that he has an untamable, uncontrollable temperament. "You need not
deny it," she writes; "you ought to have been a brigand-chief." And
she calls him her dark, wild, poniard-wielder with the flashing eyes.
During their long engagement they live in different towns. His letters
are genial, natural, and affectionate; but one feels in them that he
is not unhappy away from her. She, more warmblooded, pines for him,
for his personal presence. Hers was the uncontrollable temperament--he
was the genuine bookman, as unlike a robber-chief as any librarian on
the face of the earth. About the same time as Victor Hugo in France,
he feels the poetical attraction of the East, and, sitting in his
library, makes as careful a study as he can of Oriental literature and
civilisation. From this study result the _Bilder des Orients_, three
volumes produced with much toil and trouble. There is a great deal of
pretty and graphic writing in them, and it was unjust that they were
so entirely overlooked; but the feeling which animates these Turkish
and Persian poems, these Stamboul tragedies and scenes from Ispahan,
these more than passable verses on the Greek war of liberation, is too
commonplace, too tame; the marked individuality, the savagery which
Charlotte saw in Heinrich Stieglitz is exactly what is wanting in them.
It is all too literary.
Shortly before their marriage in 1828, Charlotte, at her _fiancé's_
request, bought a poniard for him to wear on their wedding tour, the
weapon with which, six years later, she took her own life. It was
but a short time of unmixed happiness that she enjoyed after their
marriage. But she completely identifies herself with her husband, and
is miserable because he, the genius, is compelled to spend so much of
his time and energy on his library work and teaching. She devotes much
of hers to writing letters to their rich relations in Russia, who are
ministers and privy-councillors, and to other patrons and friends, in
the hope of improving his position. She encourages him indefatigably;
she knows every one of his poems by heart, parodies one of them with
affectionate playfulness. A certain scene in his tragedy, _Selim
III._, is costing him much time and trouble. One day when he comes
home, she leads him smilingly to his desk, where he finds it lying,
completed--the fine scene between the Sultan's mother and the physician
in the Third Act.
From time to time there came over her what she calls her
champagne-mood; she grieves that this is no longer the case with him.
She writes a poem to him, with a present of six quills, exhorting him
to be energetic and determined, and not to reflect too long before he
begins:
"Giess ein Füllhorn aus mit Früchten,
Blüth und Früchte gieb zugleich,
Weisheit sei in deinem Dichten,
Witz und Jugend mach' es reich.
Menschen lass uns drinnen finden,
Menschen die gelebt, gedacht,
Lass von Lieb' dich warm entzünden
Und von Zorns Gewitternacht."[7]
She firmly believes in the existence of mighty Titanic thoughts and
imaginations in his soul, which it is difficult for him to persuade his
lips to utter. Alas! he is not only uncommunicative, he is barren, and
on the verge of insanity, at times possibly over the verge. He listens
to her exhortations with indifference. She writes: "O Heinrich, for
God's sake let us be inconsistent at times, let us blaze up wildly,
despair madly, rise to the bliss of heaven, sink to the depths of
hell--anything but be stolidly indifferent!" We feel the spiritual
kinswoman, the admirer of Rahel, in these words.
Harassed by the drudgery of his daily life, troubled by the sterility
of his overrated talent, he was sometimes irritable, sometimes gloomily
stolid. She tries every means to brace him. At one time she fancies
that he is too lonely, that he requires the stimulation of more female
society--and she is not jealous. She writes (October 1834): "I wish,
Heinrich, that you could have more intercourse, either personal or
by correspondence, with clever, womanly women. They are the poet's
true public. It would be of interest to you to learn, frankly and
truthfully, what they think of you and your works. Such intercourse
would be both instructive and refreshing, a useful and agreeable
diversion for you."
She is determined that they are to travel, to go far afield. He throws
up his appointments and they go off to St. Petersburg and Finland. But
it is all in vain.
As she and Stieglitz stood looking at the waterfall of Imatra in
Finland, in July 1833, she spoke the following memorable words: "Is
not this like a great thought which has strayed into these mountain
solitudes? Feelings like mighty billows, thunderstorms, a hurricane,
would be a suitable accompaniment to this tumbling, foaming water. How
poor the song about the little violet would sound here, pretty as it is
in itself! Like the mighty waterfall, this foaming, wildly excited time
cries for mighty song. You will give what it demands...."
