admirable. Nothing in the book surpasses the passage in which the old
farmer tells Lisbeth that her lover is a young nobleman, and makes
her understand that she must not expect him to marry her. Oswald
has concealed his position and given himself out to be an ordinary
forester, only with the intention of giving her a joyful surprise
later. If she had taken time to think, she would have come to the
conclusion that she need have no fear of his proving unfaithful.
But the knowledge that her lover has lied is a blow that upsets her
equilibrium, and Immermann profoundly remarks, "For love, as long as it
is unshaken, is divine penetration ... but once shaken, once driven to
conjecture and surmise, it is madness, which passes cathedrals without
seeing them and takes molehills for mountains." This is a profound
saying, because it is a true psychological appreciation of a feeling
which is the product of unknown causes. Heine's psychology of love
was very simple; when he complains, it is always of faithlessness as
a wrong knowingly committed. Immermann here represents what may be
called the somnambulistic action of the feeling, the instinct, unerring
as that of the sleep-walker, which it possesses when undistracted by
disturbing forces.
Both in broad outline and in minute detail this first of the peasant
novels is sterling poetry. The influence of fantastic Romanticism
is still distinct; the secret tribunal, the sword of Charlemagne,
the enthusiasm for old customs are Romantic features; even Lisbeth's
fanciful pedigree--the fathering of this truthful young being on
the old liar Münchhausen--betrays that the tale is an outgrowth of
an earlier Romantic literature. All this, however, only throws into
stronger relief the laborious, yet vigorous, process of condensation
by which healthy, modern realistic appreciation and treatment of
popular subjects was evolved out of the arbitrary fantasticality which
immediately preceded it.
Immermann is one of the company of authors, including Daniel Defoe,
l'Abbé Prévost, the Danish poet Wessel, Chamisso, and Bernardin de St.
Pierre, who prove that a single volume is enough to carry a writer's
name down to posterity, even if everything else that he has written
be quickly forgotten. As a matter of fact, only this one work of
Immermann's lives. He wrote mock-heroic poems, such as _Tulifäntchen_,
which was much appreciated in its day, but is now unreadable. He
wrote works which, for their day, must be pronounced meritorious,
but which are now given over to moth and rust, such as the drama
_Merlin_ (1831), a great Romantic work in well-written verse, a sort
of unsuccessful pendant to the Second Part of Goethe's _Faust_ and
the historic tragedy which was first known as _Das Trauerspiel in
Tirol_ ("The Tragedy in the Tyrol"), but was re-named _Andreas Hofer_.
The second of these plays is the better of the two; it is founded on
Immermann's own youthful recollections of the formidable resistance
encountered by the French in the Tyrol, and is written with both the
ability and the will to present a faithful and impartial picture of
the two hostile races, so unlike in their character and in their
development. This work in its original form, as published in 1826,
criticised by Börne in his _Dramaturgische Blätter_, and satirised
by Platen in _Der romantische Oedipus_, is interesting, especially
as a sort of mongrel, the offspring of Kleist's genius mated with
Schiller's muse; for the hero reminds us of Schiller's _Wilhelm Tell_,
and the love affair between the Frenchman and the Tyrolese girl, with
its tragic ending, of Kleist's _Die Hermannschlacht_. But the play
was too devoid of any really profound, impressive originality to live
long, and when, in 1831, Immermann re-wrote it, suppressing everything
that had given offence or called forth adverse criticism--the whole
love-story and the incident (again recalling Kleist) of the sword
which the angel restored to Hofer in a dream--he himself took away
what life there was in it. Pride, if nothing else, should have made
him retain the character which Platen had tauntingly nicknamed the
"Depeschenmordbrandehebruchstyrolerin."
It was an unlucky chance which made bitter enemies of two lovers of
liberty like Immermann and Platen, and two rare spirits like Platen and
Heine. That which gave rise to the whole literary feud, to the clumsy,
ugly attacks on Immermann and Heine in _Der romantische Oedipus_,
to Immermann's retort, _Der im Irrgarten der Metrik umhertaumelnde
Cavalier_ ("The Reeling Knight in the Labyrinth of Metre"), and to
Heine's crushing attack on Platen in the _Reisebilder_, deadly from its
very stench, was such a paltry trifle, such an insignificant though
contemptuous distich, that only an arrogant and quarrelsome disposition
like Platen's could have made it the occasion of a war with poisoned
weapons.
