In his _Christian Mysticism_ (ii. 39) Görres tells us that one of the
most noticeable characteristics of a body which, through regeneration,
has attained to higher harmony, is the fragrance it exhales. "Just as
a foul odour is indicative of diseased and discordant organic life, so
inward harmony is revealed by the fragrance which proceeds from it.
Therefore the expression, 'the odour of sanctity' is by no means merely
figurative; it is derived from countless well-established instances of
sweet odour emanating from persons who lead a holy life." And he quotes
numbers of authentic examples of this.
If Görres is right--and I cast no doubt on his assertion--then
the personages to whom, in conclusion, I would direct attention
for a moment must have exhaled a most fragrant odour, for they are
personages with whom both he and the Church were well pleased. All
that is now wanting to complete the picture of the Romantic group,
is a characterisation of the men who transferred the principles of
Romanticism from the domain of literature into that of practical life
and politics. Görres himself may be taken as the representative of
Romantic ecclesiasticism, and Friedrich Gentz as in all respects the
most interesting of the politicians proper.
Joseph Görres was born in the Rhine district in 1776. He sat on
the same school-bench with Clemens Brentano. At the time when the
French armies overran Germany he was completely carried away by the
revolutionary movement. Before he had even begun his university
studies, he became a member of the Jacobin Club in his native town,
Coblentz, distinguished himself by his championship of the ideas
of liberty, and, in _Das rothe Blatt_ ("The Red Journal"), provided
the German revolutionary party with an organ. To him the past was
detestable, France the promised land, and the rest of the world the
domain of slavery.
When, in 1798, the French army marched into Rome, Görres was loud
in his rejoicings over the fall of the city and the collapse of the
temporal power of the Pope. He writes in _The Red Journal_: "We
will tear the mask from ecclesiasticism, and set healthy ideas in
circulation everywhere. We too have sworn eternal hatred to priestcraft
and monasticism, and work for the good of the people. We at the same
time work for the monarchs, by proving their inutility and helping to
relieve them from the burden of government."
His style is youthfully audacious and witty, a genuine demagogue and
journalist style. But in his scorn we distinguish a certain fanaticism,
which, like all fanaticism, is significant of the possibility of a
complete revulsion. When the transactions of the Congress of Rastadt
had made it easy to forecast the abolition of the three spiritual
electorates, of bishoprics, abbacies, &c., Görres advertised in his
paper, under the heading of "For Sale," the following wares: "A whole
cargo of seed of the tree of liberty, the flowers of which make the
best bouquets for princes and princesses.... 12,000 human cattle, well
broken in, who can shoot, cut and thrust, wheel to the right and wheel
to the left. A splendid drilling with cudgel and lash, for twelve
years, has brought them to the point of allowing themselves to be shot
dead for their masters without so much as a grumble.... Three electoral
mitres of finely tanned buffalo hide. The croziers belonging to the
same are loaded with lead, conceal daggers, and are decorated with
artificial serpents. The eye of God on the top is blind."
In December 1799 the French occupied Mayence for the second time. When
the news reached Coblentz, Görres wrote his wild song of triumph over
the collapse of the Roman-German Empire: "At three o'clock in the
afternoon of the 30th December 1799, the day of the crossing of the
Maine, the Holy Roman Empire, of ever foolish memory, passed peacefully
away at the advanced age of 955 years, 5 months, and 28 days; the cause
of death was apoplexy and complete exhaustion, but the illustrious
deceased departed in full consciousness and comforted with all the
sacraments of the Church.... The deceased was born in Verdun, in June
842 (843). At the moment of his birth a comet (_Perrückenkomet_),
pregnant with disaster, was flaming in the zenith. The boy was brought
up at the courts of Charles the Simple, Louis the Child, and their
successors.... But his inclination to a sedentary life, combined with
an excess of religious ardour, weakened his already feeble constitution
... and at the age of about 250, at the time of the Crusades, he became
quite imbecile," &c., &c.
