of aversion, originating in the antipathy which Frankfort commerce,
consisting chiefly in banking business, early awoke in the born poet
and idealist. It horrified him to hear a Frankfort merchant speak with
the same enthusiasm and ardour of Rothschild or the Austrian loan, with
which "a lover of art would speak of a Raphael." In 1822 he wrote: "My
aversion from traders and Jews, as such, has reached a climax, now that
I have got away from Frankfort, and see what it really means to enjoy
life." Börne was by no means incapable of appreciating great commercial
undertakings from the æsthetic as well as the practical point of view.
Not many years later, the exchange and the harbour of Hamburg excite
his lively admiration. But the Frankfort merchants, Rothschild among
them, appeared to him, with their speculations in government stock, to
be connected with what he abhorred above everything--the dismembered
state of Germany and the Metternichian principles. His writings abound
in thrusts at "the ennobled German Jews, who are on terms of the most
familiar intimacy with all the ministers and royal mistresses," and
in consequence look with complete indifference on the Poles' struggle
for liberty. Rothschild especially is to him the symbol of evil: "The
government could not be more despicable if Rothschild the Jew were
king, and had formed a ministry of bill-brokers.... Rothschild will
stand till the last day of kings. What a day of reckoning! what a
crash!" In his bitter hatred of him he goes so far as to call it a
disgrace to the Jewish nation when Rothschild is sentenced in Paris to
two days' imprisonment for declining, in spite of repeated warnings,
to have his cabriolet numbered. Börne had, of course, no personal
enmity to the man, but he detests him as "the great broker of all those
State loans which give monarchs the power to defy liberty." Being
firmly persuaded, after the Revolution of July, that another great
revolution was close at hand, he mistakenly considers it stupid of the
Jews to curry favour with those in power throughout Europe. But he is
right when he calls them "stupider than cattle" for imagining that in
the event of a threatening revolution they will be protected by the
governments.
With sound political judgment he perceives, what events in Russia have
confirmed, that it is exactly at such a time that those in power will
deliver them up to the tender mercies of popular hatred in order to
escape themselves.[4]
The fact of Börne's being born without the pale of Christian society
did not produce in him any excessive sympathy with his co-religionists;
but the severe discipline of his joyless childhood, the coldness of his
parents, the aversion aroused in him by the cupidity, cowardly caution,
and other vices generated by oppression which he observed in those
around him, all contributed to forge a spirit that could never be bent,
softened, or broken--a character on whose adamantine firmness neither
flattery nor threats made the smallest impression. The severity of this
character of ermine-white purity, a severity born of the burning love
of justice, at times clad itself in the garment of humorous irony, at
times in that of scathing ire. As a writer Börne was for Germany much
what Paul Louis Courier was for France, that is to say, a political
tribune, as satirical and as liberty-loving as the Frenchman, less
clear-sighted in matters of the day, but with more feeling, more
imagination, an all-round richer nature.[5]
For in Börne's case firmness of character did not preclude gentleness
of disposition. The weak, always rather sickly boy, who grew up
in a sunless street, shut off from fresh air and from nature, was
tender-hearted. The germ of tenderness in his nature was perhaps first
developed by reading that German author who exercised most influence
on the formation of his opinions and his style--Jean Paul. It is from
Jean Paul, his best comforter in the dark days of his youth, that
Börne, the author, is directly descended.
To him Jean Paul was the poet of those who are born in obscurity. He
loved him as the spokesman of those who suffer wrong. He saw in him
a priest of justice, an apostle of mercy. His famous commemorative
oration gives us some idea of his youthful enthusiasm, and at the same
time shows what it was in Jean Paul's style that he endeavoured to
make his own. Real emotion makes itself felt through the artificial
antitheses in such a passage as this:--
"We will sorrow for him whom we have lost, and for those who have not
lost him. For he did not live for all. But the time is coming when he
will be born for all, and then all will mourn for him. He stands with
a patient smile at the gates of the twentieth century, waiting till
his lagging people overtake him. Then he will lead the tired and the
famishing into his city of love."
And there is clever character-drawing in such lines as the following:--
"In countries the towns only are counted; in towns, only the towers,
the temples, and the palaces; in houses, their masters; in nations,
parties; and in parties, their leaders.... By narrow, overgrown paths
Jean Paul sought out the neglected village. In the nation he counted
the human beings, in towns the house-roofs, and under every roof each
heart."
