that is to say as youth and grown man, had had experience of nothing
but the triumphs of baseness and its persecution of all rectitude, all
freedom of opinion. He had never been able to lift his eyes from the
sheet of paper he was writing on, without seeing pallid fear of every
great passion, of ideals, of youth itself, enthroned in high places,
side by side with the animal instinct of self-preservation and animal
self-indulgence--the Metternich and Gentz principle. He had given up
none of the convictions of his youth and manhood, but the world to
him was draped in mourning weeds. He had the feeling in Germany of
sitting at the bottom of the sea, a diving-bell providing him with
just enough air to keep him from suffocation. In Paris he had breathed
fresh air. There the light of the sun, human voices, the sounds of life
had enraptured him. Now, down among the fishes, he shivered with cold.
He suffered the most terrible ennui. The stillness made him ill; the
narrowness of everything galled him to the quick.
He describes himself as one of those natures which cannot in the long
run endure the "solo music" of existence. "Symphonies of Beethoven or
thunder-storms" were a necessity to him. He was one of the people who
feel themselves out of place in a box at the theatre, who sit from
choice in the pit, in the middle of the crowd.
It seemed to him as if in Germany the bullion of life were minted
underground, in the silence of midnight, like counterfeiters' coin.
Those who worked did not enjoy, and those who enjoyed, who in the
light of day set the money in circulation that had been coined in
fear and trembling in the darkness, did not work. In France a man of
health and spirit lived a life like that of a king's messenger, who
is sent with despatches to foreign towns, never twice to the same
place, and who on his long journeys sees and enjoys life in its most
different developments; in Germany he lived like a postilion, who is
always taking the same short journey back and forwards between two
post-houses, receiving a miserable tip from fortune for his trouble.
The postilion was perfectly able to take the journey in his sleep; he
knew every stone on his ten miles of road; and this in Germany was
called thoroughness; but Börne, sitting in the little hotel in Soden,
watching the geese fighting in the yard, and studying the jealousy of
the turkey-cocks and the coquetry of the turkey-hens, was not grateful
for the opportunity of remarkable thoroughness afforded him.[3]
When the news reached him that Polignac's ministry had issued
the famous ordinances, had violated the constitution, he cried,
anticipating all the consequences of this step: "And God said, let
there be light!"
The news of the Revolution of July followed. Every day he awaited the
hour of the arrival of the newspaper with impatience; he walked out the
country road, on the lookout for the mail; if it delayed too long, he
went all the way to Höchst, where the papers came from. Soon he felt
unable to remain in Soden. He returned to Frankfort, and astonished,
electrified his environment by his fire. The silent, invalid-looking
Börne was unrecognisable; a miracle seemed to have happened; he was
young and strong again. All his old dreams seemed to have become
realities, and everything in him that he had been forcibly keeping down
sprang up again like a spring when pressure is removed.
Frankfort did not long satisfy him; presently we hear of him in Paris.
On the 7th of September he writes from Strasburg: "The first French
cockade I saw was on the hat of a peasant who passed me in Kehl coming
from Strasburg. It seemed to me like a little rainbow after the flood
of our time, a sign of peace from a reconciled God. But when the
bright tri-coloured flag greeted my eyes--oh! words cannot express
my emotion. My heart beat so violently that I was on the point of
fainting.... The flag was on the middle of the bridge, its staff
rooted in French ground, but part of the bunting waving in German air.
Ask the first Secretary of Legation you meet if this is not a breach
of international law. It was only the red stripe of the flag that
fluttered over our native soil. And this is the one colour of French
liberty that will be ours. Red, blood, blood--and alas! not blood shed
on the battlefield."
Börne is here only the mouthpiece of a feeling which had taken
possession of most of the many in Germany who were susceptible of
enthusiasm. The heroism shown by the French students, polytechnicians,
and working men during _les trois jours glorieux_ was admired as much
as in France itself, and doubly admired as the proof of an energy
which the German people appeared to have lost. There was a universal
inclination to drift into exaggerated contempt of their own want of
political aptitude and insight, their own want of ability to act at the
decisive moment.
Thus powerfully did events act upon characters like Börne, and upon the
enthusiasts who were to be found in greatest numbers in the scholarly
class. Let us complete the picture by observing their effect on the men
of the reaction.
