no controversion, namely, that the official fatherland, the official
country, everywhere lays claim to all that the genius of the people
in times past has produced, to all their great men, even those whose
lives were one constant rebellion against it. It banished, imprisoned,
executed them--no matter; now it wears their portraits next its heart.
And the official fatherland claims, and always has claimed, to bear the
future in its womb. It not only maintains that the present existence
of all and of everything is inseparably bound up with its existence,
but that it is pregnant with the new age and is consequently entitled
to receive the respectful care that is the due of a pregnant queen.
For the thinking men of any people there is, besides this fatherland,
another, one that is not recognised, that is often disowned. It does
not deck itself with the national colours; for it the national song
is not sung. It exists wherever people feel and act in the spirit
that has been the spirit of the best of the country's sons. It has
the allegiance of all the thinking youth. Those of low degree have
more part and lot in it than those in place and power. To it alone the
future belongs.
[1] The name of one of Holberg's best known comedies is _The Lying-in
Room_ ("Barselstuen").
[2] To know which is the true Germania, you need but use your eyes.
Look first at one and then the other. Is not the one in rags, the other
clad in silk? the one starving and pale, a mere shadow, driven to house
with beggars, herself a beggar; the other stately, plump, and pleasant
to the sight, consorting with right honourable gentlemen; with child
moreover, as you plainly see?
[3] Yes, mock at me! Put your pilfering, blood-stained fingers into
my wounds! Spit on my rags, and proclaim me to be a poor, banished,
homeless woman. You know best whose hand shed my blood and tore the
crown from my head.... For her you built palaces, for me prisons. Your
menials flattered her, me they persecuted. And you, trembling phantom
queen, who have the effrontery to call yourself by my name, away! hide
yourself! make room for the rightful sovereign! make room for me!
[4]
Slowly onward, slowly onward in the race!
That Prussian progress may be able to keep pace!
XXVIII
REVOLUTIONARY POETRY
There were real poets, aspiring spirits, who did not follow the general
trend of literature at this period. There were men like Eduard Mörike
(born in 1804), the last scion of the Swabian School, who broke the
bounds of its narrow tradition, and in his lyric verse may rather be
regarded as an offshoot of the Goethe stem--a genuinely gifted poet,
the idyllic, arch, melancholy singer of the inner life, author of the
immortal poem, _Denk es, O Seele!_ And there were men like Otto Ludwig,
the Thuringian, and Friedrich Hebbel, the Ditmarschian, the two most
robust originals in modern German literature, who were both born in
1813, and both developed their very dissimilar peculiarities after
1848--two gnarled, leafy oaks standing without the forest's bounds.
The only mark of the period in which they were youths is the peculiar
defiant gloom which lies deep down in both natures. Specially their
own is a kind of melancholy keen-sightedness, inclining towards bold
realism. They are the heralds of the realism of a later, unpolitical
age. But they have not the characteristic common to all the political
poets of their own age--sunny enthusiasm, a natural bias towards public
life, towards the radical reform, or, if necessary, the complete
revolution of society.
This bias, in combination with the philosophic lucidity due to the
influence of Hegel and Feuerbach, is perhaps most remarkably observable
in an author whose writings are, undeservedly, beginning to be
somewhat neglected nowadays, an author who, dying at the early age
of thirty-one, did not live to see the Revolution of March. This is
Friedrich von Sallet, a young German officer of extraordinary strength
of character, whose solid, comprehensive culture was due to his own
unaided efforts. In him the profound thought of his age is united with
its extreme, passionate Liberalism. After his dismissal from the army
in 1831, he devoted himself entirely to literature.
His best known work is his _Laien-Evangelium_, a kind of devotional
book for free-thinkers, a series of poems in which he gives a
symbolical modern interpretation to the various events of the Gospels.
He begins each poem with some story or lesson from the Bible, and then
proceeds to show the living, eternal kernel in it, and to cast away the
historical or mythical husks. The interpretations are at times rather
far-fetched, and the employment of but one metre throughout the whole
book undeniably tends to monotony. In its general conception the work
reminds us of another, older book, Leopold Schefer's _Laien-Brevier_;
but the contrast is great between Schefer's comfortable satisfaction
with the divine government of the universe, and Sallet's impatient
inclination to interfere with the natural course of events. We are also
slightly reminded of Rückert's _Weisheit der Bramanen_; but Sallet's
wisdom is a wrathful wisdom, no peaceful collection of golden rules of
life like Rückert's, but fiery denunciation of deceit and stupidity.