Görres here strikes the note which we hear again a generation later in
Börne's _Letters from Paris_.
He contemptuously opens and reads the will of the deceased, according
to which the French Republic inherits the left bank of the Rhine, His
Excellency, General Bonaparte, being appointed executor.
This was Görres' stormy youthful period. By the year 1800 he was
beginning to withdraw from active politics, a visit to Paris having
cured him of his sympathy with Frenchmen. But he was still an ardent
progressionist, dreading nothing so much as a return to the past,
which would mean a crushing tyranny (harsher after long abeyance and
partly justified by existing circumstances), the rehabilitation of
the priesthood, and combined political and religious reaction. The
oppression of foreign rule aroused his patriotic feeling. At the
university of Heidelberg he entered upon his Romantic period. He
lectured on the nature of poetry and philosophy, waxed enthusiastic
over the Nibelungenlied, studied ancient German history, poetry, and
legend. He met his old schoolfellow, Clemens Brentano, became intimate
with Arnim, and came into contact with Tieck and the brothers Schlegel
and Grimm. It was at Heidelberg that he published his _Kindermythen_
("Child Myths"), _Die Deutschen Volksbücher_ ("The National Literature
of Germany"), and his collection of old German Volkslieder and
Meisterlieder.
It was not only national feeling which the Romantic movement aroused in
Görres; it induced an almost equally strong feeling of cosmopolitanism,
under the influence of which he took up the study of Persian, a
hitherto neglected language, and, almost unassisted, attained such
proficiency in it that he was able to produce a tasteful prose
translation of Firdusi's epic poetry.
In 1818 he went to Berlin as spokesman of a deputation from the town
of Coblentz. He boldly urged the king to fulfil the promise of a
constitution given at the time of the War of Liberation, and his daring
was rewarded with disgrace and several years of exile.
Until 1824 Görres continued to be, to all intents and purposes, the
Romantic German patriot. From that year until his death in 1848, he
is the champion of the clerical reaction. In his _Deutschland und die
Revolution_ (1820) the tendency to Catholicism is already distinct;
in it he characterises the Reformation as "a second Fall." He became
absorbed in the study of the history of the Middle Ages, and began to
regard the Church as the only power capable of satisfactorily defending
the liberty of the people from the encroachments of absolutism. Soon,
under the influence of Brentano and Franz Baader, he became a believer
in visions and bigotedly religious. Clemens Brentano was at this
time, like Apollonius of Tyana in days of old, exercising a powerful
influence upon a generation predisposed to theosophical extravagances;
and Mme. de Krüdener was founding the Holy Alliance.
As early as 1826, Joseph de Maistre declares that Görres, as author of
_Der Kampf der Kirchenfreiheit mit der Staatsgewalt in der Katholischen
Schweiz_ ("The Struggle of the Church with State Despotism in Catholic
Switzerland"), has championed the cause of the Church with both genius
and justice, and yet more boldly and effectually than it has ever been
done before. Such praise from such lips carries weight; it indicates,
moreover, that we have reached the point at which German Romanticism
passes into French, or rather, general European reaction.
In 1827 Görres published a work which is of interest as forming a
prelude to his _Mysticism_, namely, _Emanuel Swedenborg, his Visions
and his Relations to the Church_.
In 1833 Clemens Brentano moved to Munich, where Görres had already
settled. The old school friends met once more, and Brentano's influence
over Görres was great. Brentano was now entirely given over to
superstitious fanaticism. Even Schelling's new philosophy of revelation
was not pious enough for him. Talking with some young theologians, he
shouted: "It is of no use praising it to me! One drop of holy water
is more precious to me than the whole of Schelling's philosophy." He
had brought all his memoranda of Catharina Emmerich's visions and
outpourings to Munich with him; he no longer needed the Gospels; from
her he had learned more of Christ's sayings and journeyings than is
to be found in the Scriptures. The saint had even revealed a map of
Palestine to him. Görres was soon as firm a believer in miracles and
myths as Brentano. Between 1836 and 1842 he wrote the four volumes of
his _Mysticism_, the most insane book produced by German Romanticism.