Gentz, who had at first exulted over Charles X.'s energy, grew anxious
as the _coup d'état_ approached. "I look upon the ordinance against
newspapers and books," he writes, "as a tremendous venture, of the
success of which I am as yet by no means assured.... Such weapons
ought to be played with only by people who are sure of their strength
and of the means at their disposal. To venture into such regions means
ruin for men like Polignac and Peyronnet."[4]
As soon, however, as the first alarm had subsided, he and his spiritual
kindred set to work to take advantage of every mistake made by the
Liberals. Wisely turned to account, the after-effects of the Revolution
of July in Germany, by the occasion they gave for ruthless repression
and persecution, censorship, and imprisonment, might lame the German
Liberal movement for many a day; might (as Metternich said a few years
later of the Hambach Festival) make the anniversary of the Revolution a
day of rejoicing for the good instead of for the bad. And only a year
later, Gentz, who at times had seen the future in a very dark light,
was able to write: "Away with all gloomy forebodings now! We are not to
die, Europe is not to die, and what we love is not to die. I am proud
of never having despaired."[5]
Metternich had enough literary taste to admire Börne, and Gentz was a
fanatical Heine enthusiast. Before the Revolution of July it was still
possible to look upon Heine as essentially the poet of unhappy love and
the poetical humorist, with a touch of blasphemy and frivolity.
In the summer of 1830 Heinrich Heine was at Heligoland, dreaming on the
shore, gazing out to sea, listening to the plash of the waves. He had
given up all hope of better times. He occupied himself with reading
the few books he had taken with him--Homer, the Bible, the history of
the Lombards, and some old volumes on witches and witchcraft. He could
hardly himself believe that he had quite lately been the editor of the
_Politische Annalen_ in Munich. Two days after the Revolution of July
had taken place, but before the news of it had reached Heligoland,
he wrote, in one of his letters from that island, that he had now
determined to let politics and philosophy alone, and to devote himself
entirely to the observation of nature and to art; that all this torture
and trouble was to no purpose; that however great sacrifices he might
make in the general cause, they would be of little or no avail; the
world, doubtless, did not stand still, but it moved in a circle,
with no result whatever; when he was young and inexperienced, he had
believed that even if the individual perished in the war of human
liberation, the great cause would be victorious in the end; now he
recognised the fact that humanity, like the ocean, moved according to
fixed laws of ebb and flow.
Even if these expressions have been strung together at a later period,
even if the letters are not genuine, but a fragment of memoir inserted
later, for the sake of contrast, in the book on Börne[6], they will
undoubtedly give us a correct picture of Heine's mental attitude at
that time.
On the 6th of August he writes: "I was sitting reading Paul
Warnefried's _History of the Lombards,_ when the thick packet of
newspapers, with the warm, glowing-hot news, arrived from the mainland.
Each item was a sunbeam, wrapped in printed paper, and together they
kindled my soul into a wild glow. I felt as if I could set the whole
ocean, to the very North Pole, on fire, with the red heat of enthusiasm
and mad joy that glowed within me." It was all like a dream to him; the
name Lafayette especially was like the echo of one of the stories of
his earliest childhood; he could hardly believe that the man who had
ridden in front of the grandfathers of the present generation in the
American War of Independence was once more on horseback, the hero of
the nation. He felt as if he must go to Paris and see it for himself.
He writes with a passionate fervour, which he soon feels obliged to
temper with a touch of self-contempt: "Lafayette, the tri-colour flag,
the Marseillaise.... It intoxicates me. Bold, ardent hopes spring up,
like trees with golden fruit and with branches that shoot up wildly,
till their leaves touch the clouds.... My longing for rest is gone.
I know once more what I desire, what I ought to, what I must, do....
I am the son of the Revolution, and again I take into my hand the
charmed weapons, over which my mother spoke the magic spell.... Flowers,
flowers! that I may crown my head for the death struggle. And the lyre,
too; give me the lyre! that I may sing a song of battle.... Words
like flaming stars, that shoot down from the sky, set palaces on fire,
and illuminate huts.... Words like burnished javelins, that whirr up
into the seventh heaven and transfix the pious hypocrites who have
insinuated themselves into the holy of holies.... I am all gladness
and song, all sword and flame, and quite possibly mad."