It was possibly Jean Paul's political attitude which first brought
Börne under his spell. Jean Paul early took his place in German
literature as the inheritor of Herder's cosmopolitan sentiments and
doctrines. Herder had persistently exalted love of humanity, at the
expense of patriotism and national antipathy. Jean Paul continued
to proclaim the common brotherhood of man. All his writings were,
moreover, pervaded by a general spirit of political liberalism,
resembling that formulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man,
which had electrified him; and he treats of sovereigns, courts, and
the great world generally, in a tone of sustained irony. At times he
regards as close at hand a coming golden age, in which it will no
longer be possible for nations, but only for individuals, to sin, and
from which the spectre of war shall have disappeared; at other times
he relegates it to a very far off future; but the rapidity of what was
and is called _historic progress_ induced both him and his disciple to
imagine that universal brotherhood was not very distant.
It was, however, not only his grand conception of the future that made
Jean Paul so attractive to Börne, but also the idyllic and satiric
qualities of his talent. Börne adopted some of his comical names of
places (_Kuhschnappel Flachsenfingen_), and as a young man imitated
his humorous style. Many of the short tales and sketches contributed
to periodical literature--the comic _Esskünstler am Hoteltisch,
Allerhochstdieselben, Hof- und Commerzienräthe, Die Thurn und Taxissche
Post_ (the postal system of the day), &c. &c.--are in Jean Paul's
manner, though Börne keeps closer to reality both in his facts and
his local colouring than Jean Paul does. Börne attacks State, Church,
executive, manners, and customs in Jean Pauls farcical fashion; but he
has not his predecessor's stores of observation to fall back on, and
does not approach him in variety of knowledge.
By way of compensation, his style is in many ways superior to Jean
Paul's.
Börne, who was not gifted with any profound artistic feeling, or
delicate appreciation of style, admired the inartistic in Jean Paul
as being unartificial. He did not feel that the profusion of imagery
was collected from here, there, and everywhere, and was seldom the
natural outgrowth of the subject it adorned. That Oriental wealth of
simile, that flowery luxuriance of language, pleased his taste as being
poetical; and the want of harmony in the periods, the heavy ballast of
the innumerable parenthetic clauses, were to his ear only evidences of
the naturalness of the style. To him, too, Goethe's plastic art was
only coldness, while the impersonal style of Goethe's old age was a
horror. When he read Jean Paul's works, the living, restless ego in
them came forth to meet his own warm-hearted, passionate ego.
He unconsciously remoulded Jean Paul's style on the lines of his
own individuality, that individuality which discloses itself in his
earliest letters, and whose distinguishing traits were modified or
developed, but never altered. There were no wildernesses, no primeval
forests in his mind, as there were in Jean Paul's. He did not think
of ten things at a time, all inextricably entwined. No; in his case
both fancy and reasoning-power were clear, and concise in expression.
His acquaintance with Johannes von Müller's works early produced a
propensity for pithy, Tacitus-like brevity. From the first there was
a half French, half Jewish tendency to antitheses and contrast in his
style. He loved symmetry of thought and symmetry of language; his
spiritual _tempo_ was quick; as a writer he was short-winded. Hence
short, sharp, strong sentences following each other at a gallop; no
rounded periods. Metaphors abound; yet they are not so numerous as to
jostle each other out of place, and all are apt and suggestive; he
did not ransack note-books for them, like Jean Paul; they presented
themselves in modest abundance. He employed similes freely; but in
his clear-headed fashion he arranged them almost algebraically in his
sentences, so that they produce the effect rather of equations than of
scattered flowers.
By degrees his decidedly marked individuality took shape in a decidedly
individual humorous style. Jean Paul's humour spreads itself throughout
lengthy and discursive investigations, narratives, romances; not so
Börne's. He was never able to produce a political, poetical, critical,
or historical work of any length; he could not write books, only pages.
His was an essentially journalistic talent.[6] And this determines the
character of his humour.
Playful humour was his, but also that sarcastic wit which stings like
a lash, and yet thrills and touches by an indirect appeal to the
feelings; his that bitterness of complaint and accusation which assumes
the conciliatory form of an attempt to comfort; and that melancholy,
which with a smile and a whimsical conceit rises above time and place.
