spectacles. He calls their ancient history "a condition of unmitigated
ugliness." The great tragedy of the Jewish nation is, he says, a very
different thing from a Greek tragedy; it neither awakens pity nor
terror; for these feelings are only called forth by the fate following
on the inevitable errors of a noble nature. He sees the history and
fate of the Jews against a background of Sophoclean conception of
life and Aristotelian theories. Such ideas as law and punishment are
repugnant to him. The Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sin
he can only accept by converting it into the idea of fate reconciled
by love. In other words, he can only admire the sufferings of Christ
when he looks upon them as he looks upon the sufferings of Oedipus in
Colonos, namely, as a fate overtaking the innocent, not as a sacrifice
offered for the sins of others.
All that he rescues for himself from the shipwreck of positive religion
is the person and life-story of Jesus--that beautiful divine-human
personal life which is to him an equivalent for the citizen-life of
the ancient world. But his Jesus is not Jesus pure and simple, but a
Jesus-Apollo such as Heine describes in his poem _Frieden_--the giant,
who bears the red, flaming sun in his breast for a heart. We have a
similar fusion of heathenism and Christianity in the well-known preface
to _Romancero_, where Heine talks of his last genuflection "before the
ever blessed goddess of beauty, our dear lady of Milo." For this is not
Venus pure and simple, but Venus-Madonna.
Thus Hegel himself is the originator of that pagan Hellenism, of which
it was the fashion to accuse Young Germany.
And in his philosophy we can even detect the spirit which might
evolve such a watchword as "the emancipation of the flesh." This was
a French expression introduced by Heine into German literature, which
was eagerly taken up by his admirers and imitators, and was specially
execrated by the enemies and denouncers of the new literature. It
certainly might be suspected of an immoral meaning in Heine's mouth
and of an ugly meaning in Heinrich Laube's; but amongst the best of
the men of the young generation it meant nothing but what Goethe and
Hegel, too, had in reality desired. Karl Gutzkow has insisted, and
with reason, that only a low mind coupled with this expression ideas
of licence for all bad passions. For the word flesh in itself conveyed
no objectionable meaning. The New Testament says: "The Word was
made flesh." Flesh, in the Christian acceptation of the word, means
the natural, the unbaptised, the original man. Its emancipation in
reality meant to the young enthusiasts of the day nothing more than
the restoring of her rights to nature, war against what is contrary
to nature. What they desired was to make the laws of nature the rule
of conduct, to release nature from interdict and ban.[3]
A neo-Hellenism realised in the Hegelian spirit was what was present to
their minds.
It did not seem a matter of great consequence to them that Hegel should
end his days as a rigid Prussian Conservative, or that his _Philosophy
of Right_ should recognise all existing institutions as "holy things,"
and make out the highest ethical conceptions to be "idols." He had
underestimated the strength of the scientific doubt of the day.
How many institutions still presented themselves as objects of
veneration and faith to the normal mind of the period? Four at
most--the monarchy, the church, marriage, and property. As regards
these, Hegel's doctrine is as follows:
He does not uphold the monarchy as a guarantee for continuity in the
execution of great political plans; no, the monarch is to him simply
the logically necessary pinnacle of the state-building, something like
the dot over the i--a most inconsistent position of Hegel's; to him in
all other instances the subjective (the personal) is only a transient
form of energy, so that logically the monarch ought to be in time
merged in the sovereignty of the State. His defence of monarchy is thus
a concession to existing circumstances. Was it any wonder that the
following generation drew its own logical conclusion?
With regard to the Church, Hegel took up the position which was
subsequently publicly taken up by his disciple Cousin as French
Minister of State. He allowed his followers, the so-called Hegelians
of the Left, men like Göschen, to demonstrate the harmony of his
philosophy with the Bible and with ecclesiastical Christianity,
actually in his review bestowing excessive praise on Göschen's
aphorisms. The man who in his youthful letters to Schelling had
attacked the philosophy of Kant because it could be made to lend itself
to the service of orthodoxy, the man who had adjured Hölderlin never
to make peace with dogma, now in his own religious philosophy took
the ambiguous course of making out every dogma to be the symbol of a
thought, and allowing the dogma to stand, with the explanation that it
figuratively expressed the same truth as science. Was it any wonder
that his pupils drew their own inferences?
