his writings as belonging to the Young German school; but to judge
him fairly we must remember that this blow came upon him immediately
after his release, and that, in spite of his subsequent cautious
behaviour, he was again, soon after his marriage in 1837, condemned to
imprisonment for participation in the doings of the Burschenschaften.
This time the punishment was mild, thanks apparently to the protection
of Prince Pückler-Muskau. The place of imprisonment was a country
house on the Prince's property of Muskau; for a cell he was given a
hall; instead of a skylight he had eight windows, looking in three
different directions. Even a short daily walk in the famous park was
permitted. He might read and write as much as he chose. His wife shared
his imprisonment. From this time onwards he shows extreme moderation
in politics. When, in 1848, he is elected a member of the German
National Assembly, he sides, not with the republican, but with the
"hereditary-imperial" party.
Laube makes his début in literature as a disciple of Heine. His
_Reisenovellen_, a long series of volumes, are the direct offspring of
the _Reisebilder_. But along with the influence of Heine we trace that
of Heinse. From Heine Laube takes liveliness and ingenuity of style,
and also to a certain extent the personal coxcombry by which we are
sometimes very unpleasantly affected; but it is from Wilhelm Heinse,
for whom he had an extreme admiration, and whose works he edited,
that he derives the undisguised sensualism which displays itself
in a positive cult of woman's outward charms constantly and loudly
proclaimed. In Heinse's case this worship of female form and colouring,
this adoration of the fleshly, is more primitive, more naïvely
Bacchanalian, more sincerely religious, than in Laube's. Laube at times
offends by coarseness, at times by an almost personal boastfulness of
woman-killing qualities, and at times it is too perceptible that he is
writing for the purpose of annoying his respectable neighbours.
When, in his old age, he began to republish his youthful works, the new
generation were astounded by the breaches of good taste which youthful
readers some forty years before had admired, and many assented to the
severe judgment which had lately been passed on him by Emil Kuh in the
chapter on Young Germany contained in his book on Hebbel. But it is
unfair to allow a little coarseness and want of taste here and there to
keep us from estimating Laube's work in its integrity.
In the _Reisenovellen_, in spite of the off-hand way in which they
are written, there is little originality. At the very beginning,
in the division entitled _Leipzig_, with its French sympathies and
its reverence of Napoleon, there is too strong a suggestion of the
_Reisebilder_. Laube, like Heine, in his childhood saw the great
Emperor; so he gives us to understand, but in such an uncertain manner
that we are left in doubt as to whether it was in a dream or in
reality; and Laube, too, has--in the person of Gardy the dragoon--his
drummer Legrand.
Those who wish to get a real, full impression of what Laube was as
a young man, ought to read his novel, _Das junge Europa_ (4 vols.
1833-37). A whole, long stage of his development is placed clearly
before us in this now pardonably forgotten book, which retains its
interest only for the historian. Its three parts--the Poets, The
Soldiers, The Citizens--are three works differing very much from each
other in kind and in quality.
In the First Part the author is completely under the influence of
Heinse's _Ardinghello_. "The Poets" is a sort of prose hymn to female
beauty and free love, in the old-fashioned form of a novel in letters,
which communicate the love fates of about a dozen people. When the
reader has struggled through them, there is left on his mind an
impression of the wild ecstatic desire of young, vigorous, hopeful
men, and of the resolute self-surrender of young and daring or tender
women, the impression of a generation in whose veins glows a desire for
liberty--political, social, erotic--which breaks down all forms and
all conventions. We see into an imaginary, romantic world, the world
of Laube's youthful dreams, where there is abundance of power and of
life, and of illusions as to the renovation of the world by means of
revolutions of various kinds. It is a romance of beautiful bodies and
beautiful souls, male and female, the essence of whose being is revolt
against Christianity and against marriage.
Between the First and the Second Part, a considerable change has
evidently come over the author's views; he has received his impression
of the strength of the reaction; he has ripened into a man. In the
First Part one could hardly help mixing up the characters, for the
men were only distinguished from each other by their more or less
fiery, erotic, uncontrollable temperaments, the woman only by the
dissimilarity of their physical charms; in the Second Part we are
introduced into a world where a real struggle for national and
political liberty is going on. The letter form is abandoned, and there
are comparatively few characters.
