Incontestably, since the death of Goethe, Ludwig Uhland has been, at
least in the hearts of the people, the Laureate of Germany. He is not a
poet who took the world by storm with his earliest productions; but he
has been gradually growing in favour and general acceptance, until his
death is now deplored as a national affliction. He died quietly at
Tübingen, the place of his birth, on the 13th of November 1862, in his
seventy-sixth year, having been born on the 26th of April 1787. He was
said never to have known a day’s illness until his last, which was
occasioned by his attending the funeral of a friend and brother poet,
Justin Kerner, in inclement weather.
The parents of the poet were Johann Friedrich Uhland, Secretary to the
University of Tübingen, and Elizabeth (born) Hoser, daughter of one
Hoser who held a similar office. He had a brother, Fritz, who died in
his ninth year, and a sister, Luise, who married Meyer, the pastor of
Pfullingen, near Reutlingen. His education conduced to bringing out the
talent that was latent in him, as it was the custom of Kauffmann, the
rector of the Tübingen school, to give free themes to be worked out in
prose or verse, according to the inclinations of his scholars; and the
young Uhland generally chose the latter, and was early distinguished in
his choice. Even at school he was known as an enthusiastic student of
German and Scandinavian antiquities. At the age of sixteen and seventeen
he produced many compositions of merit, but only two, ‘Der Sterbender
Held,’ and ‘Der Blinder König,’ found their way into that collection of
his poems which was published in 1815. At this time he was hesitating
between the professions of law and medicine. As a youth, though given to
long walks alone in the beautiful neighbourhood of Tübingen, he was
distinguished by his love of social manly exercises, particularly of
skating. Two of his earliest poetical friends were Schröder, who was
afterwards drowned in the Baltic, and Harpprecht, who fell in the
Russian campaign of Napoleon. This is the friend who is alluded to in
the exquisite poem of ‘Die Ueberfahrt’ as “brausend vor uns allen,”
while the fatherly friend spoken of there is Uhland’s maternal uncle,
Hoser, the pastor of Schmiden. He was also much influenced in his tastes
by Haug of Stuttgard, and Gortz, Professor of Ancient Literature in
Tübingen. Later he became acquainted with Justin Kerner, whose talent he
placed above his own, Oehlenschläger the Danish poet, and Varnhagen von
Ense the historian. Goethe he had seen once when a boy in 1797, and he
records his impressions in the ‘Münstersage.’ In 1810 Uhland went to
Paris, in order to work at the treasures of Romance literature contained
in the Imperial Library. On his return he applied himself to practice as
an advocate at Stuttgard, without remitting his poetic labours. His
tragedy, ‘Herzog Ernst von Schwaben,’ which belongs to this period,
elicited the warm admiration of Goethe. In 1819 he was elected a deputy
of the Würtemberg States. In 1820 he married Emma Vischer, a daughter,
by a former marriage, of a celebrated woman, Frau Emilie Pistorius, to
whose memory Rückert dedicated a poem called ‘Rosen auf das Grab einer
edlen Frau.’ In 1834 he was made Professor of German Literature at
Tübingen. He distinguished himself as a political character in 1848,
though without joining the extreme Liberal party, and on one occasion
presented an address to the King of Würtemberg, praying for the
restoration of the Constitution, the prayer of which was immediately
granted, as most prayers of the kind were at that particular time, from
prudential motives. He had already resigned, in 1833, his office of
deputy, finding it incompatible with his professorship, and had returned
to his residence at Tübingen. His marriage with Emma Vischer was in many
respects a fortunate one. He appears to have lived with her in great
harmony till his death, and the dowry she brought him, though not large,
was sufficient to keep from his door the anxieties which usually beset a
priest of the Muses. On the other hand, the marriage was not blest by
children. There are old pictures extant of Uhland as a child, with a
fair honest face and powdered hair. His later face is now familiar to
the Germans. Its first impression is decidedly heavy. The upper-lip is