Platen's letters show what dire offence he took at the two lines
by Immermann in the _Reisebilder_, which might be construed as
referring to his ghazels, and how determined he was to revenge himself
ruthlessly. Great and serene in the region of pure art, and a manly
champion of political liberty, he displays in his onslaught on the men
who had insulted him, an offensively boastful degree of self-admiration
and an insolence which is partly the arrogance of rank and partly the
recklessness of wounded vanity. His letter from Rome of the 18th of
February 1828, shows that he really knew nothing about Immermann's
_Das Trauerspiel in Tirol_, which he had determined to attack. _Der
romantische Oedipus_ was almost finished when he wrote to Fugger: "Be
sure to tell me something about Immermann's _Andreas Hofer_, something
of the plot and any piquant nonsense. I need it for the end of my Fifth
Act, where I make him go quite mad." The boundless contempt with which
Platen treats Immermann in his play can thus, in spite of his protests,
only be regarded as vindictiveness. As regards Heine, it is simply his
Jewish birth with which Platen taunts him in both letters and play.
In the play everything turns on this--Heine is the Petrarch of the
Feast of Tabernacles, the pride of the synagogue. So personal is the
satire that Nimmermann is made to say, that though he is content to be
Heine's friend, he would not be his mistress, for his kisses reek of
garlic, &c. From Platen's letters it is easy to see that he completely
underestimated the strength of the antagonists whom he thus challenged.
He feels that he is capable of "crushing that Jew, Heine," whenever he
chooses to do so. When his friends try to persuade him that attacks
on Heine because of his birth carry no weight, he replies, quite
unmoved: "That he is, or was, a Jew is no moral offence, but a comical
ingredient. Intelligent readers will judge whether or not I have turned
it to account with Aristophanic cunning." So sure, so superior does
he feel himself, that even in December 1828, immediately before he is
utterly discomfited by Heine's return blow, he sees in him nothing but
"an impudent Jew, a miserable scribbler and sans-culotte." His moral
indignation at the first books of the _Reisebilder_ was, however, so
great that he calls the author and his like "veritable Satans."[2] The
treatment he met with was not undeserved; scorn was returned for scorn,
and his underestimation of Heine and Immermann was cruelly avenged. The
scurrilous part of Heine's attack injured himself most by exciting the
disapprobation of his own friends and admirers.
The fact that the names Immermann and Platen came to form a
constellation of hate was actually due to the similarity of their
natures, to the feeling of solitariness which, combined with a
self-esteem that was always on the alert, made them prone to proclaim
their own praises and to attack others with undue bitterness and
with insufficient understanding. These two men, each in his own way,
represent the transition from Romanticism to modern liberalism. Platen,
who followed in the footsteps of the Romanticists in his assiduous
cultivation of foreign forms, the oriental ghazel, the southern sonnet,
the ancient Greek Aristophanic comedy and Pindaric ode, shortly before
his early death wrote songs and poems (_Political Poems_, including
the _Polish Songs_--posthumously published) which are on the highest
level of spirited modern lyric poetry. And Immermann, who all his life
had treated tragic or fantastic themes with Romantic extravagance
or symbolism, not long before he died impregnated a piece of homely
reality with a spirit of true poetry by which the following generation
throughout the whole of Europe was influenced.
[1] Ludmilla Assing: _Gräfin Elisa von Ahlefeldt_, 1857.
[2] Platens _Werke_. Letters of 18th February, 12th March, and 13th
December 1828.
XX
HEGELIANISM
It was the Hegelian philosophy, in combination with the Revolution of
July, which drove thinking men to take their part in the stirring life
of modern history and politics. Not that Hegel himself sympathised
with the Revolution of July. Such a violent interference with what to
him now represented the rational state of things, could hardly appeal
to him, in his sixtieth year, as the great Revolution had done. In
politics he had long been a strong Conservative.