In October 1835, when he was making perpetual complaint of the small
pin-pricks of life, she said to him (as he himself has noted): "My
careful observation of you has led me to the conclusion that whoever
wishes to do you real service must provide a real, great sorrow for
you. Nothing would do you so much good as that; nothing would so surely
bring out your powers."
Like most people whose minds are affected, Stieglitz had periods of
violent excitement, after which he relapsed into his ordinary state of
silent, almost animal-like brooding. Once when they were on a walking
tour, he was so lost in his own thoughts, so indifferent to all else,
that she left him and went off by herself, hoping that this would rouse
him; but he did not even notice it. It was a kind of warning that her
_final_ desertion of him would be of no avail; but it was a warning
that she did not understand.
Entirely possessed by the latest ideas of the day, persuaded that a
poet ought to live in the world, to influence and be influenced by it,
it was her constant desire to drive him to action. She said to him one
day: "I long for your spiritual regeneration. You will be born again! I
know you will! Would that I could hasten that birth--even if it were by
artificial means! But how if my surgical operation miscarried!" And in
December 1834 she writes in her diary that Goethe's life becomes fuller
from the moment that Schiller enters into it, but that Goethe ought to
have profited more by his friend's death, and would have done so, if he
had not, according to his custom, determinedly refused to sorrow; if he
had allowed the sorrow to enter into him, to become part of himself,
the result would have been a renewal of youth as far as his poetical
productivity was concerned.
It was in this same month of December, 1834, that Stieglitz's disgust
with life reached a sort of climax. His malady took the form of
intellectual stagnation, of absolute incapacity to express himself.
Charlotte begged him, as if he had been a child, rather to rave and
storm as of old than to collapse in this terrible manner; but she
begged in vain. It was then that she determined to employ the last
means in her power, to take that step which she, with her innocent,
high-flown ideas, felt it obligatory to take, in order that a great,
simple sorrow might enter into his life, reawaken his genius, and give
his poetry new themes.
On the evening of the 29th she came home, knowing that she would have
two hours to herself, threw her short fur cape and boa on the hall
floor, hurried into her bedroom, locked the door of communication with
the kitchen, undressed, washed herself, put on a clean night-dress,
wrote a few lines to Heinrich expressing her belief that new life for
him would arise out of this misfortune, and exhorting him no longer to
be weak, but calm and strong and great. Then she lay down on the bed
and with a firm hand plunged the dagger of their wedding tour into her
heart.
* * * * *
One's first impression is that these women, Rahel, Bettina, and
Charlotte, who all three became famous in the year 1835, have nothing
in common. Rahel dies in 1833 at the age of sixty-one, and her real
life-work, the first energetic vindication of Goethe's pre-eminence,
belongs quite as much to the eighteenth as to the nineteenth century.
Bettina, who is fourteen years younger, does not come before the public
till a year after Rahel's death; she combines the exalted enthusiasm
and the unreality of Romanticism with the reforming tendencies of Young
Germany. Charlotte's only achievement was to kill herself, a thing
which has been done by women times without number, though probably
never for the same reason.
But when we look a little deeper, we find that they have many traits
in common. They are all restless, with the restlessness distinctive of
their day, which manifests itself, not in outward hurry and strain,
but in strong emotions, not in the nervousness prevalent in our own
day, but in perpetual introspection. Then there is the peculiarity that
none of them transgress the laws of society, though none of them have
any respect for these laws. And there is the wonderful, ideal fidelity
which they all display. Rahel is Goethe's, from the first breath she
draws as a grown-up woman to her last. Bettina is Goethe's, with such
absorbing devotion that the scheme of erecting a colossal monument to
him which she advocated in her first published work (a monument which
she herself planned and had executed in miniature), becomes in her old
age an _idée fixe_. Charlotte so entirely belongs to the man on whom
her choice falls when she is sixteen, that she not only lives for him,
but dies for him.