long, the cheekbones high, the eyes not large, the forehead broad over
the brows, and narrower above—altogether an ordinary honest man’s face,
nothing more. A phrenologist in a steamboat, to whom the poet was
unknown, once guessed him to be a watchmaker, adding, to console him,
that every one could not be a poet. Uhland’s manners appear to have been
plain and unpretending—rather those of a man who makes friends than
acquaintances. Yet those who knew him, knew him as a hearty and even
jovial companion. He was shy, and shunned publicity, and could not bear
to be treated as a literary lion. On one occasion, when he was presented
with a crown of laurel, he hung it and left it on an oak beside the
road. His habits were early and healthy. In summer he lived in his open
garden-house, and at ten o’clock every morning used to go out for a long
walk, prefaced by a plunge in the Neckar when the weather was genial. At
Tübingen, which is a very pretty quaint little university town, lying in
that finely-broken country which intervenes between the Black Forest and
the Alps, he owned a plain house on the country side of the Neckar
bridge, only ornamented by Corinthian pilasters in front; behind it was
his garden, arranged in terraces, and his “Weinberg,” from which he made
his own ordinary supply of wine. He was of social habits, but, at the
same time, fond of musing and solitude. The homely but intellectual
society of Tübingen fully sufficed him. He was not a man to care for
that of those above him in station, as his sterling independence shrank
from patronage in the same way in which his diffidence shrank from
general notoriety.
Politically, Uhland was a people’s man without being a Radical. His love
of medieval literature imbued his mind with respect for hereditary rank,
station, and honours, while his love of freedom and optimist views of
the future of his country and mankind in general, made him a sturdy
opponent of any attempt to infringe on what he called “the good old
right.” In England he might have been a Tory or Conservative Whig. In
Germany, it has pleased the powers that be to count him with the
Democratic party; hence the admiration or policy which prompted Louis
Napoleon to make a national affair of the funeral of Béranger, was
wanting in the case of Uhland, who was buried, as he had lived, in
privacy. Although this does not tell well for the temper of the
Government of Würtemberg, and fully accounts for the hatred of
Englishmen which is said to be dominant at Stuttgard, the deceased poet
would probably not have wished it otherwise. No doubt he was, as far as
the honours that proceed from the great are concerned, to the end of his
life an unacknowledged and unappreciated man. But he had all he
wanted—robust health, self-respect, and the respect of those he loved,
sufficient worldly means, and that divine gift which Homer himself
thought a full compensation even for blindness.
The uneventfulness of Uhland’s life, his unpretending presence, his very
look and bearing, his intense love for nature, the simplicity of his
habits, his steady domestic character, and unaffected religious feeling,
all bring to mind our own Wordsworth; and in his poems, as in those of
Wordsworth, the gems are to be sought among the shorter compositions.
But Wordsworth made it his business to sit down at the Lakes and paint
nature in words, as the pre-Raphaelite or naturalistic school of
landscape painters sit down and paint her in colours. Wordsworth wooed
the beauty of nature immediately and for itself. His human figures are
merely put in roughly to help out the foreground. But Uhland rarely
paints nature directly; he rather uses natural scenery as a background
to his “genre” pictures, which interest chiefly by presenting the phases
of human feeling, and the joys and sorrows of mankind. All his poems are
alive with the breath of Spring—fresh, luminous, and joyous; but we are
aware of his surroundings rather from the effects they produce upon him
than from any actual descriptions. His poems have the ring of the true
singer; an internal melody permeates his verse, capricious rather than
monotonous, changing its airs and cadences like the voice of a bird,
rather than flowing on with the mechanical jingling of a musical box.