It is the revolt of Poland which is described; Valerius, one of the
principal characters in the First Part, is led by his enthusiasm
for liberty in general to join the Poles. The subject-matter is
interesting, though here and there we have too much of the purely
historical. The Poles as a people are described impartially and with
a sure touch; their characteristics--the strong patriotic feeling
inspiring high and low, the prejudices and tyranny of the nobility, the
savagery and vigour of the lower classes--are depicted as they mirror
themselves in the mind of the German volunteer. The distrust with which
he, as a foreigner, is received, the want of liberal-mindedness in
the devotees of liberty, which he observes more especially in their
conduct to his friend, a Polish officer of Jewish descent, gradually
dissipate the illusions which he had cherished of a golden future for
Europe, the final outcome of the Revolution of July. There is a tragic
tone throughout the book. We are shown how fruitless the rebellion of
the Poles is, how it ends, as it was fated to end, in crushing defeat;
and we are shown how the young Jew, Joel, in spite of his valiant
endeavours on the battlefield to gain for himself those rights which
his aristocratic countrymen enjoy, can never rise from his position as
the pariah of Polish society. The woman he loves dares not give him
her hand; a common peasant disdains his sympathy. After the revolt
is suppressed, he puts off his uniform in despair and shoulders the
pedlar's wallet. The Christians repudiate him, the Jews he himself long
ago alienated by his alliance with the Christians, his humanity gives
him no rights; there is nothing for it but to forget his learning, his
philosophy, his scientific and military talent, and to wander from
village to village, selling ribbons, as his forefathers did.
This character has a special interest for Danes, as it evidently
suggested to Goldschmidt some of the leading characteristics of the
hero of his novel, _En Jöde_ ("A Jew"); he, too, becomes a Polish
officer during the struggle for liberty, and he too, repulsed
everywhere, in the bitterness of despair ends his career as a
money-lender, outside the pale of society.
The Third Part of _Das junge Europa_ ("The Citizens") is an inferior
production. Its chief interest for us lies in what it tells us of
two of the most enthusiastic, indomitable heroes of the First Part,
Hippolyt and Constantin. Hippolyt is finally driven to despair by the
civilisation of the modern world, which leaves no room for the great
exception, but requires all to be alike small. The bold Constantin,
who fought in the streets of Paris in the Days of July, makes his
appearance not very many years later as a Prussian judge, inflexibly,
fanatically severe in his dealings with political revolutionaries.
Constantin enters into long explanations of the influences that have
wrought the change in his convictions (this character was evidently
drawn from the life); but the author is still so possessed by the
ideals of his own youth, that he makes this man commit suicide in
despair at having been unfaithful to these ideals.
From the year 1849 till his death in the Eighties, Laube, as is well
known, devoted all his powers to the theatre. He speedily became
the best and most highly esteemed theatrical manager of Germany and
Austria. As such he always retained a preference for the French drama.
What he himself wrote for the stage is what will keep his name longest
in remembrance.
Of the many historical dramas which he produced, the most
important--_Monaldeschi_ (1834), _Struensee_ (1844), and _Die
Karlsschüler_ (1847)--are suggestive of the ideals of Young Germany as
they took shape in Laube's mind. The last-mentioned play became popular
and is still often put on the stage; the others are effective pieces in
a style that is now obsolete.
The character of Monaldeschi is a vigorous conception. He is the
bold, unscrupulous adventurer, who has no higher aim than to make his
way and to enjoy life to the full, but who understands the meaning
of power, and desires to use his power worthily--the Hippolyt of
_Das junge Europa_ in historic costume. With Queen Christina's more
complex feminine character, Laube has not been so successful, though
his representation of her has elements out of which a good actress
could make a telling part. But the play as a whole is overweighted by
the intolerable sentimentality of the love scenes (Monaldeschi has a
romantic attachment to a certain Sylva Brahe), and it suffers as a work
of art from its author's dread of offending a Philistine public's sense
of propriety. The real relations between Christina and Monaldeschi are
smoothed down into indistinctness. The sharp edges of historic fact
are filed away to make the subject fit into the mould of theatrical
Romanticism.