Marriage, Hegel regarded as an incident in family life, justified to
much the same extent as family property. How it was brought about
was of comparatively small importance; arrangement by the parents
was probably the most moral way. In his aversion from the arbitrary
action of the individual, he dwelt on the irrationality of the private
individual's capricious fancy for this or that girl ("dass er sich
gerade auf dieses Mädchen capricionire"). He spoke on this subject half
like an old Spartan, half like a narrow old bourgeois, and the youth of
the day, being neither Spartan nor narrow, did not accept his doctrine.
Property Hegel considered morally justified only as the common
property of the family. Only when it is not the possession of an
individual is what he calls the egotism of greed overcome. Of course
he vehemently condemns Communism. But an impetus had been given to
logical conclusion-drawing, and the time came when Hegelians like Marx
and Engels drew revolutionary conclusions from the philosophy of the
apparently Conservative master.
[1] Hotho: _Vorstudien für Leben und Kunst_, p. 383. Haym: _Hegel und
seine Zeit_., p. 392. Scherer: _Mélanges d'histoire religieuse_, p. 299.
[2] "Die Objectivität der Gottheit ist mit der Verdorbenheit und
Sklaverei der Menschen in gleichem Schritt gegangen, und jene ist
eigentlich nur eine Offenbarung dieses Geistes der Zeiten.... Ausser
früheren Versuchen blieb es vorzüglich unseren Tagen aufbehalten, die
Schätze, die an den Himmel geschleudert worden sind, als Eigenthum
der Menschen wenigstens in der Theorie zu vindiciren; aber welches
Zeitalter wird die Kraft haben, dieses Recht geltend zu machen und sich
in den Besitz zu setzen?"
The objectivity of the Divinity has gone hand in hand with the slavery
and corruption of humanity, and is in reality only one sign of the
spirit of the times.... Attempts have been made before, but it has been
specially reserved for our age to vindicate at least in theory, as the
property of man, the treasures which have been hurled up into heaven;
but what age will have the power to enforce this right and to place man
in possession of his own?
[3] Karl Gutzkow: _Rückblicke auf mein Leben_, p. 135.
XXI
YOUNG GERMANY AND MENZEL
When, from the all-embracing thought of Hegel, the noble art of Platen,
the polished wit of Börne, the lyric and satiric genius of Heine, the
classic fulness of Immermann's _Oberhof_, we pass on to the men to
whom the name Young Germany was more particularly applied, we feel the
change to be in the artistic sense a fall--a fall from the confidence
and perfect skill of masters to the immaturity and makeshifts of
beginners. And among the men of Young Germany there were those who
were destined for ever to remain beginners. More especially is the
transition from Heine to his successors felt like a fall from graceful,
god-like audacity to clumsy youthful defiance of all established
custom, all conventional morality.
And yet the best of these men in their best moments displayed a
self-devotion unknown to Heine.
The Young Germany of accepted tradition includes neither Heine, Börne,
and their contemporaries (who were regarded as its fathers), nor the
circle of young scientific men who expressed their views in Ruge's and
Echtermeyer's _Hallische Jahrbücher_, nor the group of political poets
who in the Forties gave literary expression to the feelings which found
practical expression in the deeds of 1848.
The name in its traditional acceptation has a much narrower
signification than that given to it in the present volume.
Its originator was a very earnest, but not specially gifted North
German author, Ludolf Wienbarg, born at Altona in 1803. In 1834, under
the warlike title of _An Æsthetic Campaign_ (a title invented by Campe,
the publisher), Wienbarg published a series of lectures which he had
delivered in Kiel, and for which he had been deprived of his right to
lecture, though their inoffensive matter and their unctuous manner
were little calculated to produce excitement of any kind. To this
book, which it is a hard task to wade through nowadays, is prefixed
the dedication: "To the young Germany, not the old, I dedicate this
book" (Dem jungen Deutschland, nicht dem alten, widme ich dieses
Buch). This is all that men remember to-day of Wienbarg's lectures. By
young Germany he meant all the young German minds that had broken with
tradition in art, church, state, and society, and were devoting their
literary talents to the furtherance of the reforms which they felt to
be imperative.
