daring and defiant of the Young Germans, he whom Heine had called "one
of those gladiators who die in the arena"--an appreciation which now
seemed somewhat ridiculous. He affirmed, in the _Allgemeine Zeitung_,
that in promising Dr. Gutzkow to contribute to his new review, he had
never dreamt of aiding and abetting the party known by the name of
Young Germany in its attacks on the existing conditions of society,
much less in its attempts to disturb and overturn them. On the
contrary, he had from the first plainly signified that he did not
identify himself with the movement.
On New Year's day, 1836, in the announcement of his
_Mitternachtszeitung_, which he had obtained permission to publish
on condition that his name did not appear as editor, he wrote that
he had become another man, that literature was no longer to him an
expression of political desires, that it was not his intention to take
any part in the literary disputes of the moment, "the rough-and-tumble
fights with uncombed hair and unwashed hands"; no, it had long been
his idea to form "a neo-Romantic school," and in it he would have no
disintegrating, destructive elements. He would support the existing,
not make war upon it. He would not identify himself with Menzel
(actually!) but neither could he take part with the so-called Young
Germany. He who had been the most daring of them all was the quickest
and most adroit in wheeling round.
Day after day, too, as was to be expected, the newspapers contained
declarations by the different university professors who had been
incautious enough to promise their co-operation in the _Deutsche
Revue_. Ulrici, Eduard Gans, Hotho, Rosenkranz and Trendelenburg,
Hegelians and Anti-Hegelians, all, one after the other, cleared
themselves from the charge of complicity. They repented with their
official souls. They vied with each other in their utter repudiation of
Gutzkow.
Heine did not belong to the number of those who lose their courage or
their heads in a difficulty. And in any case, partly because of his
established reputation, partly because of the personal security ensured
by his residence abroad, this interdict was not such a serious blow
to him as to the others. On the 28th of January 1836, after receiving
intimation of the prohibition of his books, he addressed a solemn
protest to the Federal Diet, a proceeding about which he immediately
afterwards jokes in a private letter to his publisher. In this protest
he expresses his astonishment at having been judged without a trial,
and without having been given any opportunity to defend himself. He
reminds the Federal Diet that Martin Luther did not meet with such
treatment at the hands of the Holy Roman Empire--not that he would
think of comparing himself with Luther, "but the pupil naturally
appeals to the precedent of his master." But what he especially desires
to protest against is his compulsory silence (which he was privately
determined to break as soon as possible) being taken for an admission
of culpable intentions, or even for a disavowal of his earlier
writings. To Laube, of whose new attitude he was still ignorant, he
wrote about the same time that, in the matter of politics, it was, for
the present, allowable to make any number of concessions, political
forms being of no consequence as long as the conflict for the highest
life-principles was still going on; but they must hold to their right
of free discussion of religious and moral topics, or there would soon
be an end of all Protestant liberty of thought. Laube, as we know,
finding himself obliged to give in to a certain extent, gave in all
round at once, struck simultaneously his political, religious, and
moral flags.
It was a slight consolation to the sufferers that the informer did not
go unpunished. Heine wrote _Ueber den Denunzianten_ and Börne wrote
_Menzel der Franzosenfresser_ ("The Frenchman-eater"), which is with
reason regarded as his wittiest and at the same time most warm-hearted
production.
But the more severe punishment came from Heine, who threw himself upon
his victim with all his tiger-like strength, and shook him till there
was nothing left of him but a shapeless, ridiculous bundle.
Heine points out how carefully Menzel has chosen the time for making
his accusations, a time when the leaders of the movement were either in
exile, or silent, or in safe keeping behind bolts and bars. He exposes
Menzel's hypocrisy, showing how, as long as he was connected with
Gutzkow, he looked on silently, though he knew Christianity to be in
peril of its life. He is quite ready to give him credit for "a certain
physical morality"--for a man can be virtuous alone, but to be vicious
he must have a companion. Herr Menzel's personal appearance stands him
in good stead when he is desirous to flee from vice. Heine has far
too high an opinion of the good taste of vice to be able to believe
that it would run after a Menzel. Poor Goethe was not so fortunately
gifted in this particular. Of Menzel's political opinions Heine is
afraid to speak for political reasons. Nor can he say what he thinks of
his private life (as if by a printer's error _Privatschelmenleben_ is
substituted for _Privatmenschenleben_) in the first instance for want
of space.