In _Struensee_, the second of Laube's dramas in which the action
passes at a Scandinavian court, still greater liberties have been
taken with history and historical characters. Laube makes Struensee
the noble, liberty-loving reformer, whose only fault is an excessive
German humanity, which shrinks from shedding blood. Had he only
been a trifle less high-minded and scrupulous, he might easily have
remained in power. The weakness that is his ruin is his chivalrous,
platonic devotion to Caroline Mathilde, who returns the sentiment
in an equally innocent manner. Christian VII. is represented as an
estimable, somewhat taciturn monarch, subject to attacks of melancholy.
Struensee's fall is brought about entirely by Germans, who are
partly envious of him, partly enraged because he will not comply
with their unreasonable wishes; and the bitter moral of the play is,
that the worst enemies of a German intellectual hero are his own
countrymen--Germans have always had to suffer most from Germans, who
show their want of patriotism even in their relations with foreigners.
Quite apart from the historic inaccuracy of the character, the
sentimentally erotic Struensee, with "his enthusiasm for all that
is noble and beautiful," is a very impossible parvenu minister of
state. Laube has tampered with facts to the extent of representing
Struensee's death as the result of a shot fired, by order of Guldberg,
at the moment of his arrest in the castle on the 17th of January
1772. The chief reason, and at the same time excuse, for all this
perversion of facts lay in the necessity for presenting them in such
a shape that the censorship might not forbid the play on account of
the possibility of its giving offence to a friendly power. We get some
idea of how severe this censorship was, when we read that, in spite of
Laube's precautions, the performance of _Struensee_ was for many years
prohibited in Prussia, out of consideration for the feelings of the
Danish royal family.
It is, nevertheless, impossible to understand why such a perfectly
harmless and studiously, punctiliously, inoffensive play as _Die
Karlsschüler_ should, immediately after its appearance in 1846, have
been prohibited throughout Austria, Prussia, Hanover, Würtemberg,
Hesse-Cassel, all the Grand Duchies and several of the Duchies. It is
in reality nothing whatever but a panegyric on the youthful Schiller,
in a representation of the well-known difficulties he got into as a
young regimental surgeon in the service of Duke Karl of Würtemberg,
ending with his flight from Stuttgart to Mannheim. It forms a
parallel to Gutzkow's Goethe comedy, _Der Königslieutenant_, which it
surpasses in dramatic vigour. In this case, too, Laube has sacrificed
strict historic truth. Duke Karl's character is softened and toned
down exactly as King Frederick William's was in Gutzkow's _Zopf und
Schwert_. This is not only art which is compelled to be cautious, but
art which has come into being under the oppression of a tradition which
has insinuated itself into the very disposition of the artist. But the
disposition was a cheerful, buoyant one, and the hand that wrote these
scenes was light and skilful. Something of the lustre that surrounds
its hero's name is shed upon the play. It is probable that as long as
Schiller retains his great popularity in Germany, Germans will enjoy
seeing this transcription of his youthful history--though they know
many facts concerning that history now that were not known at the
time _Die Karlsschüler_ was written. Such a play is not calculated to
produce much effect out of Germany.
After Gutzkow's and Laube's, Mundt's is the name that occurs most
frequently when mention is made of the leaders of Young Germany. It is
about the year 1835 that Mundt is most distinctly the mouthpiece of
the feelings and ideas of that school. In 1835 he published _Charlotte
Stieglitz, ein Denkmal_, the only one of his historical delineations
which had any real influence on the minds of the youth of the day. This
work, no doubt chiefly owing to its subject, but also to its pathetic,
affectionately reverent treatment of that subject, took thousands of
hearts by storm. In the same year appeared his _Madonna, Unterhaltungen
mit einer Heiligen_ ("Converse with a Saint"), which, more than any
other of his works, gives expression to the sentiments of Young
Germany, and a clue to the character of its author.
Theodor Mundt, born at Potsdam in 1808, was a man capable of
enthusiastic, yet clear-sighted devotion to causes and to persons. He
had Wienbarg's enthusiastic temperament (though not his bravery), with
a much more highly gifted, many-sided mind. And yet there was no edge
or pungency in his wit, no grace in his whimsicality, no method in his
works, no conciseness in his style. His book on Charlotte Stieglitz
is the only one of his works that has survived him, and it has done
so thanks to its subject. He could be caustic and biting and unjust,
as weak natures are apt to be, but even his most caustic tirades
are not the expression of any warlike inclination; they are only
penned in self-defence and self-assertion, are called forth by some
misunderstanding on the part of an opponent, and are no more dangerous
than the thrusts of an angry wether.