The programme he proposes for the new literature is alarming in its
vagueness. Its conception of life is to be founded on a harmonious
union of sensuality and spirituality. He proclaims a new Hellenism, in
which the sensual will be more permeated by spirit than in the case of
the Greeks, and the spiritual more permeated by the sensual than in the
case of the Christians. But before literature can be born again, life
itself must be. Not till the life around them has become healthy and
harmonious, can the young generation produce a true work of art.
There was, as we see, nothing new in these declamations and prophecies.
Heine had already said the same thing in a hundred ways, comic or
poetic; even Menzel in his first period had said the same with all the
eloquence of the unsuccessful poet and violent partisan. Here it was
expressed in the flowery language and with the rhetoric which seldom
fails to produce its effect on immature minds.
The only novelty lay in the fact that now for the first time the
exponent of these ideas was a representative of that young generation
who regarded Heine as the great author of the age, and that now for
the first time expression was given to the theory that prose was the
literary form of the new age, and of more value than poetry. Wienbarg's
æsthetic theories resolve themselves into glorification of Heine,
whom he proclaims to be the great, the greatest prose author. Not till
now, he declares, under the influence of French prose, has German
prose really been formed. Schiller's style he calls the language of
the parade, and Goethe's the language of the court. All the earlier
great authors, even Jean Paul, lived, according to him, within a magic
circle, far removed from the stir of the world. What distinguishes the
prose of a Heine, a Börne, a Menzel, a Laube, from that of the earlier
writers is, in his opinion, the want of tranquillity, of placidity
(Behaglichkeit), but it is this want that gives it its superiority, the
superiority of life. Heine especially is praised for having disdained
"the passing fame" of a lyric poet in order to play upon the colossal,
cosmic instrument which lies under the hands of a master of German
prose.
First Mundt and then Laube, neither of whom was capable of writing a
respectable verse, joined eagerly in this glorification of prose at
the expense of poetry, the more willingly as by so doing they entered
a protest against the Swabian school of poetry, the tardy offspring of
Uhland's branch of Romanticism. Mundt positively elevated this cult
of prose to the rank of the newest gospel. How little real ability
Wienbarg possessed is clearly shown by his second work, _Zur neuesten
Litteratur_, a collection of weak essays, in which the only thing we
find to admire is his courageous fidelity to Heine at a time when
envious rivals and moral doctrinaires had turned the tide of popular
opinion against him.
Wienbarg had called the name Young Germany into existence, but as yet
it designated no exactly specified group of authors. Strangely enough
it was first applied to definite individuals in connection with a
public denunciation and harsh legal proceedings.
The facts were as follows: A number of young authors had gradually
brought themselves into notice, who were not exactly in league with
each other, but whose common watchword was, spiritual emancipation.
They all held aloof from Christianity and dreamed of a new, pantheistic
religion for the new era. Many of them desired, under the name of
"the emancipation of the flesh" or "rehabilitation of the flesh," the
abolishment of the traditional code of morals, and more freedom in
the conditions regulating the union and separation of the two sexes.
Both the expression of this desire and the desire itself were, in the
case of a man like Laube, unpleasantly epicurean, in the case of a man
like Gutzkow, unnecessarily defiant and curiously morbid; with others
again, such as Mundt, it took the form of championship of what he
vaguely called the emancipation of woman, by which he merely meant more
independence in home life and in marriage. By all these authors certain
distinguished women were held in high honour--in France, George Sand,
by whom they were strongly influenced; in Germany, Rahel, Bettina,
Charlotte Stieglitz.
