service of liberty. The latter part of his life was spent in idleness.
His career as a poet and critic began in 1839[5] and culminated with
_Gedichte eines Lebendigen_. He married a rich young Jewess, an
enthusiastic admirer of his poetry. After the Revolution of February
he took up the position of a leader in Paris, and invaded Baden at the
head of a body of republican German and French workmen; on the 27th of
April they were defeated by Würtembergian troops; thanks to his wife's
courage, Herwegh escaped. Heine has given a bitingly sarcastic, but
very unfair description of this campaign in _Simplicissimus I._ The
simple, truthful account which Herwegh's wife has published since, of
all the incidents of the revolt, and of the part which her husband
played in it, proves that, even if he lacked the tactical skill which
he laid no claim to possessing, he was a brave man. Herwegh now became
a member of the emigrant colony in London, and lived the emigrants'
perniciously idle life; they had literally nothing to do but concoct
futile plans for new revolutions and fall in love with one another's
wives. He afterwards lived in Paris and Zürich, always the same
inactive life, persistently dissatisfied with the progress of events
in Germany. Like Kinkel and like Moritz Hartmann, Herwegh was unable
to the day of his death (1875) to reconcile himself to the great
development of power attained by Germany at the expense of liberty. He
never relinquished the ideals of his youth; retained a manly admiration
even for Heine, who had held him up to derision.
Being such as he was, it was only natural that Herwegh should from the
very first be on the watch in the matter of his brother poets' fidelity
to their flag and the genuineness of their liberalism. His attacks
on Geibel and Freiligrath have already been noticed. He next turned
upon Anastasius Grün (Auersperg), who had gone to Vienna in hopes of
obtaining the appointment and rank of Chamberlain; his wife, by birth a
Countess Attems, was invested with the Order of the Star of the Cross,
and he wished to be able to accompany her to court. In stirring words
Herwegh entreated him to retrace his steps:
"Darf man den Tempel um ein Weib entweih'n,
Mit einem Weib um goldne Götzen tanzen," &c[6]
Dingelstedt retorted, defending Count Auersperg in a pretty poem:
"O, sie will es nie begreifen, ihre Prosa und Gemeinheit,
Das ein Geist wie Du, ein Name, bürgt für der Gesinnung Reinheit,
Nur das Schlechte glaubt sie willig," &c.[7]
The retort evaded the attack instead of repulsing it. No one seriously
believed in a man like Auersperg having changed his convictions; the
ground of Herwegh's attack was that, holding such convictions, he had
solicited a court appointment. It was his own future position that
Dingelstedt defended; he was the next poet upon whom Herwegh turned,
with a satire that was all the fiercer because it was silent, or at
least only indirectly expressed.
Dingelstedt, like Herwegh, had been obliged to leave Germany to escape
the consequences of writing political poems. The two poets met in
Paris. There they one evening amused themselves by trying which could
write the better verses on the subject of his own imaginary political
conversion. Herwegh wrote the poem "Wohlgeboren" the burden of which
is: What is the use of all this talk of liberty and fatherland, of all
this enthusiasm, all this meddling with politics? What good has it done
me? No, no! for the future I will be a quiet, respectable citizen:
"Du sollst, verdammte Freiheit, mir
Die Ruhe fürder nicht gefährden;
Lisette, noch ein Gläschen Bier!
Ich will ein guter Bürger werden."[8]
This last line forms the refrain of all the verses. To outbid his
friend, Dingelstedt wrote the poem "Hochwohlgeboren," which begins:
"Ein guter Bürger willst du werden?
Pfui Freund!--Ein guter, Bürger--Du?
Das also war dein Ziel auf Erden,
Dem stürmten deine Lieder zu?
O nimm's zurück, das ekle Wort,
Wer mag sich so gemein geberden!
Nein, nein, mich reisst es weiter fort:
Ich muss Geheimer Hofrath werden!"[9]
In this poem, too, the last line of the first verse serves as refrain
to all the others.
Two years later Dingelstedt was Privy Councillor, librarian, and reader
at the court of the King of Würtemberg. Herwegh contented himself with
reprinting the two poems side by side.