This is the quality which gives the bardic stamp to the compositions of
a Burns, a Béranger, a Tennyson, and a want of which is felt in the
glowing rhetoric of Byron, and in
“The beauty for ever unchangingly bright,
Like the soft sunny lapse of a summer day’s light,”
which belongs to the poetry of Moore. In matter and choice of subject,
and in some measure in respect of treatment, he has much in common with
Walter Scott. His preparatory studies were much of the same nature,
consisting in the history, scenery, and legends of his own country. He
has done for Germany what even Schiller and Goethe with all their
greatness omitted to do in the same degree. He has immortalised her
local recollections. Second only to the man who leads an army to rescue
his country from the stranger, such a man is a patriot of the true kind,
whatever the colour of his politics may be. Some poems he has written
are like those exquisite ancient miniature pictures on a gold ground,
best to be understood and appreciated by the educated connoisseur, while
others are so plain in language and sentiment that they have sunk into
the hearts of the people, and will flow for ever from the lips of the
people in the shape of national songs. Uhland differs most from the twin
stars of Germany—Schiller and Goethe—in that his poetry is more
exclusively objective than theirs. Goethe was all wrapt in his glorious
self, and his all-absorbing devotion to art. Like Horace’s hero, a world
might have fallen in ruins about him and he would not have quailed; and,
indeed, all the crash of empires and clash of armies in which he lived
left his brow as serene as that of one of the gods of Epicurus. But
Uhland could not sing through the humiliation of his country, and his
voice sank within him through the French occupation; but when Germany
arose at length, and with incredible hardihood pushed back the flood of
invasion, Uhland, like Körner and others, did manful service, not by
fighting and falling among the foremost, as Körner did, but with even
better judgment, as husbanding his gifts, becoming the Tyrtæus of the
Liberation War. His songs of that time have a deep and manly note
peculiarly their own, and they are such as no lesser circumstances could
have called forth. Uhland, again, as distinguished from Schiller and
Goethe, was the prominent poet of the Romantic school. But he was to
them what Socrates was to the Sophists—counted with them, but not of
them. From whatever source he derived his inspirations, he always
remained fast rooted in truth and nature. The unreal and morbid
sentimentality of Tieck and Novalis was unknown to him; nor did he share
the Romeward tendencies of Friedrich Schlegel, while fully appreciating
the beauty of the Roman Catholic ritual and associations, and freely
interweaving them with the golden tissue of his compositions. On the
whole, he is the most German of German poets, as he owes none of his
inspiration to “the gods of Greece,” and little to any foreign source,
except those old Romance writers whom he studied at Paris; but then it
must be borne in mind that the early threads of history in France and
Germany are closely interwoven, and the empire of the Franks in
particular belonged as much to one as to the other.
In attempting to present to the English reader some of the best of the
poems of Uhland, we must premise that to translate a perfect poem from
one language into another is simply an impossibility, and difficult
exactly in proportion to the degree in which any poem approaches
perfection. The special difficulty of translating German poetry into
English, and _vice versâ_, consists in this, that though the two
languages are not in their basis much more than dialects of the same
original stock, yet German is as generally dissyllabic as English is
monosyllabic, owing in part to English having discarded inflection where
German retains it. We are aware that many of Uhland’s poems are already
known through very good translations, one of those most highly spoken of
being that of Mr Platt. Longfellow has also done freely into English
verse the ‘Castle by the Sea,’ ‘The Black Knight,’ the ‘Luck of
Edenhall,’ and others, and has succeeded admirably in catching the
spirit of the original. Not having Mr Platt’s translations before us, as
we write in Germany, we must apologise, in our zeal for Uhland’s memory,
for attempts of our own in the same direction, in which we have tried to
reproduce as nearly as we can the ideas of the original in the metres in
which they appeared. It is impossible to find a song in the whole
collection more perfect than ‘Der Wirthin Töchterlein.’ There is not a
word or thought one would wish changed. The pathos is expressed, without
a single pathetic epithet, solely by the situation. This poem has been
interpreted politically, as alluding to the different feelings with
which three classes of patriots regard the corpse of German liberty. But
to our mind this spoils the simplicity of the picture. It is more likely
to be true that the poem was occasioned by an incident of Uhland’s
youth, since it is said that he once stopped some students who were
singing it under his window, telling them not to end it, as the end had
too close a personal interest for him. If this be true, the poem is more
complimentary to the memory of the fair maid of the inn than to the lady
who became Frau Uhland. But poets will be poets, as boys will be boys.