Another thing they have in common is enthusiasm. Rahel's burns like a
steady, sacred flame; Bettina's breaks out in a pyrotechnic display
of ideas and visions; Charlotte's manifests itself in the resolute,
uncomplaining sacrifice of her life. It is genius that they all
worship; they have the enthusiastic German appreciation of poetic
genius; their great desire is to do what in them lies to promote its
recognition and glorification, or its development and emancipation;
to this task they devote their lives, regardless of the worthiness or
unworthiness of the object of their choice. Lastly, the thoughts and
feelings of all three are remarkably original. These women resemble
no other women. Never, to our knowledge, has there been such another
reflective emotionalist as Rahel, such another sylph-like enthusiast as
Bettina, such another suicide as Charlotte's, a suicide inspired by a
lofty though false æsthetic principle.
Those who look deeper into the matter and view these characters in the
light of history, see in Rahel's introspection and self-reflection,
the first form which woman's self-emancipation necessarily took in
the Germany of this century; this height of intellectual independence
had to be attained before the women in a country where they for
centuries had been relegated to simple domesticity could rise to
anything above it. In Bettina's triple enthusiasm, for Goethe, for
the ideas of political liberalism, and for social reform, the student
of history descries the transition stage between the era of art and
the era of liberalism and socialism. And in Charlotte's suicide he
sees an expression of the desire of the women of her day to snatch
the men from their literary quietism and place them face to face with
the seriousness, the tragedy of life. The whole era speaks when she
says to Stieglitz that the song of the violet cannot be sung to the
accompaniment of a great waterfall. None of these women could have
developed as they did at any other period, and at no other period
would they have been understood and appreciated as they were. To-day,
already, we find it difficult to understand them.
It is characteristic that the word _work_ finds no place in the
description of their lives. They never learned anything methodically,
and in their fear of being unfeminine are proud of this--as we observed
in the case of Rahel. Even that accomplished linguist, Henriette Herz,
is deeply offended because Jean Paul in one of his letters used the
expression, "M. Herz and his learned wife." Charlotte Stieglitz has
not the faintest idea that talent is developed by work, by obstinate
industry, and not by bereavements. And Bettina, the bayadere, who
imitates Mignon's egg-dance, has nothing whatever to do with work.
This fact impresses itself on us when we are annoyed by the slovenly
composition and the want of any real understanding of politics in her
book for the king.
About the year 1848 it began to be recognised that all this
intellectuality would have been more solid, more real, more lasting,
if these women had known something, had followed some course of study,
taken up one or other branch of science. All this soaring thought would
have been doubly valuable if it had in the first place been subjected
to regular discipline. To soar without previous training is often
mere waste of power. If Rahel had had a solid foundation of knowledge
to build upon, she would have had a very different influence upon
posterity. As it is, her ideas, obscure and lucid, chaff and seed-corn,
are scattered to the winds.
In the Thirties men still believed in an inspiration that could
dispense with knowledge, in a morality of the heart which rendered any
reform of the old social morality unnecessary, in a defiance of law
which allowed all laws to hold good, but kept clear of them all. This
state of matters Young Germany was bent upon altering.
During the Forties men had arrived at the persuasion that there was
something of greater value than sudden inspiration and a life of pure
intellectuality. There was humble and daring work to be done in science
and in politics. We see German philosophy develop in the direction of
radicalism, and we come upon poets whose aim it is to prepare the way
for political liberty.
[1] Karl Hillebrand: _Zeiten, Völker und Menschen_, ii. 5. _Aus dem
unzünftigen Schriftthum Deutschlands.--La société de Berlin. Revue des
deux mondes_, 1870.
[2] All virtues are one virtue; yea, verily, they are all one and the
same. Wouldst thou know its name? Its name is justice.
[3] Because justice is truth. Simplicity, fairness, unselfishness, a
share for all.
[4] _Rahel, ein Buch des Andenkens für Freunde_, i.-iii. _Briefwechsel
zwischen Varnhagen und Rahel_, i.-ii. Varnhagen: _Gallerie von
Bildnissen aus Rahels Umgang_, Ludmilla Assing: _Aus Rahels
Herzensleben_.
[5] _Briefe Goethe's an Sophie von la Roche und Bettina Brentano nebst
dichterischen Beilagen_. 1879.
[6] _Dies Buch gehört dem König_, p. 531.
