constitution of the Estates rested upon a national, historic
foundation, that the king took a deep interest in the said institution,
that he was firmly determined to pursue the path entered on by his
predecessors, and that his faithful Estates might "place absolute
confidence in his intentions" with regard to the institution of the
Landtag (Parliament).
Little of positive assurance as there was in this message, it was
received with joy; it relieved one party from the dread of a stern
rebuff, and encouraged the sanguine hopes of the other. The festival at
Königsberg went off successfully, and was marked by general enthusiasm.
Its most imposing incident occurred immediately after the deputies
had repeated, word for word, the oath of allegiance read out to them.
Hardly had the echo of the loud Amen pronounced by the four hundred
voices died away, when the king was seen to rise from the throne, which
stood upon an open balcony, come forward to the rails, raise his arm
as if he were taking an oath, and begin to address the assembly. Every
word of his speech was clearly audible. He promised to be a just judge,
a faithful, painstaking, and merciful ruler, a Christian king like his
ever-to-be-remembered father. The concluding sentence bears witness to
his literary gift: "May God preserve our Prussian fatherland, for its
own sake, for Germany's, and for the world's--our fatherland, which is
made up of many parts, and yet is one whole, like that noble metal, a
mixture of many others, but itself one metal, liable to no rust but the
beautifying rust of centuries!"
Astonishment that a King of Prussia should thus of his own free will
give a promise to his people in return for theirs to him, combined with
the impression produced by this ostensibly improvised address from such
an animated and winning royal personage, to create a feeling of excited
jubilation. Above on the balcony the queen burst into tears, down below
the people wept, smiled through their tears, and pressed each other's
hands. In the transport of the moment it was not observed that there
was no definite political promise in the speech, nothing but liberal
generalities and romantic phraseology.
But the Königsberg festival was only a prelude to the great one held
in Berlin. In the minds of the inhabitants of his capital a halo of
golden promises still surrounded the person of the king. They were
determined to do everything in their power to show their devotion, and
to give the festival a character that was likely to be agreeable to
him. The military element was not allowed to preponderate; something
in the style of a medieval German municipal pageant was aimed at.
The different guilds, numbering in all about 10,000 men, marched in
procession, carrying their banners and emblems. As an agreeable little
surprise for the king, a great projecting piece of masonry at the
Rathaus (town hall) with which his carriage had come into collision one
day when he was Crown Prince, was altogether removed.
In the interval between the two festivals an incident occurred which
could not but awaken in the mind of the nation a suspicion of the
king's fickleness. On the 4th of October 1840, a royal order in council
was published which intimated, to prevent any misunderstanding, that
the king, in expressing his appreciation of the loyalty of the Estates,
had by no means declared himself to be in favour of a representative
constitution as formulated in the ordinance of the 22nd of May.
The princes and nobles were to take the oath of allegiance in the
palace, the citizens were to pay homage in the great square outside the
so-called Lustgarten. But from early morning rain fell in torrents. For
two whole hours the citizens stood outside the square, getting soaked
through, whilst the king listened, indoors, to the speeches of princes,
nobles, and clergy, and gave the rein to his own eloquence.
At last he stepped out on the balcony. But on this occasion people were
prepared to hear him speak; there was no question of improvisation.
Berlin would have felt itself insulted if the king, who had made a
speech at Königsberg, had received its homage in silence. And speak he
did. Every one could see the motion of his hands, but the size of the
square and the sound of the wind and the rain prevented his words being
heard. Every time he stopped speaking, the attentive crowd, imagining
that the speech was concluded, broke forth in loud acclamation; but
the king waved his hand, and proceeded. The rain poured, but still
he spoke. All watched his gesticulations. Four times the multitude
shouted "Hurrah!" in the belief that he had done, and four times he
began again. He promised to rule as one who feared God and loved man,
with his eyes open when attending to the needs of the people and of
the times, closed when called on to do justice--but the antithesis
was lost in the whistle of the wind and the rush of the rain. He
shouted: "Will you promise, while I am striving so to do, to stand
by me, in prosperity and in adversity? If so, give an answer in that
plainest, finest word of our mother-tongue, an honest 'Ja!'" Shouts
of "Bravo! bravo!" from the square. They thought he had finished. But
the king waved his hand and continued. At last he concluded by turning
the downpour of rain to account in his peroration, by taking it as a
favourable omen--though this also was lost on the audience. "So help me
God, I will keep the promises which I have made here and at Königsberg!