Never did Heine write anything at once so insulting and so crushing.
And how did matters stand with Gutzkow, who at the early age of
twenty-four had become a kind of centre of literary events, and upon
whom "the Goliath of the Philistine army" had fallen? For a moment he
was astonished and cast down. It was his first instructive experience
of life. His sin was that he had expressed his feelings naïvely and
honestly in a second-rate novel, and its result was that he now found
himself denounced as a plague of society, mocked at by his enemies,
forsaken and disowned by his friends. With perfect calm he heard
himself compared to the men who had prepared for the enormities
perpetrated at Minister under Jan van Leyden--division of property,
marriage with twelve wives, &c. He was inexperienced enough to look
forward to the legal proceedings against him with expectations of
victory, and when he was arrested at Mannheim, he went to prison
with a feeling of relief. In prison he did not hear the yelling of
the press; he heard nothing but the squeaking of the mice that ran
over his bed. He could lead a peaceful life, a life of uninterrupted,
quiet production. He wrote his novel _Seraphine_ and a work entitled
_Philosophic der That und des Ereignisses_ ("Philosophy of Action
and Event"), a kind of criticism of Hegel's _Philosophy of History_.
When he came out of prison he took up his life-work again with firm
determination, but for a time wrote anonymously and expressed himself
more cautiously.
About a year before this he had fallen in love with a young girl in
Berlin, and become engaged to her. But the Berlin newspapers called him
an atheist. The young lady's mother was a foolish, hysterical woman.
One day she would embrace Gutzkow, the next threaten to throw a knife
at him and shriek to her daughter, "Choose between him and me!" As the
wisdom of allowing her daughter to unite her fate with Gutzkow's became
more and more questionable, the mother's amiable days became fewer, the
unamiable more frequent, and in the end the young lady, as an obedient
daughter, drew back altogether. This episode had made a tremendous
impression on Gutzkow's young heart. It had taught him that to hold
convictions contrary to those of the people one lives amongst isolates
a man even in private life, and that he who sets the opinion of his
neighbours at defiance cannot expect to be successful in life or in
love.
His friends behaved no better to him. No sooner was he released from
prison than he was overwhelmed with reproaches and complaints by
persons to whom he had previously promised literary employment, and who
were now not only disappointed in their hopes, but compromised by the
patronage he had extended to them.
His first disappointment in love led to one of his best shorter
stories, _Der Sadducäer von Amsterdam_. And the disappointment,
combined with the general disillusionment, produced the frame
of mind which characterises the dramatised version of the story
which he published many years later under the title of _Uriel
Acosta_--undoubtedly his best drama, probably his best work.
The hero is a historic personage, Gabriel, afterwards Uriel Acosta,
born in 1594, a religious philosopher of Jewish nationality. His
parents were baptised Christians, but he himself, on account of his
disbelief in Christianity, was obliged to leave his native land,
Portugal, and take refuge in Holland. Then he threw in his lot with the
Jews, but soon began to publish works in which the Jewish doctrines
were as freely criticised as the Christian. For this he was condemned
to pay fines, and in the end was sentenced to a most humiliating
penance. After public acknowledgment and recantation of his errors,
he was to lie on the ground at the threshold of the synagogue and
allow himself to be trodden under foot by the whole congregation of
the faithful. After seven years of persecution he submitted to the
sentence, but immediately afterwards, in despair at having retracted
his opinions, shot himself (in 1647). He was the forerunner, and, if we
may believe tradition, the teacher of Spinoza.
In the little old-fashioned story, _Der Sadducäer von Amsterdam_, the
most important personages of the future drama are outlined. Judith, the
vacillating and finally faithless woman, beloved of Acosta, was very
evidently suggested by the inconstant Berlin lady. The style is artless
and weak. Spinoza is introduced as follows: "She called, and her only
child, a boy of seven, came running up to his uncle, whom he easily
recognised in the moonlight. Bare your heads! That boy was Baruch
Spinoza!"