But none the less certainly did the Revolution of July change
the character of the Hegelian philosophy. It was the historical
turning point, the historical crisis that was needed to transfer
that philosophy from the lecture-room to the arena of life. One
of the peculiarities of the philosophy was, that it was capable
of diametrically opposite interpretations. From this time onwards
we observe it to be one of the most powerful instruments in the
remoulding, the reconstruction of life. We saw that it was so in the
case of Heine, who never alludes to Hegel's conversion to Prussian
Conservatism except to apologise for it; to him Hegel is always the
great philosopher of the new era, the mighty sovereign of the realm of
thought.
[Illustration: HEGEL]
Until Hegel was called to Berlin he had been unsuccessful as a teacher.
He had attracted little attention at the other universities, and in his
younger days had often lectured to only three or four students. Now he
was at the height of his fame. Unlike Schelling, who reached maturity
so early, and became so early barren, Hegel, the man of heavier,
slower nature, entered the most momentous stage of his career with his
forty-eighth year.
Great expectations were formed of him, and he fulfilled them all.
His insight was extraordinary; he seemed thoroughly to belong to his
time, and yet to live as it were above it--familiar with all its ideas
and judging them all with calm superiority and profound conviction.
Hundreds upon hundreds of listeners streamed to his lecture-room.
The young student who saw him for the first time thought him an
odd-looking figure. He had aged early, his originally powerful
figure was bent, and the impression he produced when he entered the
lecture-room was that of old-fashioned middle-class respectability. He
went to his desk, seated himself, became absorbed in his manuscript,
turning over the large leaves and looking up and down them for what
he wanted. His carriage was awkward and characterless, his expression
listless, his face worn and wasted, not by passion but by the most
arduous mental labour. But he had a fine, noble head, and when he
turned his face, with a look of profound, dignified, yet simple
earnestness towards his hearers, the imprint of high intellect was
unmistakable.
He began to speak, cleared his throat, coughed and stammered, had
difficulty in finding his words. He had a strong Swabian accent, and
a jerky, unrhythmical delivery; involved himself in long, intricate
sentences which he seldom managed to bring to a satisfactory
conclusion; sought long for the exact word required to express his
meaning, but never failed to find it; and when found, it always struck
his hearers as extraordinarily telling, whether it was a perfectly
familiar or a very uncommon expression. In time this peculiar delivery
simply served to make intelligible to the listener the extraordinary
difficulty and intricacy of the mental process. There might be tiresome
repetitions, but if the student let his attention wander and missed a
few sentences, as likely as not he was punished by losing the thread of
the discourse. For by means of apparently insignificant intermediate
steps some thought had been made to betray its one-sidedness,
its narrowness, to involve itself in contradictions, and these
contradictions had to be, or were already, explained away.
What struck one as peculiarly characteristic of his lecturing was
the combination of two features: the speaker's concentration in his
subject, which made it seem as if he spoke entirely for its sake; and
his keen anxiety to make himself plainly understood, which made it seem
as if after all he spoke chiefly for the sake of the hearer.[1]
He was a wretched orator, this professor, but a wonderful thinker and
expounder. The technical terms he employed were bewildering--that
extraordinary terminology in which "an sich" meant according to its
constitution, and "an und für sich," the completed, absolute existence;
but his hearers became accustomed to it, and soon began to feel as if
they were floating above the earth in abstractions so refined and so
ingeniously complementary that the dialectic of Plato's _Parmenides_
seemed clumsy in comparison; at times as if they were penetrating
ever deeper into ever more concrete subjects. The speaker's voice
grew stronger, he looked round with a free, confident glance while,
with a few pregnant words, he characterised an intellectual movement,
an age, a nation, or some specially remarkable individual, such as
that nephew of Rameau's who, without being named, is described in the
_Phænomenology_.
The novice who heard the famous thinker propound, without any
illustration, the abstract ideas which applied to everything--spirit
and nature, matter and mind--ideas of which it was said that they
enclosed the seen and the unseen in their mysteriously but methodically
woven net--might at first feel tempted to run away, or at any rate not
to come back again.