The farther Görres penetrated into the mysteries of witchcraft and
sorcery, the more fanciful and peculiar did he himself become. He
believed that he was possessed by an evil spirit. On one occasion he
complained that the devil, provoked by his interference in Satanic
affairs, had stolen one of his manuscripts; it was, however, found some
time afterwards in his bookcase.
When the religious disturbances broke out in Cologne, Görres came
forward as the spokesman of the Ultramontanes in their dispute with the
Prussian Ministry. His passionate diatribes against Protestantism were
couched in Biblical language--his opponents were a brood of vipers, the
Prussian State was possessed by an evil spirit, &c. This particular
demon he describes as a horrible ghost, "whom it is honouring too much
to call a spirit;" it is, he says, the ghost of the demon which in the
Prussian army of our grandfathers' days handled the whip which flogged
seven backs at a time.
Görres won the admiration of Count Montalembert, the leader of the
French Catholics, by his polemical feats. In Catholic Germany he was
regarded as a father of the Church, and called "the Catholic Luther."
He succeeded in drawing the Bavarian Government into the movement; the
opponents of the Protestant Prussian Government were allowed to publish
their lucubrations unchecked in the Bavarian press, and it was Görres'
hope that Bavaria, as an important Catholic power, would openly take up
the contest.
No expression of politico-religious fanaticism was too outrageous for
him. He went the length of declaring that the Government, by permitting
mixed marriages, compelled the Catholic parent to bring up "twofold
bastards"--and this in the face of the fact that the King of Bavaria
was the son of a Protestant mother and had married a Protestant wife.
At the time of the violent dispute as to the authenticity of the
coat of the Saviour preserved at Trèves, Görres was highly delighted
with the success of a pilgrimage to Trèves, which was promptly
organised, and in which the Rhinelanders, to the number of a million,
took part, in order to annoy the Protestant Prussians. To him this
pilgrimage was "the triumph of the victorious Church." The argument
that the holy garment could not be genuine, seeing that several other
places possessed similar coats, he dismissed with a reference to the
miraculous multiplication of loaves recorded in the New Testament.[1]
The Romantic literary theory that manner is something absolutely
independent of matter, was a theory put into practice in politics
by Friedrich von Gentz. We called Kleist the German Mérimée; for
several reasons Gentz might be called the German Talleyrand. In his
mature years he might, like Metternich, have written under his own
portrait: "Nur kein Pathos!" ("Anything except pathos!") He is the
very embodiment of Romantic irony, the incarnate spirit of _Lucinde_.
He does not, however, become a typical figure until he is over
forty, at the time when a period of diplomatic activity succeeded to
revolutionary upheavals and the Napoleonic wars, the time when the
watchword was reaction, that is to say, quiet--quiet at any price,
extinction of all the European conflagrations, and rest, profound
rest for the sick, the weary, and the convalescent peoples; when
consequently, as in a sick room, the great aim was to get rid as
quietly as possible of disturbers of the peace and prevent all noise
and uproar. "Gentz," says Gottschall, "understood how to give to
the official publications that indescribable polish, that classic
smoothness, that Olympian dignity which, untouched by the fate of
mortals, allows no drop of nectar and ambrosia to be spilled from
the cup of the gods, though blood may be flowing in torrents in the
regions below. This distinguished manner of passing lightly over the
small shocks by which nations were shattered into fragments, gave a
complexion of mildness and grace to the despotic policy of the day. One
heard only a puff, not a report; it was the noiseless slaughter of the
air-gun."
To outward seeming, Legitimist principles were being vindicated; in
point of fact, their vindicators were not Legitimists when their
interests bade them be the reverse. In them Goethe's words were
fulfilled: "None are so Legitimist as those who can legitimise
themselves." The cause Gentz championed was a bad cause, but even the
champion of a bad cause is interesting if possessed of remarkable
talent. And Gentz was talented in an extraordinary degree. Varnhagen
rightly said of him: "Never has the dust of German scholarship been
stirred up with greater _éclat_; never has learning been displayed to
such advantage."