What attracted Gutzkow as a young man to this theme was evidently its
pathos, its being the story of the first martyr for free-thought.
In our days we read of such a life without being remarkably impressed
by it. The spiritually emancipated know that all the advance that
has been made amounts to this, that they are now tolerated. The life
that they have lived has so accustomed them to hear all that they
hold highest condemned, and all that they regard as base or foolish
extolled, that no story of this kind affects them much.
It was different with the generation of 1830 in Germany. Even the
fact that Uriel Acosta sued for pardon and recanted did not lessen
Gutzkow's interest in him. In the novel he writes: "We who have been,
as it were, born into a state of constant martyrdom for the sake of
our convictions, who have lived in it all our lives, must refrain from
condemning a man who had the courage to protest against the dogmas of
a fanatical, intolerant religion, but who, nevertheless, was capable
of cringing beneath the hand that had chastised him." He depicts the
confusion in Uriel's soul: Faith is the blind man's staff; his eyes
are suddenly opened; but they are utterly unaccustomed to distinguish
objects; they cannot, like the staff to which he has been so long
accustomed, save him from falling; and so he gropes more helplessly
than before.
After the storm raised by Menzel had passed in all its fury over
Gutzkow's head, the story of Acosta inevitably acquired quite a new
significance for him. Considering it now, he saw not only its purely
dramatic possibilities, but the correspondence of its main features
with the main features of his own life story. He, too, had been
placed under ban and interdict; he, too, after being cursed, had been
deserted; he, too, had paid the penalty of intrepid thought; he, too,
had been flung on the ground before the threshold of the injured
Church, and the whole multitude had passed over him and trampled on him.
In 1846, in Paris, under the influence of the acting of great
tragedians, Gutzkow dramatised the story. He made various alterations
in it. To increase the interest of the plot, he idealised the chief
female character. In the tragedy of _Uriel Acosta_, Judith is the
betrothed of another; Uriel is her master. But when the Rabbis, with
solemn ceremony, pronounced the terrible curse, when all draw back from
him and he is left alone on one side of the stage, whilst the words:
"Fluch dem Freund
Der Dir im Elend je die Treue hält!
Nie giebt sich Dir ein liebend Herz des Weibes,"[2]
are being spoken, she crosses the stage and places herself by his side
with the famous and beautiful speech ending with the line:
"Er _wird_ geliebt! Glaubt besseren Propheten!"[3]
Of a personage who hardly appears at all in the novel, Gutzkow made
an imperishable character, the best and most original in the drama,
the aged Chief Rabbi, Ben Akiba. This old man has in reality only one
conclusive speech, which he repeats again and again to Uriel and to the
others:
"Es war alles da."
(This has all been before.)
Admirable words! Ben Akiba is age, that has seen all these things
before, seen the Church attacked, seen the Church triumphant, seen
sceptics and champions arise, seen them humiliated, defeated, dead, and
buried. The others believe that this is something new; it is all old,
it all leads to no result. Ben Akiba is dogmatic conservatism in human
form; he is experience, shaking its heavy head. If youth were to listen
to him, despairing indifference would be the inevitable result.
Uriel lets himself be persuaded to recant. He does it for his mother's
and Judith's sake. His old, blind, believing mother comes to him, and
in a scene which never fails to affect the audience, persuades him to
recant and submit to the ignominious punishment--persuades only by her
silent dignity and the strength of her love, without a single entreaty
to do this or anything else for her sake. Uriel takes the step, hoping
that it will remove a weight from his mother's heart and make it
possible for him to marry Judith. But whilst he is still in prison
preparing for the penance, his mother dies, and Judith is forced to
marry Ben Jochai. He degrades himself in vain. Judith poisons herself,
and he (the drama in this point keeping to fact) shoots himself.