In his introductory poem Sallet compares those who had written
Oriental poetry before him to the Kings of the East, who offered gold,
frankincense, and myrrh to the Light of the world, and then fell back
again into their Oriental dream-life. Now, he says, light is once more
dawning, thought is once more rousing from their slumber both East and
West. In his eager advocacy of his ideals, he is too indifferent to
colouring, too Western; his book is spoiled by its too modern, directly
didactic tone.
The collection of poems known as _Gedichte_ is a much finer one. Here
again the political poems are the most important.
He describes a sleeping giant, on whose head and breast foolish dwarfs
are disporting themselves. They sit on chairs in his open mouth and
pay compliments to each other; spread their tables and dine upon his
stomach; declare that it is his duty to sleep--if he does not, they
will punish him with pin-pricks. They believe that God has created the
great giant solely that they may disport themselves merrily on the top
of him, the truth being that if he were to awake and rise there would
be an end of them. The poet himself is tickling the giant's nose with
his paper in hopes that he will perhaps sneeze; that alone would play
the deuce with them. He cries: "Awake and see how they are daring to
behave; it will be an easy matter for you to drive them away." And he
concludes: "I know perfectly well what the giant's name is, but I have
my reasons for not divulging it."
In another poem, _Ecce Homo_, instead of appealing to the people
as a people, he appeals to man as man: "There stands the old, grey
cathedral, and there the old, fortified royal castle, looking down on
wandering humanity passing beneath them, one generation after another.
Song is heard from the one, fealty is sworn in the other, from century
to century; we seem, in comparison with them, but insects of a day. And
therefore fools preach veneration for these houses of cards. For what
are they but card-castles, built for himself by man in his childhood!
He built them, and he can knock them down, and build others in their
stead. Heaven and earth are but soft clay, which man can mould as he
inclines."
At times Sallet writes in a lighter, more playful tone: "What is the
name of the old man to whom people everywhere, but these good Germans
in particular, are devoted, though he has never done anything worth
doing? He stands in the pulpit, he drills the soldiers, he administers
justice, he lectures at the universities, and his voice carries weight
in the councils of the State. Taking a hundred steps to do what could
be done with one jump is called in his language 'the good old ways and
customs'; this is what he approves of, but if you produce anything
original and great, his wrath is aroused and he scolds and storms
till men begin to be afraid of you. He is wanting both in brains and
backbone, the old gentleman, and yet he rules almost absolutely, and to
oppose him successfully one would need to be as strong as a lion. There
is no reason for concealing his name; it is Old Routine."
Among the _Gedichte_ are also clever parodies, such as the one in which
the poet attacks the censor, by whom he was perpetually worried:
"Kennst Du das Land, wo Knut und Kantschu blühn,
Den Steiss von Zarenliebe machend glühn,
Wo man das Zeitungsblatt schwarz überstreicht,
Dass preussisch' Landtagsgift in's Volk nicht schleicht,
Kennst du es wohl? Dahin, dahin,
Möcht' ich mit dir, geliebter Censor, fliehn."
He is even more wroth with the cowardly prophet than with the censor:
"Ever so slight a blow with your hand," he says, "and the mummy falls
to pieces, once it has been brought up from the airless subterranean
halls to the light of day; it will stand intact so long as no hand is
raised against it." He is furious with those who declare that things
will happen of themselves, that historical evolution, &c, will bring
them about. Nothing irritates him so much as to hear people say: "A
change _must_ come; things _cannot_ go on as they are doing." "Since
the beginning of the world," he says, "nothing has ever happened of
itself."
He could not, on account of the censorship, attack monarchy directly,
but he gives us, in excellent verse, the parable of the bear. Much in
the same manner as wolves are kept in the Capitol in Rome, the bear is
kept in Berne as the emblem of the city. On this practice Sallet founds
his fable: "The people of the Canton of Berne in days of old kept a
bear. They let him live on the fat of the land, but they took good care
to keep his claws cut in case he should take it into his head to tear
them to pieces. When asked to explain what good the bear did them, they
answered with surprise: 'Explain! Why, what should he do! He eats his
fill, he moves about majestically, he growls--he is our bear, and that
is enough.' If questioned as to why they kept him, they gave answer:
'Because our fathers did. If the race were to die out, all would be
over with us.' If any one ventured once again to ask why, they only
shouted; 'Hold your tongue, or we'll beat out your brains.'