Friedrich von Gentz was born in Breslau in 1764. Both his parents
belonged to the middle classes; his future exalted position in society
he owed entirely to his own ability. At the University of Königsberg
he applied himself seriously to the study of Kant's philosophy, at
the same time cultivating an enthusiastic Platonic friendship for
an unhappy young married woman, Elisabeth Graun. In 1786 he went
to Berlin, obtained a Government appointment, and made a _mariage
de convenance_ with the daughter of a high official in the finance
department. He plunged into a course of unbridled dissipation, and took
part in all the foolish pleasures of a court "in which a repulsive
assemblage of roués and bigoted women surrounded the old king,
Frederick William II."
In the midst of such a life as this he was surprised by the French
Revolution. Its first effect was to fire him with youthful enthusiasm.
"If this revolution were to fail," he wrote, "I should deem it one
of the greatest misfortunes which has befallen mankind. It is the
first practical triumph of philosophy, the first example of a form
of government founded upon principles and a coherent system. It
is hope and comfort for our race, which is groaning under so many
ancient evils. Should this revolution fail, these evils will be more
irremediable than before. I can picture so clearly to myself how
the silence of despair would acknowledge, in defiance of reason,
that men can only be happy as slaves, and how all tyrants, great and
small, would take advantage of this dreadful acknowledgment to avenge
themselves for the terror caused them by the awakening of the French
nation."
But the horrors which the French Revolution brought in its train soon
caused him to change his mind. He suddenly became the ardent champion
of the good old days. To combat the supremacy of public opinion and the
follies of the masses became the object of his life. He was incapable
of seeing in the French Revolution the necessary outcome of centuries
of wrong and ferment; he declared the cause of its lawlessness to
be "enlightenment," the inordinate cultivation of cold reason--a
characteristically Romantic theory.
No doubt there was a species of real development at the root of this
change. The "rights of humanity," which he had so warmly defended
in his treatise _Ueber den Ursprung und die obersten Prinzipien des
Rechts_ ("On the Origin and Main Principles of Rights"), now seemed
to him only of importance to the statesman as "elementary preparatory
studies." The theory of these rights appeared to him to stand in
much the same relation to statecraft as the mathematical theory of
projectiles does to bomb-throwing. And now, by slow degrees, he arrives
at the narrow view that it is not the people, but the Government, which
is the chief power in the state. He regards the co-operation of the
people in legislation as a mere form; liberty has shrunk into willing,
glad obedience.
Intercourse with Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the influence of the
æsthetic ideas of the period on the need for harmony between private
and public life, somewhat softened the severity of these principles,
and the English constitution became Gentz's ideal. When Frederick
William III. ascended the throne, he actually felt impelled to present
a petition to his Majesty, in which, in eloquent language, he called
upon him to concede liberty of the press--the very liberty which he
described a few years later as the source of all evil. The loyal
Goethe was astounded by this attempt "to coerce" the sovereign, and as
the King took no notice of the appeal, Gentz at once let the matter
drop, and did his best to bury it in oblivion. From this time onward
he was in the pay of England; he did not exactly sell himself, but he
accepted regular and considerable monetary rewards for his political
activity in English interests. And Gentz needed money. He gambled for
high stakes, and lived a life of perpetual dissipation and revelry with
actresses and ballet-dancers. At times this was interrupted by fits
of extreme sentimentality, when, as he writes, he lived "a pleasant,
but still wild life" with his own wife. In April 1801 he notes in his
diary: "Profound emotion over the death of a dog." During a visit to
Weimar, where he met all the literary notabilities of the day, he
became desperately enamoured of the poetess, Amalie von Imhoff, and
made determined resolutions to lead a better life. But he had hardly
returned to Berlin before he wrote: "Result of my Weimar resolutions
--on December 23rd lost all I possessed at hazard." For a time he
went on writing letters of six or eight sheets to Amalie von Imhoff;
then he fell madly in love with the actress, Christel Eigensatz,
and forgot everything else. "_Maintenant c'est le délire complet_,"
he writes in his diary. In the midst of all this, his wife leaves
him and applies for a divorce. The evening she leaves, Gentz tries
to forget the unpleasantness in playing _trente et quarante_. When
Berlin had for many reasons become disagreeable, nay, impossible, he
accepted the offer of an Austrian Government appointment in Vienna.