Among other things, he tells how the fisherman who some days later
rowed him out to the sandbank from which they bathed, told him the news
smilingly, with the words: "The poor people have won the victory."
Heine expresses his astonishment at the correct instinct of the common
man. And yet the exact opposite was the real state of matters; it was
the rich people who in the end were and remained the victors.
But an utterance such as the last quoted suffices to show the light
in which German authors regarded the Revolution of July. It inspired
in them the same religious emotion with which forty years previously
the leading spirits of the Germany of that day had regarded the great
Revolution. It was not to them the result of the strength of the
Liberal bourgeoisie, and of their ability to persuade the lower classes
to work and shed their blood for them; it was the general signal for
the political, economical, and religious emancipation of humanity. It
was the great deed that with one blow freed all nations from the yoke,
all minds from oppression.
In 1847 one of the foremost of the Radical writers of the Forties,
Robert Prutz (at the time of the Revolution only fourteen), gave an
excellent reproduction of the impression it created. "For fifteen
years," he says, "it had seemed as if the eternal generative power
of the world's history were paralysed. For fifteen years they had
been building and cementing, holding congresses, forming alliances,
spreading the net of police supervision over the whole of Europe,
forging fetters, peopling prisons, erecting gallows--and three days had
sufficed to overturn one throne, and make all the others tremble. It
was not true then, after all, what the sovereigns had boasted, what the
court romanticists had said and sung."[7] The millennial reign of the
Holy Alliance had lasted fifteen years. It seemed as if a new spring
must be at hand in the political and intellectual life of the German
people.
[1] Karl Gutzkow: _Das Kastanienwäldchen in Berlin. --Rückblicke auf
mein Leben_, p. 7.
[2] _Cf_. Emil Kuh: _Biographie Fr. Hebbels_, i. 437.
[3] _Aus meinem Tagebuch_. Soden, May 22, 1830.
[4] "Die Ordonnanz gegen die Zeitungen und Bücher betrachte ich als
ein kolossales Wagstück, dessen Ausführbarkeit mir noch nicht recht
einleuchtet.... Mit solchen Waffen darf man nur spielen, wenn man
seiner Kraft und seiner Mittel gewiss ist. Leute wie Polignac und
Peyronnet, wenn sie sich in diese Regionen versteigen, gehen zu Grunde."
[5] "Nun fort mit allen schwarzen Gedanken! Wir sterben nicht, Europa
stirbt nicht, was wir liebe stirbt nicht. Wie viel bilde ich mir darauf
ein, nie verzweifelt zu haben."
[6] Heine: _Sämmtliche Werke_, XII. 80.
[7] R. Prutz: _Vorlesungen über die deutsche Litteratur der Gegenwart_,
270, 271.
V
THE INFLUENCE OF BYRON
The classical literature of Germany in the end of the eighteenth and
the early years of the nineteenth century was in subject or form
imitative of the antique; the Romantic literature which followed swore
allegiance to the Middle Ages; both stood aloof from surrounding
actualities, from the Now, from existing political or social
conditions; neither directly aimed at producing any change in these.
The ideal floated in the deep blue ether of Greece or in the Catholic
sky of the Middle Ages. Now it was resolutely dragged down to earth.
The modern ideal, an ideal which contains no mythic element, manifested
itself to the dreamers and the workers. And with a haste, a violence,
that too often made prose journalistic, poetry only lyric or quite
fragmentary, the opposition poets and prose writers set to work to draw
all modern life into the sphere of literature. From the fact of this
inclusion, this appropriation, taking place when things were on a war
footing, wit and satire became more prominent powers than they had ever
been before in Germany; and the mood and inspiration of the "Sturm und
Drang" period seemed to have revived, so far as aggressive defiance
of the established was concerned. It was a strong craving for liberty
that first induced Heine and Börne to strike out a new path in German
literature, and afterwards inspired the writers who followed them, and
were known by the vague name of "Young Germany."