But something similar to this might be said of other great humorists.
What distinguishes Börne (from Sterne, Jean Paul, and others) is, in
the first place, the strength, the violence of the reaction produced in
him by all the occurrences of the day which came within the bounds of
his horizon. A comparatively trifling incident in real, and especially
in public, life is sufficient to set all the chords of his being in
vibration. The second peculiarity is that all occurrences directly
act upon one and the same point in his spiritual life, that passion
for liberty which was born of the keenest sense of justice. One of
his critics, Steinthal, explains in a masterly manner the connection
between this fact and the fact of his inability to produce a great
work. He never thought systematically, never combined with each other
all the many things that one after the other occupied and affected
his mind, but looked on each separately in its relation to the centre
point of his being.[7] His humour brought the miserable reality into
juxtaposition with the ideal demand of his intellect; but he gave no
picture of the different elements of reality, he merely focussed them.
Given such a state of matters, it is easy to understand how inevitable
it was, not only that Börne should place Schiller high above Goethe,
but also that he should consider Jean Paul to be greatly Schiller's
superior. And it is highly characteristic that what he objects to in
Schiller is not his purely poetical shortcomings, but his want of moral
idealism. We are accustomed to think of Schiller as unassailable on
this point, but to Börne's ruthless severity of moral requirement he
is not so. Börne's pronouncement on the character of Wilhelm Tell is
especially enlightening. To him Tell is nothing but a Philistine--
a good citizen, father, and husband, but a man the essence of whose
character is submissiveness. He did not appear at the Rüth, that
meeting-place of the elect, to take the oath; he had not the courage to
be a conspirator. His words:
"Der Starke ist am mächtigsten _allein_"--
(The strong man is strongest alone)
are to Börne the philosophy of weakness; a man who has only the
strength necessary to get the better of himself, is strongest alone,
but he that has strength to spare after gaining the mastery over
himself, will rule others also. The critic reviews Tell's actions one
by one. Tell does not uncover to the hat on the pole, but his is not
the noble defiance of the lover of liberty; it is only Philistine
pride, a mixture of a sense of honour with fear; he passes the pole
with his eyes cast down, that he may be able to say he has not seen it.
And when Gessler calls him to account, he is humble--so humble that we
are ashamed of him; he says the omission was accidental, and shall not
occur again.
The famous apple incident arouses no admiration in Börne. A father
may dare everything for his child's life, but he has no right to
hazard that life. Why did Tell not shoot the tyrant at once instead
of beseeching like a woman with his reiterated "Lieber Herr! lieber
Herr!"? He deserved to have his ears boxed. And when the governor, in
the storm on the lake, trusted himself to him, as enemy trusts enemy,
was it not treachery and a knavish trick on Tell's part to leap on
shore, push the boat out into the lake and leave him to the mercy of
the storm? Börne finds strong cause of offence in the speech:
"Ich aber sprach: Ja, Herr mit Gottes Hilfe
Getrau ich mir's, und helf uns wohl hindannen.
So ward ich meiner Bande los und stand
Am Steuerruder und _fuhr redlich hin._"[8]
"How," exclaims the critic, "are we to explain such Jesuitry in the
simple-minded man? It is inconceivable to me, too, that any one can
consider Tell's next action moral, much less beautiful--he lies in
safe ambush, and kills his enemy, who has no idea that he is in danger."
No one can be surprised that a man in whose spiritual organism the
sense of justice was so sharply, so intensely developed that it almost
took the place of the æsthetic sense, should be wanting in the organ
of appreciation for Goethe, whose craving for justice was undoubtedly
less developed.
In 1802, after one or two years' residence with a professor at Giessen,
young Börne was sent to Berlin, his father being obliged to give in
to his desire to study, although on account of his religion this
could only lead to his becoming a doctor, a profession for which as
yet he showed no turn whatever. He boarded in the house of the famous
physician and Kantian, Marcus Herz, whose public lectures on philosophy
had drawn such crowded and influential audiences, that the appointment
of Professor of Philosophy was conferred on him before any University
of Berlin existed. Herz was an eminent physician, a clear thinker, and
a good orator; a friend of Lessing, whose poetry he valued as highly as
his critical writings. Hence the mysticism of the Romantic school, more
especially Hardenberg's, was to him both meaningless and obnoxious.