In sign hereof I raise my right hand to heaven. Proceed we now with our
high festival, and may God's blessing fall like his fertilising rain
upon us this day!"
But God's fertilising rain completely extinguished the festive spirit,
poured its chilling prose over both audience and orator.
No one could observe that any promises were kept, but neither could any
one name any particular promises that had been made by his Majesty. The
new king and his government soon showed themselves in their true light.
Eichhorn was nominated Minister of Public Worship (_Kultusminister_)
in place of the late Count Altenstein, the patron of Hegel and the
Hegelians. Eichhorn had already shown Pietistic leanings; it was
reported that he intended to introduce strict regulations regarding the
observation of holy-days, and possibly also rules of church discipline
binding on all Government officials. The indignation roused by this
report was so great that advantage was taken of the first possible
opportunity to display it. Racine's _Athalie_ was put on the stage by
the king's special request. There was no fault to be found with the
play itself, but it had a religious subject and had been originally
written for the inmates of a convent. On the occasion of its first
performance, January 4th, 1841, it was hissed by the audience, a
demonstration the meaning of which every one understood. People were
much more exasperated with the minister than with the king; for no one
doubted that the king was a sincerely religious man, whereas the life
Eichhorn had lived and the company he had kept led them to conclude
the opposite of him. And when it came to his making public use of the
expression, "the Christian state," that is the state of which the
unorthodox cannot be reckoned true citizens, war was waged against this
"square circle," as the expression was called, with all the weapons of
sober earnest and of mockery. Unfortunately the king had, a few months
before this, in one of his fits of political liberalism, possibly
influenced by his appreciation of wit, abolished the censorship of
caricature-drawing. So now Eichhorn was to be seen everywhere, in the
shape of a squirrel (_Eichhorn_ = squirrel) gnawing leaves, cracking
the empty nut of the Christian Church, &c., &c. The ungrateful
caricaturists did not even respect the king; and Heine, the greatest
caricaturist of the age, ridiculed royal indecision in the following
lines of _Der neue Alexander_:
"Ich ward ein Zwitter, ein Mittelding, das weder Fleisch noch Fisch ist,
Das von den Extremen unserer Zeit ein närrisches Gemisch ist.
Ich bin nicht schlecht, ich bin nicht gut, nicht dumm und nicht gescheute,
Und wenn ich gestern vorwärts ging, so geh ich rückwärts heute."[3]
[3] I'm neither fish nor flesh, neither this nor that, but a queer
compound of the extremes of the day; I'm not bad, I'm not good, not
stupid and not clever; if I walked forwards yesterday, I'll walk
backwards to-day.
But Eichhorn was not content with Christianising the State, he aimed
at Christianising science. He was particularly desirous to oust known
Hegelians from all good and influential appointments, the Hegelian
philosophy being distasteful to the king, because it left no play for
his imagination.
It was by the king's wish that Schelling was brought from Munich
to Berlin to fill the professorial chair left vacant by the death
of Hegel, that from that vantage ground he might propound his new
philosophy, that _Philosophie der Offenbarung_ (Philosophy of
Revelation) which, like some quack remedy, had been kept secret
for years, and yet puffed as if it were to introduce a new era. He
received a larger salary than had ever before been given to a Prussian
university professor (it was declared that he was almost as well
paid as a _premiere danseuse_); and it was certainly not the king's
fault that, in spite of all Schelling's endeavours, there seemed no
possibility of eradicating Hegelian unorthodoxy. As a matter of fact,
Schelling was a failure. He could not but feel that he was regarded
with contempt by the whole youth of a nation. Ch. Kapp wrote a clever
description of the court thinker's various metamorphoses since the
days of his youth, his apostasy from himself, the humbug in his
reconciliation of faith and thought; and Ludwig Feuerbach, in his
energetic language, styled him the philosophical Cagliostro of the
nineteenth century, and his philosophy a theosophic farce.