But there was one great man who, foreigner though he was, influenced
German intellectual life by his personality, writings, and actions
more than any of the famous men of the past. This was Lord Byron. It
was long before men's eyes in Germany were opened to his artistic
weaknesses and deficiencies. Gutzkow alone, about the year 1835, begins
to criticise him discerningly. But the Byron whom Goethe had admired
and shown favour to (though principally because of that in him which
the old master attributed to his own influence), Byron, with his
contempt for the real negation of liberty that lay concealed beneath
the "wars of liberty" against Napoleon, with his championship of the
oppressed, his revolt against social custom, his sensuality and spleen,
his passionate love of liberty in every domain, transfigured by his
death as a liberator, seemed to the men of that day to be an embodiment
of all that they understood by the modern spirit, modern poetry.
Wilhelm Müller, the poet of the _Griechenlieder_, sings of him with
fervent enthusiasm:
"Siebenunddreissig Trauerschüsse? Und wen haben sie gemeint?
Sind es siebenunddreissig Siege, die er abgekämpft dem Feind?
Sind es siebenunddreissig Wunden, die der Held trägt auf der Brust?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Siebenunddreissig Jahre sind es, welche Hellas heut beweint!
Sind' die Jahre, die du lebtest? Nein um diese wein ich nicht:
Ewig leben diese Jahre in des Ruhmes Sonnenlicht,
Auf des Liedes Adlerschwingen, die mit nimmer müdem Schlag
Durch die Bahn der Zeiten rauschen, rauschend grosse Seelen wach.
Nein, ich wein um andre Jahre, Jahre die du nicht gelebt,
Um die Jahre, die für Hellas du zu leben hast gestrebt:
Solche Jahre, Monde, Tage kündet mir des Donners Hall,
Welche Lieder, welche Kämpfe, welche Wunden, welchen Fall!
Einen Fall im Siegestaumel auf den Mauern von Byzanz,
Eine Krone dir zu Füssen, auf dem Haupt der Freiheit Kranz!"[1]
Byron's pride and his contempt for political slavery meet us again in
Platen; his aristocratic tone, his antipathy to prejudice, his taste
for travel, his love of animals and of nature, his charm and his
irony, live again in Prince Pückler. How enormously he influenced the
formation of Heine's poetical ideal needs no insisting on, so forcibly
does it strike every one who is familiar with the development of the
modern literature of Europe. But it is both remarkable and instructive
to observe the light in which he was looked upon by Börne, the first
pioneer of the new German literary movement, a fundamentally different
character from the English poet. One would naturally imagine that
the vain, frivolous sides of Byron's personality would repel him, as
these same qualities did in the case of Heine. Far from it. Note the
expressions he employs in writing about him (_Briefe aus Paris_, No.
44) after reading Moore's _Life of Byron_. He calls the book wine that
sends a glow of warmth through the poor German wayfarer, shivering on
his journey through life. He feels almost ill with envy of such a life:
"Like a comet that submits to no rules and regulations of the star
community, Byron wandered through the world, wild and free; came
without welcome, departed without farewell, preferring solitude to
the thraldom of friendship. His feet never touched the dry earth;
through storm and shipwreck he steered undauntedly onwards, and the
first harbour he came to was the grave. Oh, how he was tossed about!
But what islands of bliss did he not discover!... His was the kingly
nature ... he is king who lives as he lists. When I hear people say
that Byron only lived for thirty-seven years, I laugh; he lived for a
thousand. And when they pity him because he was so melancholy! Is not
God melancholy? Melancholy is God's gladness. Is it possible to be glad
when one loves? Byron hated men because he loved mankind, hated life
because he loved eternity. I would give all the joys of my life for a
year of Byron's sorrows."
We observe not only that Börne takes everything about Byron seriously,
but that he is quite unconscious of the same self-indulgent temperament
in Byron which repelled him so strongly in Goethe. And it is still more
surprising that Börne should consider his own nature to be akin to
Byron's. He writes:--
"Perhaps you ask me in surprise how such a beggarly fellow as I come
to compare myself with Byron; in which case I must tell you something
that you do not know. When Byron's genius on his journey through the
firmament first came to this earth, he stayed for a night with me. But
the lodging was not to his mind; he left again at once, and took up
his quarters at the Hotel Byron. I sorrowed over this for many a year,
grieved over my insignificance, my failure. But that is past now; I
have forgotten it, and live contented in my poverty. My misfortune is
that I was born in the middle class, for which I am not suited."