It is surprising to the modern reader that a work like Mundt's
_Madonna_ can ever have been considered a dangerous book. To understand
how this could be, we must keep in mind that those in power at the
time of its publication stood in terror of shadows. It is, however, a
book which must not be overlooked by any one who is making a study of
the period, for there is something typical in its expression of the
thoughts and enthusiasms of the youth of the day.
In its very formlessness, _Madonna_ is characteristic of Mundt, and
of those whose literary taste was identical with his. It contains
prose lyric effusions, descriptions of travel, personal confessions,
world-revolutionising theories of the rehabilitation of the flesh by
means of a hitherto unknown mystic creed--all this grouped round a
central female figure and interwoven with her story.
The book opens with a "post-horn symphony," well written in the old
Romantic style, but not Romantic in tendency. It is a glorification
of "movement," the shibboleth which Mundt invented and fell in love
with. Movement is to him what progress and the struggle for freedom
were to others--the watchword of the new era. He talks of the party
of movement; the new literature is to him the literature of movement
(_Bewegungslitteratur_); in a postscript to _Madonna_ he calls that
book _ein Bewegungsbuch_. We perceive that the expression is perfectly
neutral and innocent.
The only readable part of _Madonna_ nowadays is the heroine's
narrative of her life experiences. The author meets her in a little
Bohemian village; when he first sees her, walking in a Roman Catholic
procession, he is tremendously impressed by her extraordinary beauty.
Later in the same day he accidently makes his way into her father's
cottage, wins the narrow-minded, bigoted old man's heart (in a very
improbable manner) by the unction with which he tells him the story of
Casanova, who had at one time lived in that neighbourhood in the castle
of Dux, receives an invitation to supper, and spends part of the night
in a sentimental conversation with the daughter, whom he discovers to
be a woman deserving, in his estimation, the name of saint--a secular
or worldly saint (_eine Weltheilige_)--and who, in that capacity,
embraces and kisses him, weeping hot tears. He is obliged to leave the
neighbourhood next morning, but soon afterwards receives from her an
immoderately lengthy letter--_Die Bekenntnisse einer weltlichen Seele_
("The Confessions of a Worldly Soul")--in which she makes a frank
revelation of herself and all her experiences.
This beautiful girl is an unfortunate victim. She has been enticed by
a relative, a depraved woman, to leave Teplitz, her native town, where
she lived in poverty with her parents, and come to Dresden. There,
under the pretext of providing for her future, this woman educated her
for a rich debauchee, a man of high position, whose prey she was to
become as soon as she was grown up. The time comes; all preparations
are made; at night she is locked into a room with her benefactor and
pursuer, whom she loathes. She forcibly breaks away from him, manages
to get out, and, in her despair, seeing a light in the room of a young
theological student who lives in the same house, takes refuge with him.
She has long loved this young man and he her. Now with chaste passion
she gives herself to him, and he cannot find it in his heart to repulse
her. But on the following day, repenting as a Christian of his sin,
he commits suicide. The young girl has to make her way on foot from
Dresden to her native village in Bohemia, where, after her experience
of the life and variety of a great town, she pines in sadness and
loneliness. Her old father, with whom she lives, is a cripple and a
fanatically bigoted Roman Catholic.
The point in this story evidently lies in the innocence of the young
girl's self-abandonment, innocence which the world calls guilt. To
the author his heroine is a saint, a Madonna, the type of lovable
womanliness. She is a carnal saint, undoubtedly; but it is his creed
that we can conceive of nothing more holy, that there exists nothing
more spiritual, than the carnal. And he propounds a neither new nor
remarkable, but somewhat peculiarly formulated theory of the necessity
for a fusion of flesh and spirit, for the abolition of the distinction
between spiritual and carnal. "The world and the flesh must be
reinstated in their rights, in order that the spirit may no longer have
to live in the sixth storey, as it does in Germany." And he brings the
narration of a very lengthy Bohemian legend of Libussa to a close with
the jubilant cry: "The free woman is sovereign; let her decide, let her
speak, for she has the right to speak! And sweet is the happiness of
free love!"