They all talked much and loudly of the rights of youth, had all imbibed
a certain faith in liberty from Hegel, and all owed their general
political tendency to the Revolution of July. Their aim was to identify
literature with life, as Hegel had reconciled idea with reality. They
had no really profound sympathy with each other, and they soon went
each his own way. They were widely enough separated as regarded their
places of residence. Heine lived in Paris, Weinbarg at Kiel--entirely
isolated; Gutzkow resided in South Germany, Mundt was in Berlin,
Laube in Leipzig; and the distances separating these places were
very considerable then. Laube was very soon in many ways an opponent
of Gutzkow, and a cold, unpleasant critic of Mundt and Kühne. Mundt
attacked Gutzkow. An accidental meeting between Laube and Gutzkow in
the north of Italy in 1833 contributed to their estrangement rather
than their reconcilement. There was no other community between these
writers than that usually existing between men of the same age and
calling; they were much less a political party than a literary coterie;
nevertheless literature was not to them its own aim and end; they
desired to devote themselves to the service of the spirit of the age.[1]
This was the reason why they did not occupy themselves with the pure
forms of literary art, neither with epic nor with lyric poetry, and but
sparingly with dramatic. They all idolised the "Zeitgeist" (spirit of
the times), and did homage to it in journalism and fiction, in critical
and argumentative essays, in fanciful descriptions of travel, after
the pattern of Heine's and Prince Pückler-Muskau's, and at times in
long-winded novels.
[Illustration: KARL GUTZKOW]
The most able of them all was undoubtedly Karl Gutzkow, born in
Berlin in 1811, a man of a tireless, energetic, inquiring spirit,
absorbed in the thousand problems of modern life, a cross between an
analytical critic and a poet, but a man to whom nothing came of itself
and who achieved nothing with ease. His personality had no charm, his
youth no freshness, his prose no rhythm. But he was bold, inventive,
intelligent, and enterprising. He had the gift of pathos, but not the
lyric gift; his style was effective, but unmelodious. His mind was
specially open to ideas, to all the thoughts and spiritual movements
that were abroad at that day. By nature he belonged to the ungainly,
but his literary enthusiasm was so genuine, his ambition so great, and
his will so strong, that he gradually became an intellectual centre and
diffused his influence in many directions. There was a time, about the
year 1840, when a great part of what was best in German literature took
its tone from him and his adherents.
We saw how it was the Revolution of July that awakened in him a
desire to write. The following year, the great year of dismissals,
imprisonments, and banishments in Prussia, put the pen into his hand.
It was a time when every word underwent the strictest censorship; even
the advertisements in the _Intelligenzblatt_ were carefully examined,
in case they might contain some hidden political meaning.
Gutzkow began by publishing a newspaper, _Forum der Journallitteratur_.
He had been brought up on the Hegelian idea of the progress of the
world towards ever greater liberty. As Gottschall has expressed it:
"There swam before his eyes a constant succession of political sunrises
and world-liberating theories." His newspaper reached a circulation of
seventy copies, and was then given up.
Wolfgang Menzel, at that time the acknowledged master of German
criticism, had repeatedly invited Gutzkow to come to Stuttgart and
assist him in the editorship of his _Litteraturblatt_, as he himself,
having been elected a member of the Würtemberg Parliament, was no
longer able to conduct it alone.
In spite of his hatred of Goethe, nay, partly because of it, Menzel,
at this period of his career, was revered by the youth of Germany much
as Katkóf and Ploug in their first periods were revered in Russia and
Denmark. He, above all others, was to them the man of the day, the
friend of liberty. One of Gutzkow's aims in his newspaper had been to
defend Menzel, the man after his own heart, against the attacks of
his enemies--and Menzel had many enemies, for as a reviewer he was
disputatious, quarrelsome, and abusive. But he was, or seemed to be,
a man of sincere convictions. He urged the necessity for a profounder
conception of patriotism and of religion than was then in vogue, but
at the same time he was an ardent Liberal in politics, and as such an
admirer of Börne and Heine, who looked upon him as a trusty companion
in arms; in Parliament he championed all progressive measures, amongst
others the emancipation of the Jews.
Gutzkow, not yet much over twenty, short, slight, fair, and pale-faced,
entered the presence of his lord and master, who was thirteen years
older than himself, with a bashful reverence which he has compared to
that of the student who appears before Mephistopheles-Faust in the
first part of Goethe's drama. He saw a man with broad shoulders, a well
developed chest, and dark hair, whose clean-shaven face reminded him
of a Romish priest's. Round the mouth, with its ugly yellow teeth, a
satiric smile played; the expression of the short-sighted eyes behind
the spectacles was half defiant, half dignified. The man's temper
seemed to be violent, his will inflexible. An expression of faun-like
sensuality would come over his features when he talked of some erotic
book, and yet Goethe's worldliness was as hateful to him as his
indifference to politics, and he uncritically bowed the knee to men and
phenomena that to his mind represented the mysterious. His character
was a genuine priestly blend of irony and mysticism. He loved Voltaire,
and enthusiastically admired Görres.