Words such as these bear striking witness to the magic power which
the shade of Byron still exercised over the minds of the leaders of
literature.
[1] What mean these thirty-seven minute-guns? Do they tell of
thirty-seven victories? of thirty-seven wounds on the hero's breast?...
They are thirty-seven years, that Greece is mourning to-day. Are they
the years of thy life? Nay, over these we do not mourn; these live
for ever in the sunlight of fame, borne upon the eagle wings of song,
whose tireless beat resounds down the ages, awakening great souls. 'Tis
other years I weep, the years thou wouldst have lived for Greece. 'Tis
of these years and months and days that the volley's thunder speaks to
me. What songs, what struggles, what wounds, what a fall! A fall in the
intoxicating moment of victory, on the walls of Byzantium, a crown at
thy feet, on thy brow the wreath of liberty!
VI
VALUE OF THE NEW LITERATURE
It was under the conditions and influences just described that the
German opposition literature of 1820 to 1848 came into being. In
surveying such a large group of intellectual productions, we naturally
look upon them in the first instance as being, taken generally, a
series of documents which inform us how the people of that country
and that time thought and felt, what were the developments of their
civilisation, what their hopes, their wishes, their philanthropy,
their devotion to liberty, their sense of right, their ideal of good
government, and, finally, what their taste was--that is to say, in
what manner an author required to write who wished to be read and to
awaken real interest.
Our historical curiosity on these points being satisfied, there
next involuntarily arises the question of the actual value of the
literature. In the case of philosophical writings this question
turns mainly upon the measure of new truth they contain; or if, as
is too often necessary, we are obliged to regard them chiefly in the
light of productions of the imagination, it turns upon the scope and
suggestiveness of their hypotheses. In the case of poetry and fiction,
and also to a certain extent in the case of the allied historical and
descriptive writings, the question of their value is the same as the
question of their beauty; for by beauty we mean artistic worth.
It is a well-known fact that out of a very large number of authors only
one or two continue to be read after the lapse of a few generations;
out of an enormous number of works there is only one here and there
that people continue to make their own. Of the writers of the period
under consideration, very few are known and read to-day out of
Germany; in Germany of course a considerably greater number; still,
comparatively few of the productions of that day are in the hands of
the general reading public.
The first rough criticism is thus the work of time; after the lapse of
so many years, such and such an author does not sell, whilst another is
perpetually coming out in new editions. But it is no absolute proof of
the worth of a writer that he long continues to have a wide circle of
readers. It does not prove that his place is among the best, only that
he is among the most approachable, the most entertaining. A high degree
of culture, or of refinement of mind, may stand in the way of a wide
circulation, though they ensure lasting fame.
At the present day, out of Germany, only two of the philosophical
writers of that day, Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, are still read, the
former little, the latter much; but it was at a later period that
Schopenhauer began to influence men's minds, and both these thinkers
are read less for the sake of their matter than for their original,
daring style. Of the poets, only Heine is much and steadily read out of
Germany. In Germany he is looked on and judged as the stinging-nettle
in the garden of literature; he stings the historians' fingers and
they curse him. In histories of literature and magazine articles his
prose is described as old-fashioned and his poetry as artificial;
yet his works, now that the copyright has expired, are republished
in innumerable editions. Both in and out of Germany he is as much
sung as read. His poems have given occasion to more than 3000 musical
compositions. In 1887 the solo-songs alone (leaving out of account
the duets, quartettes and choruses) numbered 2,500. Hueffer has
counted one hundred and sixty settings of "Du bist wie eine Blume,"
eighty-three each of "Ich hab' im Traum geweinet" and "Leise zieht
durch mein Gemuth," seventy-six of "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam,"
and thirty-seven of "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten." Amongst
these compositions are many of the most beautiful songs of Schubert,
Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Robert Franz, and Rubinstein--very few
of which the poet himself can have heard. Of all the German lyric poets
Heine is the one whose songs have been most frequently set to music.
After him, with his 3000 compositions, comes Goethe, with about 1700;
the others follow far behind.