Reading and the Art of Leisure in Morike's "Wald-Idylle"

In 1814, the painter Georg Friedrich Kersting produced a small canvas entitled Lesender beim Lampenlicht (fig. I). The alliterative appellation is at odds with the prosaic theme. Depicted is a young man, wearily ensconced in a stack of papers or unbound volume. Several sealed letters are visible on his desk, and one supposes him working late into the night. A bell-cord indicates both the availability of a servant or secretary and the reader's own isolation. The lamp, a brass fixture with three candles and an opaque, black shade, casts patterns of shadow on the walls and ceiling, emphasizing the drabness of the surroundings and creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia--effects reinforced by the drawn window-shade, which extends the pale green of the adjacent wall. The draperies and the lamp itself import a degree of ornament into an otherwise austere room, whose furnishings, along with the complete absence of books, denote a professional, perhaps legal study. The spartan character of the space is consistent with the need for concentration (Sammlung), of which distraction and beauty are kindred foils. Emil Staiger, in suggesting that nocturnal silence envelops Kersting's reader with a "magical tone," occludes the sheer disenchantment of a world defined by the utility of literacy and the partitioning of the household into atomized cells. ¹ The solitary scene presents a modern, bureaucratic counterpart to the gotisches Studierzimmer that Goethe's Faust, through recourse to magic, endeavors to flee.

The oppressively bare wall--the fact that Kersting's painting contains no painting--stresses a pervasive rationality and provides a field for the projection of shadows that direct attention to the lamp. Its glow muted, its flame emphatically eclipsed, the lamp is the source of an entropic diffusion that defines this space by its outer limits. Much as the plain wall is symmetrical with the drawn shade, both of them screens against the outside world, so the lamp displaces the hearth, whose unity of light and warmth fosters intimacy, pulling people and things into its magical orbit. While the lamp at the center of Kersting's composition is the figure of an increasingly utilitarian world, the hearth is the focus of a nostalgia for a home-life as yet unsundered by the forces of industrialization. Both nineteenth-century literature and social theory, recently discussed by Vincent Pecora as tandem responses to modern disenchantment, found a repertoire of positive imagery in the archaic household, locus of "a new sense of the sacred." ²

This "new sense" can be specified with reference to Eduard Mörike's Der alte Turmhahn, a narrative poem that attests to the coalescence of the sacred with the intimate interior. A bronze weathercock, worn by more than a century of seasonal extremes, is removed from the roof of a village church and affixed to the rectory stove. A kind of family mascot, it is privy to the domestic scene, noting the many articles--books, furnishings, utensils, keepsakes--that (like the warmth radiating from the fire) fill this space and constitute it as a milieu. ³

A profane object to begin with, the metal bird joins an array of inanimate things rendered sacred not only by the proximity to the church but by the stove itself, whose decorations give it the semblance of a cathedral (Münsterbau). ⁴ The weathercock, brought to life by the affections of his patron, suggests how an aesthetics, like "primitive" magic, "grants living power [...] to things increasingly dominated by the dead hand of rationality." ⁵

Animated by the "living power" that issues from the stove, the weathercock, still sensitive to the whims of climate, bears witness to a communal intimacy that is heightened by an awareness of the elements outside: "Davon vernahm ich manches Wort, / Dieweil der Ofen ein guter Hort / Für Kind und Kegel und alte Leut', / Zu plaudern, wann es wind't und schneit" (ll. 104-07). ⁶ Standing at...