Master and pupil agreed well at first, both in their social and in
their business relations. Gutzkow, who lived now in one, now in another
of the towns in the neighbourhood of Stuttgart, indefatigably reviewed
the great parcels of books sent him by Menzel. He soon caught the
brisk, sweeping journalistic style, and all went well. The youthful
works which he himself published, naturally found a more than lenient
critic in Menzel. Yet they were poor enough. _Briefe eines Narren an
eine Närrin_ ("Letters from a Male to a Female Fool") are humorous
effusions without originality, in a style which is partly an imitation
of Jean Paul, partly of Heine; and _Maha Guru, the History of a God_,
the description of the psychological condition of a Tibetan who is made
Dalai-Lama and consequently worshipped as a divinity, is a piece of
fantastic writing, now totally unreadable. Yet Menzel, when reviewing
this latter book, chose from amongst the vignettes which alternately
figured on the title-page of his review, a laurel wreath, and had
Gutzkow's name twice printed within its circle.
Gutzkow's intention in _Maha Guru_ was to show how the god who is
supposed to be incarnated in the Dalai-Lama is subordinated to the
man in him, the false divinity being completely thrown into the shade
by the true nobility, true divinity of the human being. But besides
this, the book was intended to be a philosophical-satirical romance
in the old style, representing home institutions in foreign guise.
The Tibetan theocracy was intended to suggest the European hierarchy,
the Tibetan polyandry the European emancipation of woman. The foreign
scenery, which Gutzkow had never seen, the foreign customs, which were
not described for their own sake, could not interest. The book was
suggested to him by the story of the French atheist, Billaud-Varennes,
who escaped the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, took refuge in
America, and was there worshipped by the Indians as a god. His skill in
catching, training, and stuffing birds made such an impression on them
that they looked upon him as a second creator. But all this had little
to do with Tibet, and the would-be gravity of Gutzkow's theme.
Up to this time Young Germany and its fathers had not seemed to Menzel
to be sacrilegious scoffers or bad patriots. Gutzkow's irreligion so
far had not disturbed the good relations between him and his master.
Menzel himself praised Börne's _Letters from Paris_, which were
attacked on all sides, as manly utterances, and excused their strong
expressions as outbursts of feeling which must not be too roughly dealt
with; he compared them to the glow-worms which shine so beautifully on
mild summer nights, but which turn into poor little grey insects when
seized by rough hands.
But it was inevitable that the tie between Gutzkow and Menzel should
soon be loosed. From the first Gutzkow had received warnings not to
involve himself too deeply with the Stuttgart author. Hegel himself,
who took an interest in the young man, had said to him: "How can any
one bind himself to a man like that?" The first disagreement between
them was on the subject of Menzel's attitude to the South German lyric
poets, the so-called Swabian school, followers of Uhland, a poet who
not only enjoyed the fame which he most undoubtedly deserved, but a
far greater. As a good Swabian, Menzel esteemed and supported these
men--Gustav Schwab, Gustav Pfizer, Karl Mayer, &c.--as bulwarks of
conventional piety and morality. But Gutzkow, with his keen sense of
what was the life-idea of the time, Gutzkow, to whom literature was the
church militant, had the greatest objection to such Sunday afternoon,
gilt-edged poets, men who put into rhyme old, dead ballad themes, or
their own petty, sentimental feelings, whilst they were cautiously
watching over their interests as government servants aspiring to
professorships or consistory counsellorships.
When _Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann_ appeared, it became known
how severely Goethe had judged his admirer Uhland's poetry. He would
hear of nothing but the ballads, considering all the rest unworthy of
notice. And a most contemptuously disparaging verdict upon the whole
Swabian school, from Uhland to Pfizer, was presently published in
_Goethe's Correspondence with Zelter_: he (Goethe) had never expected
anything fresh or capable from that quarter; the fellows concealed
their want of genius under the moral-religious-poetical beggar's cloak.[2]