"One day loud cries were heard throughout the town; the citizens
thronged together--the bear lay dead. He had died suddenly; they had
no new bear ready to take his place, and everywhere the dolorous cry
resounded: 'It is all over with the Canton of Berne! Up and away, brave
hunters! Get us a new bear!
"In vain the hunters explore the mountains and the ravines; they cannot
find a bear. But in spite of this, wonderful to relate, corn and grapes
ripen, fruit grows on the trees--it seems as if nature were utterly
indifferent to the woe of Berne. The sun, though it saw the bear lie
dead, still rises every morning--the world still stands. What can be
the meaning of it?"
Witty as the fable is, it will hardly convince any supporter of
monarchy of the uselessness of that institution. Sallet only attacks
the foolish worship of the supposedly indispensable symbol, without
making any attempt to dispute the most frequently employed argument
in favour of monarchy, namely, the benefit which results from the
withdrawal of the highest of all positions from competition. He puts
his whole soul into another poem, _Aut--Aut_, a poem which became a sort
of watchword for the youth of the day. Its most characteristic verses
are:
"Die ihr den grossen Kampf der Zeit
Ausfechten wollt, herbei ihr Ritter!
Sprecht, welcher Sach' ihr euch geweiht,
Sprecht frei durchs offne Helmgegitter!
Entweder--oder!
Für Fürstenmacht, für Volkesrecht?
Für Geisteslicht, für Pfaffendunkel?
Republikaner oder Knecht?
Ja oder nein! nur kein Gemunkel!
Entweder--oder!"[1]
And the poem concludes with an allusion to the time now fast
approaching when the last on one side or the other with cloven skull
will bite the dust.
Sallet did not live to take part in the great, decisive encounter for
which he so ardently longed. He died in 1843. Not long after his death
the storm-clouds begin to thicken and the birds to fly low. We are
approaching 1848.
Literature follows in Sallet's path. From all parts of Germany comes
the cry: "Let deeds follow upon words!" We hear it not only from the
poets of North Germany, the Rhineland, and Switzerland; three poets of
far-off Austria, Karl Beck, Alfred Meissner, Moritz Hartmann join in
the chorus.
Karl Beck, the son of a Hungarian and a Hungarian Jewess, born at Baja
in 1817, first studied medicine in Vienna, but gave that up, devoted
himself to literature under the auspices of Gustav Kühne, and produced
a succession of poetical works which attracted attention by their
faithful and vivid delineation of Hungarian scenery and Hungarian
national character. As regards this aspect of his work, Beck may be
classed with the Hungarian national poet, Petöfi, a man five years his
junior; but as the poet of liberty, he must be regarded as a disciple
of Börne--the only one who was of any importance as a poet. Like Börne
he is the champion of the Jewish race, of the proletariat, and of
political liberty. In his writing we have the Old Testament style and
pathos combined with the influence of the newest French and German
oppositionist literature. In Austrian poetry Anastasius Grün and Lenau
are his immediate predecessors. He had not the culture of a Prutz,
but his writing is distinguished by fervid colouring, emotional glow,
graphic power, and wrathful enthusiasm. He was, however, one of those
who, hailing the outbreak of the Revolution with joy, changed the
key-note of their song after the victory of the reaction. After the
magnificent revolt of Hungary had been crushed, he addressed a poem to
the Emperor of Austria in which he flatters the victor, and entreats
him to have mercy on the captive heroes. This poem enraged his old
companions in arms. They called to mind that he who was now playing
the part of a loyal subject of the Emperor of Austria had, before the
collapse, been a republican and a socialist.[2]
Alfred Meissner (born at Teplitz in 1822) and Moritz Hartmann (born at
Duschnitz in 1821), Bohemia's two best lyric poets, are both inspired
by the most ardent desire for political liberty.