[7] Pour out thy horn of plenty; give us blossom and fruit together;
let there be not only wisdom, but wit and youth in thy words. In thy
pages let us find human beings, beings who have lived and thought; let
love, let anger's lightning-flash kindle thy Muse's flame.
XXIV
FREDERICK WILLIAM OF PRUSSIA
With the year 1840 the literary movement enters upon a new, more
philosophic, and more political phase. Yet another generation had
arisen, a generation which owed its profoundest culture to Hegel,
and which, strangely enough, he had influenced chiefly in the
direction of politics. Schelling in his day had declared art to be the
highest manifestation of intellect. His principle, and that of the
Romanticists, was that the artist is the true man. What art had been to
Schelling, history was to Hegel--history, that eternal progress of the
idea of liberty, that great liberty-epic. And what the work of art had
been to Schelling, the State was to Hegel. To him the true, the perfect
human being is not the artist, but the citizen of a constitutional
State.
This youngest generation was inspired by the Hegelian philosophy to
make the reform of the State its aim. It held the adherents of the
Young German school in light esteem, being of opinion that they had
not stood bravely by their colours, either in philosophy or politics,
that they were too belletristic, too epicurean. It would not join in
the old cry for the rehabilitation of the flesh, would not even listen
to it. Heine, in _Atta Troll_, had told the young generation that a
man of character without talent was no better than a bear; the young
men retorted that a man of talent without character was nothing but a
monkey--possibly a very amusing monkey, but nothing more.
That the Hegelian philosophy had again become a guiding principle was
made plain when the periodical known as the _Hallische Jahrbücher_
was brought out by Ruge and Echtermeyer in 1838. This organ of the
Hegelians of the Left disseminated the ideas which moulded not only
the politicians but also the poets of the day. In all essentials the
principles were the same as those in whose name Young Germany had taken
the field, but they were now proclaimed with more scientific precision
and more resoluteness. The elder men had to choose between joining the
Young Hegelians and reprobating the principles of their own youth, as
now proclaimed by others. As was only natural, they did not recognise
their own opinions as propounded by these bellicose youths, and there
was many a collision between the youngest generation and Gutzkow,
Laube, and Mundt.
The idea of the State now became the central idea of the day, the idea
of the State as a living organism, realised in the consciousness of
all its citizens. In the many philosophical, theological, æsthetic
feuds waged by this new generation, the State and the necessity for
its reform is always the burden of their cry. This was the season of
preparation for that absorption in the idea of the State which is so
characteristic of the Germany of later days, and which caused even a
revolutionary (but a Hegelian revolutionary) like Lassalle to exclaim:
"Do not malign the State! The State is God!" It is a sign of the nature
of the literary development that the _Hallische Jahrbücher_ began as
a philosophical, but was suppressed as a political periodical.[1]
[1] _Cf_. R. Prütz: _Vorlesungen über die deutsche Litteratur der
Gegenwart_.
The new political ideas with which the nation was impregnated presently
broke forth in poetry and song. The first political poetry appears in
the same year as the _Jahrbücher_, and spreads political free-thought
in far wider circles. At first it was for the most part rhetorical, and
devoid of artistic value, but the common national feeling of the German
countries had slumbered so long that the mere watch-words "liberty" and
"fatherland" produced an electrical effect.
On the 7th of June 1840, Frederick William IV. ascended the throne of
Prussia. The new king presented in every respect a marked contrast to
the man who, succeeding in 1797, had wielded the Prussian scepter for
forty-two years. Frederick William III. had been the born soldier;
his son was an artist by nature, with mediocre half-suppressed
talents, a dilettante in art and science. The father had been a sober,
modest, steadfast character; the son was a fanciful enthusiast, as
impressionable as a woman. The father had been the devotee of duty,
an upright, dry, narrow-minded man, the son was full of romantic
ideas, clever, famous for his witty sallies. The father had been tall,
slender, soldierlike, in his bearing and dress; the son had soft,
rounded features, not unlike Queen Louisa's, was fat rather than
muscular, quick and jerky in his movements, communicative, sociable,
very talkative. The father had been a reliable man, the son was an
interesting one.