Here he gradually surrendered all independence and became the tool of
Metternich.
But before this happened, Gentz had had his period of greatness. The
apathy with which the Viennese accommodated themselves to French
supremacy, to defeats and humiliations without end, roused all
that there was of energy and genius in him. The burning hatred of
Napoleon by which he was inspired made him for a short time, during
their misfortunes and deep depression, the Demosthenes of the German
people. But it was only independence that he so passionately desired,
not liberty. In Napoleon the whole Revolution seemed to him to be
concentrated. Against him he would not have hesitated to employ even
such a means as assassination. He strove with all his might to bring
about a union between the German powers and to rouse the German people.
But, true to his character, he appealed less to the people than to the
chosen few in whose hands it seemed to him that the destiny of the
people lay. His preface to the _Political Fragments_, his manifestoes
and proclamations of war, are written with passionate vigour, in a
fluent, magniloquent, and yet manly style, the rhetorical flourish of
which is never in bad taste. Even the defeats of Ulm and Austerlitz
did not crush him; but it was with deep dejection that he observed the
miserable condition of affairs in Prussia before the battle of Jena.
When Johannes von Müller, and others upon whom he had relied, allowed
themselves to be flattered and won over by Napoleon, Gentz remained
immovably firm. In the famous letter to Müller he makes scathing
allusion to those "whose lives are an incessant capitulation." But
when Austria gave up the struggle, and, as generally happens in such
cases, frivolity and pleasure-seeking increased in proportion to the
defeats and humiliations suffered by the country, Gentz too was soon
so deeply entangled in the wild whirl of stupefying dissipations that,
in his terrible pecuniary difficulties, he caught at an alliance with
Metternich as a drowning man at a plank. The influence on a character
like his of the man whom Talleyrand called the "weekly politician,"
because his range of vision never extended beyond that period, and
whom a distinguished Russian called "varnished dust," was no happy one.
Henceforward Gentz's letters are full of complaints of "such mental
lassitude, despondency, emptiness, and indifference" as he had hitherto
neither known nor imagined, and which he aptly describes as a "sort
of intellectual consumption." He calls himself "damnably blasé."
"Believe me," he writes to Rahel, "I am damnably blasé. I have seen
and enjoyed so much of the world that I am no longer influenced by its
illusive grandeur and rewards." "Nothing delights me; I am cold, blasé,
contemptuous, thoroughly persuaded of the folly of almost every one
else, unduly certain of my own--not wisdom--but clear-sightedness, and
inwardly devilish glad that the so-called great doings are coming to
such a laughable end." So indifferent has he become, that Napoleon's
downfall, which he had formerly so ardently desired, arouses no deeper
feeling in him than this. "I have become terribly old and bad," he
himself confesses with an amiable effrontery which reminds us of
Friedrich Schlegel, and which never deserted him.
It is about this time that he begins to be persistently haunted by the
fear of death; he now regularly notes in his diary the exact degree
to which the feeling is weighing upon him. His letters betray all the
weaknesses of a nervous woman. The correspondence between him and
Adam Müller is particularly ludicrous. We are never allowed to forget
that they are both afraid of thunder. But even a letter is sometimes
more than Gentz can bear. He writes to Müller: "Your letters shatter
my tender nerves." His fear of death most frequently took the form of
fear of being murdered. After the assassination of Kotzebue by Sand,
his terror lest he also might fall a victim to the hatred of the
Liberal youth of Germany reached such a climax that the sight of a
sharp knife was sometimes enough, as he himself confesses, to bring on
a fainting-fit. In 1814 he writes to Rahel: "Now, God be praised, all
is at an end in Paris. I am, thank God, very well. I live sometimes
at Baden, sometimes in Vienna, have sometimes brioches with exquisite
butter for breakfast, sometimes other heavenly cakes. I have come into
possession of furniture that makes my heart leap for joy, and I am far
less afraid of death."