Eichhorn proceeded to take a variety of measures to counteract the
progress of science. He set a fixed limit to the number of teachers
at all the different Prussian universities, thereby reducing the
number of private lecturers and increasing the influence of the
Government. Professor Hoffman (von Fallersleben) was dismissed from
the University of Breslau, because of some harmless jests at politics
in his _Unpolitical Songs_--jovial, catching verses, which so exactly
chimed in with the Liberal ideas of the middle-class citizen that
they alarmed the authorities. The Biblical critic, Bruno Bauer's, two
books on the authenticity of the Four Gospels cost him his post of
lecturer at the University of Bonn. The servile Faculties carried out
the wishes of the Government: they approved of free scientific inquiry,
but could not approve of Bruno Bauer as a lecturer on _theology_. The
Hegelian theologian, Marheineke of Berlin, undauntedly declared that
he, too, was desirous that Bruno Bauer should be relieved from his
post as lecturer, because he considered that such an eminent critic,
a man of such thorough scientific training, should be promoted to a
really influential appointment. But Bauer's fate was sealed. The Halle
students petitioned that David Strauss might be appointed professor at
their university. The answer to their petition was a reprimand, and
the three students whose names headed the list of petitioners were
expelled. After Gans's death, the noted reactionary Stahl (author
of _Umkehr der Wissenschaft_) was appointed to his professorship
in Berlin. It was somewhat humiliating for the Government that the
students refused to listen to Stahl's first lecture; they drummed him
out of the lecture-room.
In the summer of 1841 there appeared in Switzerland a little book,
entitled _Gedichte eines Lebendigen_ ("Poems of a Living Man"). It
contained many an astounding verse; among others:
"Reisst die Kreuze aus der Erden!
Alle sollen Schwerter werden!
Gott im Himmel wird's verzeihn.
Lasst, o lasst das Verseschweissen,
Auf den Amboss legt das Eisen,
Heiland soll das Eisen sein."[4]
[4]
Tear the crosses from the graves;
'Tis the sword alone that saves;
God forgives the deed ye do.
Leave, oh leave your rhyming trade;
Steel on anvil must be laid--
Steel shall bring us safely through.
(JOYNES.)
And:
"Brause, Gott, mit Sturmesodem durch die fürchterliche Stille,
Gieb ein Trauerspiel der Freiheit für der Sklaverei Idylle!
Lass das Herz doch wieder schlagen in der Brust der kalten Welt
Und erweck ihr einen Rächer und erweck ihr einen Held!"[5]
[5] Let thy tempest blow, O God, and put an end to this terrible calm!
Give us a tragedy of liberty in place of this idyll of slavery! Set
the heart of the clay-cold world beating again; raise up for her an
avenger; awaken for her a hero!
The collection was prefaced by a poetical challenge "To the Dead Man,"
namely Prince Pückler, who had written under this pseudonym. He was
chosen as the representative of the careless pleasure-lovers who seek
distraction in travel. The attack was unjust, but how fine it sounded!
The anonymous author, whose name soon became public property, was a
young man of twenty-four, Georg Herwegh, born in Würtemberg in 1817,
and educated at the well-known Tübingen Institution. While serving his
time in the army, Herwegh quarrelled with an officer, and was obliged
to take refuge in Switzerland, where he lived for several years,
associating with other refugees and other youthful Radicals. His poems,
with their fresh, energetic, and yet vague Radicalism, at once made
their mark, and attained an immense circulation in the course of a few
months. The sentiment of these poems is somewhat mixed. Now it is with
tyrants, now with Philistines, that their author is at war; at one
time he discovers the enemies of the good cause in Germany itself, at
another abroad; now he writes as a staunch Republican; again, following
the example of Platen, he appeals earnestly, imploringly to the King of
Prussia, warning him, but at the same time assuring him that it is not
too late:
"Du bist der Stern, auf den man schaut,
Der letzte Fürst, auf den man baut."[6]
[6]
Thou art the star to which we turn our eyes,
Of monarchs all the last in whom our hope yet lies.
The public of that day overlooked the young poet's want of consistency;
his enthusiasm was infectious, his melodious lyrical rhetoric
irresistible. He was the first lyric poet who had taken men's hearts
by storm since the days of Goethe and Schiller. From the Alps to the
Baltic the young men sang: _Reisst die Kreuze aus der Erden!_
In the autumn of 1842 Herwegh took a tour through Germany, with a
practical aim in view. The work which he had begun as a poet, he
desired to carry on as a journalist, a political writer; his journey
was undertaken for the purpose of securing contributors to a monthly
magazine to be entitled _Der deutsche Bote aus der Schweiz_ ("The
German Messenger from Switzerland"); but it became a sort of triumphal
progress; he was entertained at banquets in Cologne and Leipzig, and
serenaded by the students of Jena; never before had such homage been
paid to a German poet.