It is unfair to allow the unpleasant ending to Meissner's literary
career to blind us to his unquestionably genuine poetical talent. It
is both pitiable and monstrous that one of Germany's best lyric poets
should, after an honourable youth, have descended so low as to buy the
manuscripts of an inferior novel-writer and publish them under his own
name, but it does not detract from his worth as author of the fine
poems which undoubtedly are his own. As specimens of a revolutionary
eloquence which was, and with reason, irresistible to the youth of the
Forties, read his glowing lines to the memory of Byron and George Sand.
Moritz Hartmann, Meissner's countryman and contemporary, is a figure
cast in different metal; there is no flaw in him; he is a hero as well
as an unusually gifted poet. No other German poet has loved liberty so
faithfully and passionately from his earliest youth to the day of his
death, or risked his life for it so daringly and so often.
Hartmann, who was one of the handsomest men it is possible to imagine,
was born of Jewish parents in the little town of Duschnitz. The family
was of Spanish origin, the name Hartmann being a translation of Duros.
Moritz was sent to school in Prague, where, as a boy, he witnessed the
banished King Charles the Tenth's melancholy entrance into the town.
At the early age of thirteen he emancipated himself from the religious
faith of his family, and while still a mere child was deeply affected
by the news of the discomfiture of the Polish revolutionists. As a
student he became acquainted with Lenau, to whom he devoted himself
with the enthusiasm of a boy and a disciple. From his childhood he
spoke both Czech and German, and his first book of poems, _Kelch und
Schwert_ ("Chalice and Sword"), contains abundant indication of his
love for the Czech language, which he ranks with Polish, and extols
as superior to Russian. But when it comes to the question of Czech
political sympathy with Russia and hatred of everything German, he is
entirely the German.
In _Kelch und Schwert_ (1845) the Bohemian predominates. The little
introductory poem tells us as much:
"Der ich komm' aus dem Hussitenlande,
Glaube, dass ich Gottes Blut genossen,
Liebe fühl' ich in mein Herz gegossen,
Lieb' ist Gottes Blut--mein Herz sein _Kelch_.
Der ich komm' aus dem Hussitenlande,
Glaube an die fleischgewordnen Worte,
Dass Gedanken werden zur Kohorte
Und jedwedes Lied ein heilig _Schwert?_[3]
A native of that country from which the emancipating doctrines of Huss
have been banished, he feels himself a Hussite, and interprets the old
Hussite war-cry, the right of the laity to receive the chalice in the
sacrament of the Lord's Supper, in a modern spirit, almost the spirit
of Feuerbach. In a poem on the German "songs of liberty" he tells the
lyric poets of Germany that song is not the hammer that will shatter
a prince's heart; also that liberty is a woman, and not to be won by
words alone. He feels for the Poles as if he were himself a Pole.
We are made aware that he loves a Polish lady, and that through his
love to her he has become in his heart her countryman. The poem, _To
C----a_, is one of the most beautiful that sympathy with Poland has
produced. Hartmann can at times be prolix and commonplace, but much
more frequently he is concise and dramatic. Some of his scenes impress
themselves indelibly on the reader's mind. Read, for instance, _Die
Drei_, the poem of the three exiles who meet in a lonely inn on the
plains of Hungary. They are sitting silent over their wine in the
stillness of night, when some one suddenly raises his glass and cries:
"Our country!" Of the three, one is a gipsy, one a Jew, and one a Pole.
They have no country; they look at their glasses and sit silent as
before.
Even more impassioned than his pity for Poland is his pity for Bohemia,
"the poor stag that is bleeding to death in the depths of a forest."
Nothing is left to the Bohemians but their music, that sweet music
which awakes compassion for them everywhere, which sings and sobs and
melts men's hearts with its mysterious melodies.
We may say of this first book of poems what the poet himself has said
of the following: "Not a song in it but has been kissed on the brow by
liberty, the most beautiful and noble of all muses." He already gives
frank expression to his hatred of Metternich's Austria, that Austria
which in 1848, in his _Reimchronik des Pfaffen Mauritius_, he was to
call the Bastille of the nations, within whose walls the silence of
death is only broken by the clank of fetters.
The sensation created by _Kelch und Schwert_ meant exile for Hartmann.