Franz Dingelstedt (born in 1814) represents one of the most curious
types of the day. He is a revolutionary who ought to have been born
in the purple, a Prince Pückler in the guise of a poor schoolmaster,
a satirist who cannot dispense with appearances, a man of first-rate
abilities with neither serious vices nor serious enthusiasm, but
with ready wit and frequent poetic inspiration; early _blasé_, he
retains a certain practical activity of mind to the last. He was
born in the worst-governed country in Germany, Hesse-Cassel, under
the hated administration of Hassenpflug, became master at one of its
grammar-schools, aroused dissatisfaction by his emancipated opinions
and conduct and the liberal tone of his poetry, was transferred and
perpetually interfered with, and sent in his resignation in 1841, when
he was twenty-seven. Only one year after Herwegh he published his
first collection of political poetry, _Lieder eines kosmopolitischen
Nachtwächters_ ("Songs of a Cosmopolitan Night-Watchman"). Good verse,
clever poems, a good idea. The watchman in his uniform, armed with his
spiked mace, his horn in his hand, goes his nightly round, and, pausing
outside the houses, tells us what he sees and imagines within.
He is a genuine night-watchman--thoroughly weary of the old woman
at home, who is so ugly and so wrinkled, yet with whom he manages
to live peaceably, for she sleeps by night and he by day; a genuine
night-watchman, who sings the watchman's song about lights and fires;
looks up at the prisoners, the political prisoners, peering through the
iron bars and shaking them; shudders as he passes the cathedral with
all its relics, where the wind is howling so loud in the organ pipes;
and then laughs at himself for shuddering. It is twenty years since he
was inside the building, he is none of your seat-holding church-goers.
And yet he is not a genuine night-watchman. He has feelings and
opinions which are not those of a man in his station. In one house a
ball is going on; he listens to the music, and describes the dancing
and the behaviour of the fashionable company. What a sensation it would
create if he, lantern and mace in hand, snow on his cloak and cap, his
cheeks burning and frost on his beard, were suddenly to appear among
all these shadows! Outside another house stands the carriage of the
great, the all-powerful, Minister of State. The coachman is wrapped
in furs, but the poor uncovered horses are trembling with cold whilst
their master is playing cards within--just as if they could not revenge
themselves when he comes:
"Ich rathe dir, lass die Karten ruhn,
Und hüte dich fein, Ministerlein!
Du hast es mit vier Hengsten zu thun,
Bedenk', dass es keine Bürger sein."[10]
There are many pathetic passages. In one of the suburbs the watchman
passes a house where a poor wretch lies in his last agonies; he passes
the lunatic asylum, and the dread of madness that always seizes him
here is mingled with a strange feeling of attraction; he passes the
cemetery, where his poor father, who took his own life, lies in a
disdained, neglected corner; and on his way back he passes the palace,
where the prince tosses sleeplessly on his pillow of down, while the
sentry sleeps soundly standing in his box.
A night-watchman might easily have had some of these feelings--he would
never have expressed them thus; the mask is perpetually falling off.
There are one or two most masterly and natural expressions of popular
indignation, for example the tirade occasioned by the sight of light in
the sickroom of a cringing courtier whose extortions have impoverished
his country:
"Warum er nicht schläft? warum er in Wuth die Spitzen am Hemde zerissen?
Ein gutes Gewissen schläft überall gut, und nirgends ein schlechtes
Gewissen.
Er hat an des Landes Mark, die Schlang', sich voll gefressen, gesogen,
Er hat--ein Menschenleben lang!--gestohlen, gelogen, betrogen."[11]
But there are also expressions of hatred and exasperation which we
feel belong to another class of society. We actually find the watchman
giving frivolous advice to a beautiful young lady who has been married
to an old reprobate, telling her how she may best revenge herself
upon him. At times his thoughts and reveries take a higher flight.
He is leaning on an old cannon, which stands on the rampart, shining
and dumb. Once its wheels rolled over dead and living on the field of
victory; once it gave the signal for the dread onslaught, for beside
the touch-hole there is an N. surmounted by the imperial crown. Now
its voice is only heard when some wretched prisoner has escaped from
his dungeon, or on the occasion of his Majesty's birthday, or when a
princess is born. "Patience!" cries the watchman to the cannon; "it may
be that ere long thou wilt once more pour thy balls upon the enemy; but
keep silent in the meantime, old veteran, or they will spike thee as
they are gagging us." Here the mask is completely thrown off.