But he did come back, for the laborious delivery soon fascinated him,
and he began to feel that he was making progress. Every now and then
a lightning-flash of thought illuminated the darkness. The pupil
began to comprehend that, in his master's mind, there was no question
of this being a system like other systems, a more profound or more
comprehensive plan of instruction than other plans, but that the man
regarded himself as the originator of an entirely new science, which
comprehended the whole of existence, explained everything, God and
the world, and was the completion of everything; for the thoughts of
all earlier thinkers were discernible in his system, as all the lower
animal forms are traceable in the human embryo; everything that had
gone before had prepared his way, all endeavours found their fulfilment
in him; from this time forwards progress could only lie in the
direction of more special development of the separate sections of the
great completed plan.
The pupil was henceforth under the master's magic spell. The very
abstruseness of the terminology was now an attraction the more;
difficulties acted as spurs; it seemed to him a point of honour, a
matter of vital importance, that he should understand. And with what
rapture he understood!--understood that the whole world of sense
was only appearance; the great reality was thought. These separate,
individual appearances were not real, not true, only the universal was
real. I think, and by inevitable laws the progress of my thought leads
me to the complete understanding of myself and of the world. I think my
own thought, not regarding it as my own, but as the universal thought,
as the thought of all other human intelligences in union with mine; I
deprive them all of the individuality which appears to be essential
but is not, and see in all these intelligences one intelligence, and
in it the principle of existence. This first principle, which finds
its highest expression in man, is that which permeates, which creates
the world. This first principle, which works and creates blindly in
nature, is in me conscious of itself. The absolute, the idea, that
which is popularly known as God, is not a conscious or personal being,
for consciousness and personality presuppose the existence of something
outside the consciousness and personality; and yet it is not quite
unconscious. Man's consciousness of God is God's self-consciousness. I
cease to live as a single, fortuitous human being, in order to feel the
universal life live and pulsate in me.
Logic, which has been nothing but a sort of childish scholastic
discipline, which inculcated self-evident facts by the aid of barbaric
formulæ (Barbara, Celarent, Ferio, Camestres, Baroco), logic, which
had languished and died in ignominy long ago, came to life again in
the doctrine of the thoughts of existence in their connection and
their unity; for the first thought necessitated, produced the second,
amalgamated with it into a third, which in its turn summoned up its
antithesis, which was at the same time its complement. Thought of
necessity produced thought, until the thought-serpent set its tooth
into its own tail, thus forming one inviolable circle, from which the
realms of nature and spirit again detached themselves, dropping as the
rings dropped from Draupner, the ring of Odin.
And all the sciences came and drank of the new metaphysic, as of a
fountain of life, and all renewed their youth. And the system gradually
rose before the disciple's eye, homogeneous, carefully articulated,
severely symmetrical, of an internal infinity, a spiritual Organon,
a gigantic Gothic cathedral, every little part of which repeated
the whole, every little triad the great Trinity--thought, nature,
and spirit. It rose, built upon the granite foundation of thought,
all the buttresses and arches of the realm of nature supporting it
as it mounted towards the spirit, soaring to heaven in the mighty
three-storied tower of which religion formed the lowest, art the
middle, and philosophy the highest course.
But even more to the disciple than the system was the method. For
the method, the imperative thought-process, was the key to earth and
to heaven. It was by virtue of the method that he understood. It was
by virtue of the method that he saw the history of the world to be a
connected drama, one grand drama of liberation, in which every race had
its part, and all the parts were interdependent.
It was, after all, a truly great thought-poem, which men took for a
scientific demonstration; a new species of poetry, more dramatic and
more masterly in construction than that which Schelling's intellectual
perception had revealed to him; a new intoxicant, more subtle and
potent than that provided by the natural philosopher. The system has,
indeed, collapsed, the machinery of the method, too fine and intricate,
has come to pieces in our hands; only a few of the great fundamental
thoughts remain. But he who in his early youth has passed through the
Hegel period in his own mental experience, perfectly understands the
rapturous enthusiasm of the youth of that day, and the strength they
drew from these cosmic thoughts, world-ideas.