Towards the end of October he arrived in Berlin, where he could not
expect to make as great a sensation, especially as he had followed
the advice of his companion, Ruge, and refused the advances of a very
unprosperous Radical association. But something happened which made
far more impression on the public mind than any popular demonstration
could have done--the king expressed a wish to make Herwegh's personal
acquaintance.
So far the only public manifestation of Frederick William's æsthetic
sympathies had been his patronage of Tieck and Rückert, both of whom
he had invited to Berlin. Ludwig Tieck, now an old man, crippled with
rheumatism, occasionally read aloud at Court and put plays on the
stage; Friedrich Rückert was expected to assist in reorganising the
study of Oriental languages at the University, but proved unfit for
the task. Unprejudiced judgment in literary matters was certainly not
traditional in the Hohenzollern family. There was only one possible
precedent for the audience granted to Herwegh, and that was to be found
in the present king's own private reply to the ode in which Platen
conjured him to embrace the cause of unhappy Poland. In a cordial
letter to the poet, Frederick William, then Crown Prince, expressed
his hearty sympathy with the Poles and bewailed his inability to help.
The ode addressed by Herwegh to the king implored him to put down
clericalism; it was an agreeable surprise to find that this had given
no offence.
The audience took place on the 19th of November 1842. Herwegh was very
silent, depressed by the situation. The king was, as usual, eloquent
and communicative. He is reported to have said: "You are the second
enemy whom I have received this year; the first was M. Thiers (who
had threatened war in 1840, because of the support given by the great
powers to the Sultan in his quarrel with the Egyptian Pacha); but it
gives me greater pleasure to see you. We have our vocations, you and
I; mine is to be a king, yours to be a poet. I shall be faithful to
mine, as I trust you will be to yours. Nothing is more abhorrent to
me than vacillation; I esteem an Opposition which is actuated by real
conviction (wenn sie nur gesinnungsvoll ist)." Referring to Herwegh's
youth, he prophesied "a Damascus day" for him, concluding with the
words: "Until then, let us be honourable enemies."
Such particulars of this meeting of king and poet as reached the
ears of the public awakened feelings either of childish envy or
childish indignation among the oppositionist writers of the day. It
was considered that Herwegh ought (_à la_ Marquis Posa) to have taken
advantage of the opportunity to demand political liberty for Prussia.
A few days after the audience, Herwegh left Berlin. At Königsberg,
where he was again entertained at a banquet, he was surprised to
receive the news that his projected periodical, before its appearance,
had been declared contraband in Prussia. It was a prohibition for which
he might well have been prepared, for all books published abroad (his
own poems included) were contraband, except those for which special
licence had been granted. But already irritated by accusations of
treason brought against him in one and another Radical newspaper, he
was completely upset by this rebuff, and at once addressed an awkward,
unmanly, would-be pathetic letter to the king.
He pleaded the king's promise of honourable enmity, a promise which he
declared to be broken by this prohibition; he would not ask the king to
revoke this edict, though it was hard for him to see the child of his
Muse menaced while yet in its mother's womb, and hard to have to live
in a state of constant warfare with the law of the country; not that
the prohibition did him any harm, for he was fortunate enough to be at
that moment preparing the fifth edition of his poems, also a prohibited
book; but he felt impelled to address a last, honest, impassioned
appeal to the king; an appeal which, though private, was not merely his
own, but that of thousands, &c, &c.
The letter itself was stupid and indiscreet; its publication in a
Leipzig newspaper a few weeks later was a piece of folly that avenged
itself. In Stettin, Herwegh received orders to leave the country;
policemen escorted him to the stage-coach, from which he was forbidden
to alight in Halle. He had received a festive welcome in Prussia, but
his leave-taking was of the coldest.
The arch-scoffer Heine, in his poem, _Der Ex-lebendige_, has the
following lines:
"Aranchuez! in deinem Sand'
Wie schnell die schönen Tage schwanden,
Als ich vor König Philip stand
Und seinen uckermarkschen Granden.
Er hat mir Beifall zugenickt,
Als ich gespielt den Marquis Posa,
In Versen hab' ich ihn entzückt
Doch ihm gefiel nicht meine Prosa."[7]
[7] O my Aranchuez! how the days flew that I spent amidst thy sands!
those days when I stood in the presence of King Philip and his
Uckermark grandees. He nodded approval to me when I played Marquis
Posa; my verses charmed him, but my prose he could not stand.