He had, in the first instance, transgressed the laws of Austria by
publishing in a foreign town a work which had not been submitted to
Austrian censorship. He knew that if he were to return from Leipzig,
where he had been living for some time, in intercourse with Kühne and
Laube, he was liable to be arrested on the frontier. But he could not
resist the desire to see his mother again, and succeeded in making his
way secretly to his native town. It was not possible to conceal his
presence there; a traitor betrayed him, and he was obliged, before many
days had passed, to make his escape by a back-door while the police
were forcing their way into the house. In his _Zeitlosen_ there is a
set of poems entitled _Heimkehr und Flucht_, in which he describes this
youthful escapade, and thus proudly delineates his own character:
"Und als der Verrath mich ausgewittert
Und als die Häscher herangekommen,
Da hat die bleiche Mutter gezittert,
Der Schwester Aug' in Thänen geschwommen.
Ich aber sprach: Die Thränen verwischet,
Wir müssen scheiden und von einander,
Und da mich rings die Gefahr umzischet,
In Flammen werd' ich zum Salamander.
Ich bin geboren, ich, für Gefahren,
Sie lauern immer auf meinem Gange
Wie Wegelagrer in dunklen Schaaren;
Doch kenn' ich nimmer die Furcht, die bange.
Ich bin zu Gefahren bestimmt und geboren,
Sie lieben mich, wie Löwen den Meister.
Ich hab' sie alle heraufbeschworen,
Sie dienen mir, wie dem Zaubrer die Geister."[4]
On account of the prologue which he spoke at the Schiller Festival at
Leipzig on the 11th of November 1847, a festival which was in reality
a demonstration in favour of the liberty of the press, Hartmann was
accused of high treason and of offering affront to the Emperor of
Austria. In 1848, as soon as the revolution broke out, he hastened
to Prague. He and two friends, of whom Alfred Meissner was one, were
sent as a deputation to Vienna. He has given an exquisitely humorous
account of their audience with Archduke Franz Karl, who received them
because his brother, the Emperor, was ill, and who was perfectly
unable to understand what they wanted.[5] When the rabble, during
the disturbances in Prague, attempted to storm the Jewish quarter
and slaughter its inhabitants, it was Hartmann who rushed to the
university, persuaded a body of armed students to accompany him, and
with their assistance defended the quarter against the maddened crowd
until the grenadiers arrived.[6]
In the Parliament of Frankfort Hartmann voted with the extreme Left;
his aim was the unity of Germany as a republic. He spoke seldom, but
attracted much attention; he was known as the handsomest man in the
Parliament. Kinkel describes him at this time as a handsome, amiable
man, with firm convictions; "the Southern imagination of the Austrian
gave him fluency of speech, his German training had given him solidity;
with Jewish cosmopolitanism he combined a steadfast patriotism which
not unfrequently found utterance in proud words." At first he took part
enthusiastically in the proceedings of the Parliament. Afterwards,
when these became both tedious and barren, and the assembly showed
its incapability of laying any great and lasting new foundation, his
disappointment found vent in the witty, impressive _Reimchronik_, a
work written in the metre of Hans Sachs. Hartmann, however, was not
only a man of words, but a man of deeds. In the engagement in the
streets of Frankfort on the 18th of September, he exposed himself a
hundred times to the bullets of both parties in his endeavours to
arrange a truce. After the revolution had broken out in Vienna, he
and Froebel went there as deputies from Frankfort to the provisional
government to express the sympathies of the national assembly, and
Hartmann entered the army of the revolution as a common soldier. When
Vienna was defending itself desperately against the Croats, he one day,
with apparently certain death before him, joined a party that were
determined to march through a severe fire to gain possession of a mill,
and was made officer and leader when the original leader fell. After
the fall of Vienna he escaped, thanks to the protection of a lady of
high position, who procured him a falsified passport. He returned to
his duties in the Parliament of Frankfort, and, when it broke up, went
with the protesting party to Stuttgart. There this last remnant of the
Parliament was dispersed by force of arms.
All Hartmann's work, including the youthful poetry written before
1848, bears the mark of his resolute character. In the volume, _Neuere
Gedichte_, published in 1847, which as a whole is unpolitical, we
find in the division _Ost und West_ wild omens of the coming European
storm--for example, the irate poem to the King of Prussia, in which
Hartmann, deprecating Platen's and Herwegh's respectful attitude,
cries shame upon him for delivering up the Poles to the Russian knout,
and that other very touching poem, _Hüter, ist die Nacht bald hin?_
("Watchman, is the Night nigh past?"), which is one long sigh of
impatient desire for the dawning of the new era.