After Dingelstedt had left Hesse-Cassel, he published _Nachtwächters
Weltgang_ ("The Night-Watch man's World Patrol"), in which the poet
is no longer the unsophisticated night-watchman--but the cultivated
revolutionary. He falls foul of bad kings, of the governments of
Hesse-Cassel, Prussia, and Hanover, and of false German patriotism:
"What, gentlemen, is a German patriot?--A man who serves the Lord
on Sunday and the king on week-days. What are the objects of his
desire?--Office, a title, and a ribbon for himself, bread for his
lawful offspring, and legitimate sovereigns for his country.--Away with
you, German patriot! The temple is no place for you! You are a Judas,
whose treacherous kiss has been the death of liberty!"
A few months later Dingelstedt was a Privy Councillor and Councillor
of Legation--held office, had a title, wore a ribbon. Naturally no one
believed in any genuine conversion, and it is not surprising that his
conduct was severely, and in some quarters spitefully, judged. The
numerous documents relating to his character and life which have been
published of late years (especially Julius Rodenberg's articles in the
_Deutsche Rundschau_ of 1889-90) throw a more favourable light upon
his action than that in which his contemporaries saw it. There was a
want of fine feeling about it, it was unseemly, but it was not base.
There was nothing wrong in the actual fact of his accepting the post
of reader to a cultivated and amiable sovereign, the fault lay in his
having so shortly beforehand proclaimed all sorts of democratic and
radical principles which he was not prepared to stand by.
He had the true artist's temperament, and yet was distinctly practical;
he was pleasure-loving and ambitious, unable to bear permanently the
humiliation of being poor and consequently ignored; he was above all
else impressed, strongly impressed, by the belief that in following
the path he had entered upon he was pursuing a _métier de dupe_. What
did he gain by refusing, because of his principles, to accept good
appointments and influential positions! What did the world gain by
clever men on principle leaving titles, money, office, orders, and
posts of honour to the stupid men! Was this the best way to improve
matters? His great desire was to play the sovereign in some domain of
art, to solve great scenic problems, to direct great theatres, to be
the favoured of beautiful women. Was he at all likely to attain it as
the exiled schoolmaster, the correspondent of the _Allgemeine Zeitung?_
Who would permanently hold in esteem the poor, independent journalist?
who would not, in course of time, esteem the influential courtier? Of
course there would be an outcry when he accepted the call--if only he
had not written that wretched poem to Herwegh!--but what was needed was
cool courage, ironical impenetrability, smiling indifference, and the
calm superiority which allows one's opponents to bawl till they are
tired; and these gifts he possessed.
He became, as every one knows, not only a courtier, but in course
of time manager of one court theatre after another--Stuttgart,
Munich, Weimar--ending his career as the influential director of the
Burgtheater in Vienna.
Heine, who was not strict, but witty, wrote the incomparable poem
"Verhofrätherei," which begins:
"Verschlechtert sich nicht dein Herz und dein Stil,
So magst du treiben jedwedes Spiel,
Mein Freund, ich werde dich nie verkennen,
Und soll ich dich auch Herr Hofrath nennen,"[12]
It expresses a mournful understanding of Dingelstedt's conduct,
and bitter contempt for the public to whom both he and Dingelstedt
addressed themselves.
Any one who desires to get a distinct and correct idea of Dingelstedt's
intellectual personality should compare the clever, graphic account of
his life, entitled _Münchener Bilderbuch_, with his own cyclus of poems
entitled _Ein Roman_. These poems show us far more of his inmost nature
than the verses of his early youth. But he had early experienced the
mingled feeling of attraction to the great world and contempt for it.
In the poem "Krähwinkel," he wrote of fashionable society:
"Sie lügen, sie krakehlen, sie hassen sich bis auf's Blut,
Zum Morden oder Stehlen fehlt ihnen nur der Muth.
Sie möchten gern und wagen's nicht, das heisst denn Recht und Pflicht;
Die denken können, sagen's nicht. Die Meisten denken nicht."[13]
Now he tells the story of a society amour. In England, at a ball, the
poet meets a lady of Hindoo blood, but English in every other respect.