Among Hegel's pupils about the year 1830 there were already
master-thinkers like Hotho, Gans, Marheineke, Michelet; and almost all
the men of mark who appeared in the most diverse intellectual domains
from this time until far on in the Fifties, belonged at first to the
Hegelian school--Rosenkranz and Werder, Strauss and Fischer, Feuerbach,
Marx, and Lassalle. Cousin came from France, Heiberg from Denmark, Vera
from Naples, to fit themselves for propagating his doctrines in their
native countries.
From the professorial chair in Berlin, the Hegelian philosophy spread
throughout Germany, throughout the earth. Seldom or never has a
spiritual monarch's throne stood so secure. At the time of Hegel's
death (by cholera) in 1831, his followers compared him to Aristotle, to
Alexander the Great, even to Christ.
On the literature of the following decade, and in especial on the
so-called Young Germany, Hegelianism acted as an emancipating spiritual
power, a power that destroyed faith in religious dogma and freed the
individual from the burden of the Christianity of the State church.
We have already observed that even such an essentially lyric nature
as Heinrich Heine's took on the tinge of Hegelianism in this respect,
quite independently of the fact that his keen understanding was trained
in the school of Hegel; in the peculiar turn of his wit we trace the
influence of the Hegelian dialectic, which makes every idea pass over
into its opposite (unity of opposites).
But it was as a sort of modern Hellenism that the Hegelian philosophy
exercised the most powerful influence upon young minds. What may be
called Hegel's Hellenic influence was even stronger than Goethe's.
The reader doubtless remembers the passage in Heine's book on Börne in
which he writes on Börne's Nazarenic narrowness. He tells us that he
calls it "Nazarenic" to avoid employing the words Jewish or Christian,
words which to him convey the same meaning, because he does not use
them to designate a faith but a disposition, a nature; and he places
the word Nazarenic in opposition to the word Hellenic, which also to
him signifies an innate or acquired disposition and view of things
generally. In other words, all humanity is divided for him into
Nazarenes and Hellenes, men with ascetic, image-hating dispositions,
inclined to morbid spiritualisation, and men of cheerfully realistic
temperament, inclined to genial self-development. And he designates
himself a Hellene--a name which no Romanticist would ever have bestowed
on himself.
Hellenism in this sense emanated abundantly from Hegel. His whole
intellectual bent is in the direction of that tendency of the time to
present modern matter in antique manner, which we observe in Goethe
when he writes his _Iphigenia_, and in Thorvaldsen when he represents
the Princess Barjátinska in Greek dress. It was not by mere chance that
Hegel and Thorvaldsen were born within a few months of each other in
the year 1770. Nor was it a mere accident that Hegel best understood
that side of Goethe's nature which turned towards Greece.
Hegel had received his early training in his native country,
Würtemberg, under two influences, that of eighteenth century
enlightenment with its revolt against theology, and that of classic
antiquity. Even as a schoolboy he was keenly interested in the study of
the Greek language and literature; as a mere child he was devoted to
the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, which in later life was to him the typical
Greek work of art, and is constantly referred to in his writings. He
declared the study of the ancient classics to be the real introduction
to philosophy, and his own system as a whole he gradually moulded on
the plan of the ancient systems. It stands in the same relation to the
Aristotelian structure of thought in which Goethe's _Iphigenia_ stands
to a play of Euripides, or Thorvaldsen's "Triumphal Procession of
Alexander" to the frieze of the Parthenon.
His primary natural disposition towards Christianity is shown in
his studies and researches as a youthful theologian, the substance
of which, taken from the original manuscripts, has been given to
the public by Haym. In these early writings he maintains that the
Greco-Roman religion was a religion for free men, that a free
community, a free state, was the highest ideal of the Greek, an
ideal to which he consecrated his labour and his life. The God of
Christianity was only a substitute for lost republican liberty. Men
had lost power; they could no longer will, but only wish and pray. And
the more slavish they grew, the more was a God outside of themselves
and above themselves a necessity to them. And it is Hegel's opinion
that for us, in our days, has been reserved the task of demanding the
return of those treasures--the property of man--that were flung up into
heaven. In this he anticipates Heine and Feuerbach.[2]