death” (Job 16:16).
Chapter 7. LOVE AND MELANCHOLIA
Romantic creative genius consisted in the melancholic acceptance of death, the recognition that the individual, yearning for self-determination, was unable to achieve that goal in this world. Creative genius rejects any compromise; melancholia, however, warns that this rejection is not just the result of careful deliberation, a conscious decision, but also a matter of fate: melancholic geniuses cannot do other than choose death. The attraction of melancholics to suicide was always conspicuous; during the period of Romanticism, this attraction, by the force of circumstances, entered into an alliance with creative genius. Originally, “genius” meant a guardian spirit — it is an irony of history that in the modern era it was death, of all things, that sat as a guardian spirit on man’s shoulders. Nothing was more typical of the Romantic era, however, than that public opinion held love, next to death, to be the other genius. If love was a genius, and it, along with death, nurtured melancholia, then it stood to reason that love and melancholia were also bound to meet. The correlation of love and death peaked with Romanticism (Liebestod), though for the ancient Greeks Eros and Thanatos had predicated each other.