She is spiritually akin to himself, gloomy and cold and weary of life.
They fall in love:
"Wir klammerten uns, ob aus Zeitvertreib,
Ob aus Verzweiflung, an einander an,
Sie, ein verlornes, neugebornes Weib,
Ich, ein verlorner, neugeborner Mann."[14]
The word "Zeitvertreib" (pastime) is a little too weak, the word
"Verzweiflung" (despair) is a shade too strong. There is German
puerility in this insistence upon fashionable frivolity and blank
despair. So much is certain; the two fall in love. We have plenty of
passion, hot and wild--more of sensuality in it than love, voluptuous
nights, secret pleasures, and coldly cynical front shown to the
world; then separation, farewell, and oblivion; until one day in a
conservatory in Amsterdam the decaying smell of a dead lotus-plant
makes him feel faint. He is reminded of her, and presses one of the
dead leaves to his lips as if it were the hand of a corpse.
Such characters as Dingelstedt significantly illustrate their age, they
do not create it. They are not the builders of the palace, they are its
gilders. No doubt the work of the gilder first attracts the eye, and
attracts far more eyes than the work of the builder, who in laying the
foundation of the palace determines its whole construction; but there
is also no doubt as to whose work is of the more importance.
These pleasure-loving poets, often disillusioned so young, with
no principles except the political convictions of which they sing
and boast, and to which they generally prove unfaithful, are of
social importance from the fact that they create the opinion of the
moment, general political opinion, and thereby accelerate the slow
reorganisation of society. But this outward reorganisation is not
itself the principal matter; political opinion is not the prime mover.
The outward revolution is a result of movements going on much deeper
below the surface. Perhaps the most powerful impulse is given by
philosophy with its quiet revolutionising of the religious view of life.
In this domain of philosophic agitation there appeared in the summer
of 1841 (the year in which Dingelstedt's first book was published, the
year following the publication of Herwegh's first) an epoch-making
thinker. In the work entitled _Das Wesen des Christenthums_ ("The
Nature of Christianity") he formulates great thoughts, founds and
expounds a philosophy of life which makes its influence felt in the
spoken and written words of all who come after him, all at least
whose minds attain their fullest development. Ludwig Feuerbach is the
foundation-stone upon which for the next twenty years every one builds,
everything is built.
When I say of him that he was great, a great man and a great thinker,
I myself resent the platitude. Great is a term which we hear so
constantly applied to this, that, and the other thing, that we
have come to be unaffected by it. There is not even any very keen
appreciation among us of the quality of greatness. The sense for it
is deadened by the cold, clammy manner in which the intellectually
great are handled by those who write learned treatises on their
work. Take up a history of philosophy, and you will find them all
arranged and labelled, one looking exactly like the other. There
they stand in a row, all treated with the same respect, and regarded
with the same interest--Schelling, who was a genius and a charlatan;
Trendelenburg, who accepted his appointment from Eichhorn and improved
his opportunities after the death of Altenstein; Strauss, who was a
second-rate thinker, and a bit of a pedant; Karl Vogt, who was a gifted
gourmand; Lotze, who was an excellent professor of philosophy, but
nothing more; and amongst the rest Feuerbach, one of a list, possibly
labelled as inferior, onesided men, calling themselves ideal realists
or something of the sort. The effect is demoralising.
He was great. This means that there is a wide, open space round him on
every side. It means that if we would understand him, we must separate
him clearly in our minds from all those men, all those facts that
jostle him in lesson-books and hand-books. That he was great means,
that he is altogether upon another level. The moment we catch sight of
him as he stands there alone, reverence takes possession of us.
Simply natural as he was in intercourse with friends, there was yet
something awe-inspiring about the man. Look at that face, in every
feature of which there is genius and character--obstinate, energetic
character. There is character in the mighty brow, in the small eyes,
in the big, fan-shaped beard. There is power in it all, power and
nobility, and manly beauty, stern as though cast in bronze.