Though Frederick William IV., as Crown Prince, had had the best of
instructors in all the branches of a military education, he did not
take the lead in military matters. He was fond of calling himself a
Prussian officer, but the strict, pedantic discipline inseparable from
military service in time of peace, was wearisome to him, and at times
he, a Hohenzollern, was even known to jeer at State parades. Now and
again, however, it happened that he grew wildly enthusiastic. At a
review, the music, the clash of weapons, the loud commands, the firing,
produced in him a sort of poetic excitement. Carried away by military
enthusiasm, he once, on the occasion of a big sham-fight, led the
troops right into Berlin, regardless of the confusion thereby produced,
and of the hundreds of window-panes shattered by the volleys fired in
the streets.[2]
[2] Prutz: _Zehn Jahre_, i.
But for the most part it was with men of science and artists that
the Crown Prince consorted--scholars such as Humboldt, historians
like Ranke, painters like Cornelius, sculptors like Rauch. He was
much interested in architecture, made a study of the antique styles
in their application to ecclesiastical architecture of the Byzantine
type, sketched plans, tried to produce imposing effects by means
of colonnades and halls. He projected ideal landscapes, resembling
scenes on the Italian shores of the Mediterranean. He criticised
music and poetry. He specially encouraged and patronised the study of
ancient German customs and of all ancient art which had devoted itself
to the service of religion; and all this occupation with the past
increased his distaste for the time in which he lived, and developed
his inclination to restore the old order of things, or at any rate to
oppose reforms inspired by the modern spirit.
This inclination could not but be strengthened by the young prince's
intercourse with clergymen, and with the small circle of romantically
disposed aristocrats who were his familiar associates. From his
childhood he had been religious. As a boy he had, during the war with
Napoleon, learnt to believe in the sacredness of the old system of
government, in the divine right of kings, and in the mission of Austria
as heir of the Holy Roman Empire. He adopted the whole system of ideas
and enthusiasms of which Joseph de Maistre was the first and ablest
exponent. He studied Haller's _Restauration der Staatswissenschaft_.
Ere long he came to look upon the crown as a mystic jewel, a
combination of the priestly fillet of old with the dictator's golden
wreath; the kingly office became in his eyes a sacred calling, the king
himself a divinely inspired being. His ideal was a patriarchal relation
between the king and his people, much the same ideal as that which was
aimed at during the same period by the so-called Young England, the
followers of Disraeli.
Frederick William IV. was received by his people with all the confident
expectation with which a nation that is still in its political
childhood welcomes a new king. They believed of him what is believed
of all crown princes, that his principles were more liberal than his
father's. The hopes and expectations of the nation surrounded him
with a sort of halo. He began, as kings are wont to do, with an act
which appeared to justify the popular estimate of his character; he
proclaimed a general amnesty for political offences. This led all to
hope that he would fulfil the political desire of the country, that he
would confer on Prussia that benefit which was regarded as a necessary
condition of all progress, constitutional government.
As already stated, the Prussian people were in possession of a
distinct, definite, royal promise of a constitution, a promise the
fulfilment of which had been dishonestly delayed. This made their
hope all the stronger; they felt sure that this promise would now be
redeemed.
Soon after the new king's accession, the Estates of the Provinces of
Posen and East and West Prussia were summoned to meet at Königsberg,
for the purpose of paying homage to him. The Estates of East and
West Prussia replied to the announcement of this meeting by sending
in a most humble petition to the king, in which they besought him
to maintain and to complete the system of representative government
inaugurated by his glorious father, who, in this as in all else
faithful to his promise, had introduced representative government in
the provinces, but had left the completion of the work to his royal
successor "whom the nation loves with the truest devotion, and on whom
its dearest hopes are set" (in welchem die treueste Liebe und die
innigsten Wünsche des Landes sich begegnen).
The lower classes of citizens, all those who hoped that their
trades and industries would profit by the approaching festivities
at Königsberg, were highly incensed by this proceeding, which they
considered calculated to offend the king. The higher classes, on
the contrary, imagined that their gifted monarch would at once
gladly accede to the legitimate desire of his people; no one was
in a better position than he to understand the defects of the old
system of representation. But neither those who dreaded an outburst
of royal indignation nor those who expected a manifestation of royal
liberal-mindedness proved to be right.