As he died in 1803, his influence on young Börne's development was
inconsiderable. All the more powerful was the impression made on the
youth by Herz's famous wife, Henriette, _née_ Lemos. She was seventeen
years younger than her husband, to whom she was betrothed, without
her consent being asked, at the age of twelve. Remarkably beautiful,
mistress of many languages, admired by numbers of the most eminent
scientific men and authors of the day, she made her house one of the
most frequented, most talked of, most looked up to in Berlin. She was
thirty-eight, Börne sixteen, but this naturally did not prevent the
young man from at once falling violently, though hopelessly, in love
with the most beautiful, most distinguished woman it had been his lot
to meet.
The charming Henriette presented in outward appearance, as well as in
character, a marked contrast to her little, clever, ugly husband; she
was a faultless beauty, tall and stately as Queen Louise, with the
small head we see on Greek statues. She went by the name of the Tragic
Muse or the Beautiful Circassian. She was worshipped by Wilhelm von
Humboldt, by Mirabeau, by Schleiermacher, and after her husband's death
she was surrounded by a bevy of men of position, who all wooed the fair
widow in vain. She refused all offers, in spite of her poverty rejected
even the hand of the richest noblemen in Germany, and took the place of
governess to the future Empress of Russia. She was as severely virtuous
as she was intoxicatingly beautiful. She was on terms of intimacy with
more than one man, but always within the strict bounds of friendship.
In her circle a line was drawn between the admissible coquetry which
aims at enthralling the whole man, and the inadmissible, which only
aims at enthralling his senses. She herself belonged to the dangerous
class of virtuous flirts. Of a passionless temperament and much
addicted to sentimental moralising, she founded in her younger days a
"Tugendbund" (league of virtue), in which Wilhelm von Humboldt played
the principal part, and of which old and young, known and unknown men,
were members. They called each other Thou, wrote long letters to each
other in foreign languages or in Greek or Hebrew characters, exchanged
rings or silhouettes, aimed at each other's "moral development,"
desired "to attain happiness by self-devotion" (unencumbered by
duties, for self-devotion knows no duties), and ignored the rules and
regulations of conventional propriety--but in all chastity and honour.
Rahel laughed at them, and would have nothing to do with the league.
The letters the members of the league exchanged bear a strong
resemblance to those which passed a little later in Denmark between
Kamma Rahbek and Molbech. They were absorbed in their own feelings,
but in constant self-examination, thereby naturally depriving their
feelings of all freshness. Friends of different sexes explained to
each other in interminable letters, with written tears, how they
mutually supplemented and developed one another. They tore themselves
up into lint, and contemplated themselves in this unravelled condition;
they did not collect themselves for each other's benefit, but spun
themselves out. They put their inner man under pressure till the
result was a liquid--tears, heart's blood, or such like--and this
they poured into the bosom of a like-minded friend, without themselves
becoming in any way more remarkable or original under this treatment.
The beautiful and noble Henriette Herz herself was less an original
personality than what the Germans call an "Anempfinderin." From the
remarkable men with whom she came in contact, she seldom assimilated
more than what she picked up from a surface knowledge of their ways
and doings. What brought her particularly into notice was the tender
friendship existing between her and Schleiermacher. It was much talked
about in Berlin, but with no insinuation of evil. The contrast was too
striking between the "Tragic Muse" and little Schleiermacher, whose
distinguished head was set upon a fragile, slightly deformed body.