And in _Die Audienz_ he jeers more mercilessly still at the Swabian
suckling:
"'Ich will, wie einst mein Heiland that,
Am Anblick der Kinder mich laben.
Lass zu mir kommen die Kindlein, zumal
Das grosse Kind aus Schwaben.'
So sprach der König, der Kämmerer lief
Und kam zurück und brachte
Herein das grosse Schwabenkind
Das seinen Diener machte.
Der König sprach: 'Du bist wohl ein Schwab?
Das ist just keine Schande.'
'Gerathen! erwidert der Schwab, ich bin
Geboren im Schwabenlande.'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
'Erbitte dir eine Gnade,' sprach
Der König. Da kniete nieder
Der Schwabe und rief: 'O geben Sie, Sire!
Dem Volke die Freiheit wieder.'
Der König stand erschüttert tief;
Es war eine schöne Scene.
Mit seinem Rockärmel wischte sich
Der Schwab' aus dem Auge die Thräne.
Der König sprach endlich: 'Ein schöner Traum!
Leb' wohl und werde gescheidter!
Und da du ein Somnambülericht bist,
So geb' ich dir zwei Begleiter.
Zwei sichre Gendarm', die sollen dich
Bis an die Grenze führen.
Leb' wohl, ich muss zur Parade geh'n,
Schon hör ich die Trommel rühren.'"[8]
[8]
"I will, as my gracious Saviour did,
Find the sight of the children pleasant;
So suffer the children to come, and first
The big one, the Swabian peasant."
Thus spake the monarch; the chamberlain ran,
And return'd, introducing slowly
The stalwart child from Swabia's land,
Who made a reverence lowly.
Thus spake the king: "A Swabian art thou?
There's no disgrace in that, surely?"
"Quite right! I was born in Swabia's land,"
Replied the Swabian demurely.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"One wish I will grant thee," the monarch said--
Then the Swabian in deep supplication
Knelt down and exclaimed: "O sire, I pray grant
Their freedom once more to the nation!"
The monarch in deep amazement stood,
The scene was really enthralling;
With his sleeve the Swabian wiped from his eye
The tear that was well-nigh falling.
At last said the king: "In truth a fine dream!
Farewell, and pray learn discretion;
And as a somnambulist plainly thou art,
Of thy person I'll give the possession
To two trusty gendarmes, whose duty 'twill be
To see thee safe over the border--
Farewell! I must hasten to join the parade,
The drums are beating to order."
(BOWRING.)
It was not only humour that laughed, but envy and vindictiveness as
well. Men wreaked vengeance on their own former enthusiasm. The Herwegh
catastrophe was, moreover, attended by disastrous practical results.
The _Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung_, the Opposition newspaper most
widely read in Prussia, was suppressed the day after it published the
letter to the king. The _Rheinische Zeitung_, the principal Liberal
paper published in Prussia, itself very soon received its death-blow.
And in Saxony, at the request of Prussia, Arnold Ruge's _Deutsche
Jahrbücher_ (first known as the _Hallische Jahrbücher_), the leading
periodical expressing the opinions of the reflective youth of the day,
was also suppressed.
One lesson the young generation learned from what had happened. It
was no momentous matter that a young poet should have shown himself
embarrassed and then unmanly in his relations with a king. But the
men of this day had imagined themselves to have taken a great step in
advance of the men of the Thirties; they believed that they possessed
strength of character, whereas their elders had only been gifted with
talent. Now it was borne in upon them, not only that poets are little
calculated to make good political leaders, but also that the whole
generation must discipline itself severely if it were to stand any
firmer in the day of trial than its predecessors had done.
So now thinkers and politicians by profession (in almost too many
instances professors) took the lead. And the fact that the generation
which now revolutionised the mind of Germany failed so miserably in
the close of the struggle of 1848, is to be ascribed, not to want of
strength of character, but to that idealism which is bred in the minds
of men who have never ruled, to their belief in the irresistible powers
of ideas and ideals to realise themselves, and to their contempt for
that external brute force, which in theory was of minor importance,
but which, vanquished in the first brush, calmly allowed itself to
be disdained, and awaited the moment when, with renewed vigour, it
returned to the attack.