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.
Seld