People smiled good-naturedly when they saw the little pastor coming
out of Henriettas house in the evening with a lantern fastened to the
button of his coat, or when they met him in the daytime hanging on the
arm of his majestic Melpomene. A caricature appeared, in which she was
represented carrying him--the jewel, as he was called--in her hand,
like a parasol.[9]
Even if young Börne had been the fresh, red-cheeked youth he was
not, he would hardly have made much impression on his proud, spoiled
foster-mother. At first she did not even understand what was the matter
with the young man, whose passion--described in his own memoranda
was a real school-boy worship, of the kind produced at his age by
half-conscious instinct and exaggerated ideas of the perfection of
woman. One or two attempts which he made, through the medium of the
servant, to procure arsenic from an apothecary's, opened Henriette
Herz's eyes to the position, and she did her best, by an admixture
of kindness with strictness, to bring him to reason.[10] That she was
not quite insensible to his adoration, or quite innocent of a certain
amount of coquetry, which masqueraded in this case as motherliness,
is shown by the following little incident. Börne had taken her to be
between twenty-eight and thirty, but at the dinner-table, on the 3rd of
December 1802, she told him that she was thirty-four. In the evening
she added two to this figure, but she never acknowledged more than
the thirty-six, and on the 5th of March 1803, Börne still supposes
this to be her age. So the charming "Frau Mutter," as she allowed him
to call her, made herself two years younger than she was. Naturally
he continued to love, to admire, to despair, to suffer the pangs of
hell because of her indifference, and to feel the bliss of heaven when
she smiled at him or said a friendly word; also to be so suspicious,
bitter, unreasonable, and capricious that at last it became necessary
to send him away.
He went to Halle to continue his studies there. As he was leaving he
handed her the diary of his emotions--she had, it seems, advised
him to pour forth his sorrows on paper--and a number of passionate
letters addressed to herself. He continued to write to her from Halle
with unchangeable devotion and passionate longing, but in absence he
soon so far recovers himself as no longer to be entirely absorbed
in the sifting of his own feelings; we presently have calm and
entertaining criticism of his surroundings, and a certain dignified
self-esteem, combined with self-criticism. In these letters we already
notice the characteristic combination of enthusiasm for ideas,
indignant denunciation of slavishness, and sharp satire. They give
us an understanding of Börne's real nature--a temperament to which
licentiousness presents as little temptation as does drink, a soul that
suffers under weakness of body, suffers from the inward conflict that
ensues where there is courage without power, love that meets no return,
undefined longing to do great deeds without any definite aim. Here and
there we come upon a threat of what, when once his powers are matured,
awaits the Philistine crowd that now smile at him--upon a wrathful
presentiment of future humiliations, and fiery projects of revenge on
those who, as he already knows, will shamelessly revile him because of
his birth, and torture him by calling his reserve cowardice.[11]
It is plain that one result of young Börne's stay in Berlin has been
the maturing of his emotional life, and also that his intellectual
powers have been stimulated by his being brought into contact, in
Marcus and Henriette Herz's house, with the most eminent men of the day.
Börne was studying at Halle when the battle of Jena was fought. Shortly
afterwards that university was suppressed by Napoleon, and he went to
pursue his studies at Heidelberg, full of patriotic rancour against the
French, to which he gave vent in a pamphlet which the censor refused
to pass. Whilst one result of Napoleon's triumphal progress was the
expulsion of the students from Halle, another was a complete revolution
in the political conditions of Börne's native town. In 1806 Dalberg,
as "Prince-Primas" of the newly formed Rhenish Confederation, took
possession of Frankfort-on-Main. One of his first acts was to improve
the position of the Jews, and in 1810 Napoleon issued an ordinance
removing all burdens resting upon them and upon serfs. In 1811 the
Jewish community in Frankfort received the full rights of citizens,
in consideration of a sum of 440,000 guldens, which was paid up by
the following year. The first result of all this, as far as Börne was
concerned, was that he gave up the study of medicine, which he had
taken to unwillingly, and only because he was debarred from every
other, and entered on that of political economy and jurisprudence, as
opening the way to a government appointment. In 1818 he took the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy.
His father, who had been extremely dissatisfied with his want of
application as a student, and with being constantly called on to
pay small debts, and who was now no less dissatisfied with him for
throwing up the study of medicine, insisted that he should begin to
support himself, and procured for him a small post in the Frankfort
police establishment, an appointment which contrasts comically with the
position which he afterwards took as an author.
He was appointed "Aktuarius," sat in the old, dark Römer building,
examined passports and journeymen's certificates, entered minutes, and
on state occasions, dressed in uniform and wearing a sword, represented
local authority.
But he had also by this time made his _début_ as a writer. He
contributed to a Frankfort daily paper articles crammed with primeval
German rhetoric, defying the mighty Corsican with a patriotic
enthusiasm which he at times allows to run away with common sense. They
are appeals to the youth of Germany, and passionate expressions of
blind, loyal faith in the rulers of Germany.[12] He is absolutely
hopeful of the result of "the war of liberation."