By reason of its theme, the tragedy of _Uriel Acosta_ occupies a
unique place in the German literature of the day. It is a tragedy of
free-thought, a drama that gives us a better idea than anything else
does of the period which produced it--a period of energetic struggle
for liberty, and of still more energetic oppression--and of the
spirit of that Young Germany which was so gallant in advance, but so
prone to defection and retractation. It is a play, too, which bears
unmistakable testimony to its author's qualities of head and heart. Any
one who compares Gutzkow's _Uriel Acosta_ with Heine's _Almansor_, will
subscribe to the affirmation already made, that the best men of Young
Germany in their best moments displayed a manly earnestness which we do
not find in Heine.
On the German stage _Uriel Acosta_ has now long been a favourite play.
The pure style and the treatment of the subject remind us of Lessing's
_Nathan der Weise_, but in energy and pathos Gutzkow in this case
surpasses Lessing. In spite of some weak parts, such as the Spinoza
scene, the dramatic construction is excellent.
Of all Gutzkow's works, this play has had the widest circulation. It
has been translated into all the Slavonic and all the Latin languages,
into English, Hungarian, and Swedish.
In Germany it was for a time, as Gutzkow himself aptly remarked, a
sort of barometer indicating the state of public opinion. When the
ecclesiastical reaction was in the ascendant, it was prohibited in many
of the theatres. When there was a change of system, the prohibition was
cancelled. It is significant that in Austria its performance was always
permitted in the provinces, but that the Concordat with the Pope stood
in the way of its being played in the Burg Theater of Vienna. As was to
be expected, the play was long in reaching Denmark; it was first played
there in the Nineties.
After 1835 Gutzkow writes nothing childish or crude. From this time
onwards he is the great, indefatigable literary worker; a student
and critic who possessed the faculty of discerning and explaining
the relation in which all characters, past or present, stood to the
requirements and problems of his day; an acute distinguisher of
the various drifts of the times; a psychologist distinguished for
his understanding of individual character. His _Goethe_ (1836) is
a thoughtful little work, in the first instance a protest against
Menzel; his long series of portraits (_Zeitgenossen_, afterwards
_Säkularbilder_) show qualities which somewhat later stood him in good
stead as a novelist; his _Life of Börne_ (1840) is a tribute to the
memory of that progenitor of Young Germany and a challenge to Heine,
whose injudicious and ungenerous work on Börne had lowered him in the
estimation of the young generation.
A special interest attaches to Gutzkow's dramatic attempts from the
fact that he and Laube were the first German authors of any position
since the days of Kleist to connect themselves with the theatre and to
win an honourable place for themselves on the German stage. Gutzkow
makes a laboured beginning with sentimental dramas that no longer
satisfy the public taste. His _Richard Savage, oder der Sohn einer
Mutter_ (1839) is from beginning to end a high-flown extravaganza. A
talented English poet, who has grown up in ignorance of his parentage,
discovers his mother in a beautiful, brilliant, aristocratic woman
of the world, who refuses to acknowledge him or to have anything
whatever to do with him. The play is a series of representations of
his fruitless attempts to win this mother's cold heart. _Werner, oder
Herz und Welt_ (1840), is a pathetic, middle-class drama, turning on
a theme on which Gutzkow rang many changes, the struggle in a man's
heart between an old attachment and a more recently formed connection.
Heinrich Werner has allowed himself to be adopted by people in a
position above his own. He has been ennobled under the name of von
Jordan, and has deserted a poor but charming young girl in order to
marry a lady of position. But in his new, affluent circumstances, he
misses his former plain, studious life, and, most of all, Marie Winter,
the girl to whom he had been engaged, and whom he cannot forget. He
suddenly meets her again as governess in his own house. He is long
distracted between his duty to his wife and his attraction to this
girl, whom he is determined to love only platonically, but whom he
really loves above everything. At last things come to a crisis. The
wife asserts her rights, rights that Heinrich refuses to acknowledge.
His morality is a higher, a freer than hers. She "shudders at his
principles." The knot is finally cut by a _deus ex machinâ_. A young
friend of Heinrich's comes to an agreement with Marie that he and she
will marry, and so prevent the breaking up of the family. The tragic
motive is thus, we observe, deprived of its point.