Himself a genius, he belongs to a notably talented family; the father
one of the most distinguished criminal jurists of Germany; brother,
sister, nephew, all gifted. He is born at Landshut in 1804; studies at
Heidelberg; turns his attention to theology, first from the orthodox,
afterwards from the critical standpoint; then to philosophy, first
abstract, afterwards realistic, ever more realistic. He publishes
his _Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit_ ("Thoughts on Death and
Immortality") anonymously. The book is at first confiscated, but
subsequently allowed to circulate. After it becomes known that he
is the author, he applies in vain for professional appointments at
several of the South German universities, and similar attempts made
somewhat later in Berlin, France, Switzerland, and Greece prove equally
fruitless, in spite of the support of noted savants. From 1836 onwards
he lives a retired life in the country--till 1860 at Brückberg, near
Ansbach, afterwards at Rechenberg, near Nuremberg. In his later years
it is the life of a hermit. He corresponds with friends of his own
class and stamp, and also with men of the people (such as Konrad
Deubler of the Salzkammergut), who sometimes understand his writings
better and feel them more deeply than the so-called cultivated class.
In 1837 he married the love of his youth. It was not without influence
on his life that, in the beginning of the Forties, a young girl,
daughter of one of his friends, was for a time passionately attached to
him, an attachment which he returned.
His only course of lectures was delivered in 1848, at Heidelberg, but
not at the university; there he was dreaded and shunned. In 1842 his
friends had tried to get him appointed professor at Heidelberg; he at
first took kindly to their plan, but afterwards frantically opposed
it. "To try to make me a professor and that, too, in the ordinary
way, the way in which any blockhead can be made one ... is to place
me on a level with the fools that are posing as professors now, is
to insult, to disgrace me.... The professor's desk is no place for a
man with a head like mine. Do you know the proper place for my head?
Guess! The block: for my brain is as keen and as peremptory as the
executioner's sword, and I have no desire, no courage to do any deeds
but those for which men risk the loss of their heads."[15] His friend
had been advising him rather to call his work _Wesen der Théologie_
than _Wesen des Christenthums_. He answers: "I take no interest
whatever in the overturning of theology. I concern myself only with
great world-entities (welthistorische Wesen).... One must deal a mortal
blow, must deny on principle. To act means to take life--with the
determination, if necessary, to give one's own life in return."
This is more resolute language than the poets used; these views are
very different from theirs. Saint-René Taillandier animadverted on
the fact that Feuerbach, holding such views, did not take part in the
revolutionary movement of 1848. Feuerbach answered: "M. Taillandier!
When another revolution breaks out and I take part in it, know, to the
dismay of your godly soul, that that revolution will be victorious;
the last day of the monarchy and the hierarchy will have come. Alas!
I shall not live to take part in that revolution. But I am playing an
active part in another great and victorious one, the results of which
will not be evident till centuries have come and gone. For, according
to my philosophy--which you know nothing about and presume to judge
without having studied--according to my philosophy, which ignores gods,
and, consequently, miracles wrought by means of political measures,
space and time are necessary conditions of all being, all thought,
and all action. It was not, as has been asserted in the Bavarian
Reichsrathskammer, because the Parliament of Frankfort consisted of
unbelievers that it was such a complete and shameful failure; as
a matter of fact the majority of its members were believers--and
surely God, too, respects a majority; it was a failure because it was
destitute of the sense of place and time."[16]
Notwithstanding the number of different stages through which Feuerbach
passed in his progress towards realism, notwithstanding all that can
with justice be said of the diversity of the positions he took up, his
ground-thought, the key-stone of the vaulting upon which the whole
rests, is as simple as it is great. It is this: Man cannot be conscious
of a being that is higher than himself. If it were possible for man
to be conscious of himself--that is, his being or nature--as finite,
compared with another being apprehended as infinite, he would by this
consciousness limit his own being, _i.e._ deny it. His consciousness
would extend beyond the limits of his being, which is impossible, for
consciousness is simply the self-affirmation of being.
Instead, therefore, of saying with Hegel: Man's consciousness of God is
God's self-consciousness, we are compelled to say: Man's consciousness
of God is man's self-consciousness; religion is man's first and
indirect self-knowledge.
It is universally acknowledged that the idea, God, can only be
formulated by the aid of human predicates--God is love, God is
goodness, knowledge, power, &c. The subject here is nothing but the
personified predicate. The predicate is the original. What religion
really means is this: Love is divine, _i.e._ of absolute worth,
deserving of adoration; goodness, knowledge, power are divine.
Hence belief in a God is belief in man as the essential being.