Mundt began as a Hegelian, but his Hegelianism has, as we see, turned
into a sort of fantastic mysticism. Christ declared that his kingdom is
not of this world, and yet he came to us and himself became world. God,
out of love, entered into the flesh, and the world's flesh has become
holy since it became God. Hence the kingdom of God flourishes over
the wide earth, and yet it is, as Christ declared, not of this world,
that is, not of the world which is flesh only, and which sets its face
against the free "movement" of thought. Like an insufficiently trained
pedant, Mundt involves himself in lengthy and confused polemics against
"the beyond" which is without "the here," and against "the here" which
refuses to know anything of "the beyond." He ends by enthusiastically
proclaiming the praises of what he calls "the image" (as distinct from
both spiritless matter and immaterial spirit): "O ye philosophers! what
you want is the image.... I contend for the rehabilitation of the
image."[4]
If there ever was a man unsuited to be a leader and teacher of
other men, it was this unctuous proclaimer of self-evident truths.
_Madonna_ was followed by a long series of historical novels (a still
longer series came from the pen of Mundt's wife, who wrote under the
pseudonym of Louise Mühlbach), and a considerable number of critical
and historical writings. Amongst these latter one of the best is his
_Geschichte der Litteratur der Gegenwart_ ("History of Present Day
Literature"), 1842, because in it he treats a subject with which he
has a thorough acquaintance; but it, too, like all his other works,
is formless, full of undigested material, and spoiled by would-be
profundity. He reads, for instance, a special meaning into the fact
that Hegel died of cholera. Hegel's system, he writes, was, like
Casimir Périer's, a universally levelling _juste-milieu_ system:
hence he, like Casimir Périer, was fated to die of this universally
levelling malady. It was a malady which must be regarded as the
physical expression of the general anguish of the times. Troubled
and restless, the body had attacked its own intestines, and was at
last obliged to pay the penalty of its craving to know and understand
itself, by performing the last possible process of self-examination,
that of vomiting itself up.[5]
In a work entitled _Das junge Deutschland_, consisting for the
most part of letters to the publisher, Feodor Wehl, the well-known
theatrical manager, has endeavoured to give the reading world a
more favourable idea of Mundt than that prevalent in our days; and
he has succeeded in producing the impression that Mundt was a man
with excellent intentions, many acquirements, and no small degree of
enthusiasm in the causes that were sympathetic to him. He is not, and
never will be considered, a great writer.
The authors of the second rank, the rearguard of Young Germany, men
like Gustav Kühne, Hermann Marggraff, and Alexander Jung, are in
reality his equals. Their gifts lie, like his, partly in the direction
of journalism, partly in that of creative authorship. They are men of
character, cultivation, and distinct literary ability, animated by the
same fundamental ideas as the men in the front ranks.
The reader who takes up Kühne's _Weibliche und männliche Charaktere_
(1838) will be agreeably surprised by the vigour and brilliancy of his
delineations, and by his accurate appreciations of public personages.
His heroines are those of his school--Rahel, Bettina, Charlotte
Stieglitz; but he sees them with his own eyes and describes them with
unpretentious enthusiasm. Among the poets, who are the subjects of
his laudatory criticism, are not only the great Radicals of a former
generation like Shelley, not only all the singers of freedom of his
own day, from Anastasius Grün to Karl Beck, but tranquil spirits
like Rückert and Chamisso. He is not remarkably original, but he is
impartial and unprejudiced.
The same can be said of Hermann Marggraff. Though his book
_Deutschlands jüngste Litteratur- und Culturepoche_ (1839), is written
in the spirit of Young Germany, its author always reserves his right to
perfectly independent judgment. He is a thoughtful, earnest critic and
a good writer, always natural, at times brilliant. His errors are much
more due to Conservative tendencies than to excessive modernity.
Unless we single out the _enfants perdus_ of this new school--and there
are such in every school--it cannot be said that its members gave any
real occasion for the violent attacks made upon it. It is not Young
Germany, but its assailants, who uniformly show the worst taste and
exaggerate most grossly.