The first of Gutzkow's plays that it still gives one a reasonable
amount of pleasure to see is _Zopf und Schwert_ ("Pigtail and Sword"),
written in 1843. It is a play which has kept its place on the German
stage, but which never gained a firm footing outside of Germany
from the fact of its being a species of national drama. The beat of
a Prussian's heart is felt in it. Gutzkow's aim was to represent
Frederick William I. and his court in a comedy like those which
Scribe was bringing out so successfully about the same time. The
historic appreciation is, however, far from being so superficial as
in Scribe's comedies. Gutzkow had an eye for the admirable as well as
for the comical qualities of the miserly family tyrant, the monarch of
Spartan severity. But the very fact of the play being a comedy made a
really profound study of the character an impossibility. And it was
not Gutzkow's habit, and still less was it Laube's, to investigate
into historical characters and situations until they arrived at the
historic, as opposed to the traditional truth. Their history was simply
the vehicle of a more or less cleverly concocted plot. We have only to
open the first volume of Carlyle's _Frederick the Great_ to find such
an immensely more powerful and impressive picture of the eccentric
Prussian king with his tall grenadiers, that Gutzkow's in comparison
shrinks into a mild pleasantry. And we have only to look at a few
pages of the Memoirs of Gutzkow's heroine, Wilhelmine of Bayreuth,
to see that in the relations between her and her father there was no
suggestion of comedy. But, putting aside all thought of historical
correctness, we have a very pretty intrigue-play, with a historic
colouring which cannot fail to appeal to lovers of Prussia. _Zopf und
Schwert_ is a species of light-hearted pendant to Kleist's serious
_Prins von Homburg_.
Of the other plays written by Gutzkow in the Forties, _Das Urbild des
Tartüffe_ ("The Prototype of Tartuffe") has been the most successful,
but it is a much over-estimated work. A very charming little work
is _Der Königslieutenant_, an unassuming play, written for Goethe's
centenary, and treating of him in his youthful days.
The long historical novels, _Die Ritter vom Geist_ ("The Knights of
the Spirit"), _Der Zauberer von Rom_ ("The Roman Magician"), &c,
which Gutzkow wrote during the reaction period after 1848, and which
immensely strengthened his hold over the minds of his contemporaries,
do not come within the scope of the present work. They were the
forerunners of Spielhagen's long series of novels.
Next to Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube (born in Sprottau, in Silesia, in
1806) was the most eminent member of the new group. He is a clear-cut
type, a man with plenty of fresh, vigorous talent, exuberant spirits,
an intuitive perception of what is effective, a gift of slight, but
in most instances adequate character delineation, and, to start with,
many daring but shallow and second-hand ideas. He is not devoid of
feeling, nor totally devoid of earnestness, but his distinguishing
quality is his brisk, energetic practicalness. Between 1826 and 1832
he studied theology at Halle and Breslau. In 1832 he embarked on the
career of a journalist in Leipzig. In his unpedantic literary style,
as also in his outward appearance, there was something that seemed
to point to Slavonic blood in his veins. As a student he loved to go
about in a Polish braided coat, and eccentric caps and cloaks of his
own invention. He wrote with a fluency and vehemence, with a crude
naturalness and a want of exactitude which were not German. His blood
was hot and flowed quickly; he had the sanguine, choleric temperament,
without a touch of melancholy.
As a member of a student's union (Burschenschaft) and because he
had given too free expression to his sympathy with the Revolution
of July and its results in Germany, he was, in 1834, expelled from
Saxony and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment in Berlin. In the
introduction to his drama, _Monaldeschi_, we find an account of his
life in prison, of the monotony of that beautiful summer of 1834, which
he spent in his cell, without a book--nothing but a bed, a table, a
stool, and a pitcher of water. He also gives an indirect and more
effective description of the same experience in the Third Part of _Das
junge Europa_, where Valerius, upon scraps of paper procured with the
greatest difficulty, writes his impressions during a long confinement
in a Prussian prison.