He now looks to Görres as the only person who can write, he himself
being incapable of any kind of production. Yet at this very time he
occupies such an exalted position in society that he can deny himself
to crowned heads. On the 31st of October, 1814, he writes in his diary:
"_Refusé le prince royal de Bavière, le roi de Danemark_," &c. He
meets Talleyrand, and admires him excessively. To give this admiration
a practical direction, the astute French diplomatist presents him
with 24,000 florins in the name of the King of France. At the close
of 1814 Gentz writes in his diary: "The aspect of public affairs is
melancholy.... But, since I have nothing to reproach myself with, my
accurate knowledge of the pitiful doings of all these petty beings
who rule the world, so far from distressing, only serves to amuse me;
I enjoy it all like a play given for my private delectation." Is not
this like a speech of Jean Paul's Roquairol? Tired of life, whatever
disturbs his peace is objectionable to him. It is now his object to
maintain the existing condition of things at any price. In 1815, in
argument with Görres, he actually defends the Peace of Paris. He was
too sagacious and cold, too great a hater of phrases, not to sneer
at the "Burschenschaften" (students' leagues), the agitation for a
national German dress, the Teutoburgerwald enthusiasm, and others of
the same description; nevertheless, the assassination of Kotzebue was
made a pretext for forbidding the formation of patriotic societies, as
further assassinations and crimes were feared. It was owing to Gentz's
exertions that the universities were placed under control and that the
press was gagged. Of the liberty of the press he now writes: "I hold
to my opinion, that, to prevent abuse of the press, nothing should be
printed for a certain number of years. This as the rule, with a very
few exceptions permitted by a thoroughly competent court, would in a
short time lead us back to God and the truth."
His utterances on the occasion of the Greek war of liberation prove
that, in spite of his reactionary ardour, he had too much sense to
believe, like Adam Müller and the rest, in the principle of legitimacy
and the divine right of kings as revealed truths. He had written to
Müller in 1818: "You are the only man in Germany of whom I say: He
writes divinely when he chooses; and nothing in our audacious days
astonishes and exasperates me more than the audacity of those who dare
to measure themselves with you.... Your system is a completed, rounded
whole. It would be vain to attack it from any side. One can only be
entirely in it or entirely outside of it. If you can prove to us, make
comprehensible to us, that all real knowledge, all true understanding
of nature, all good laws and social regulations, nay, even history
itself (as you somewhere assert), are, and can only be, communicated to
us by divine revelation, then (as far as I am concerned at least) you
have gained the day. As long as you do not succeed in doing this, we
stand afar off, admire you, love you, but are separated from you by an
impassable gulf." It must be remembered that Adam Müller had gone the
length of asserting that the existence of the Holy Trinity sufficiently
proves that any national economical system based upon one single
principle must be a wrong system. It even proves to him the necessity
of the "Dreifelderwirthschaft" (triennal rotation of crops). Now,
when Greece revolts, Gentz writes that the principle of legitimacy,
being the production of time, must be modified by time, and makes the
following noteworthy assertion: "I have always been aware that, in
spite of the majesty and power of my employers, and in spite of all the
single victories gained by us, the spirit of the times would in the
long-run prove stronger than we are; that the press, contemptible as it
is in its excesses, would prove its superiority to all our wisdom; and
that neither diplomatic art nor violence would be able to hold back the
wheel of the world."
In his sixty-fifth year, the worn-out, gouty, suffering old man was
taken possession of by two passions strangely out of keeping with his
age and the bent of his mind. It was a momentary return of youth. The
one was for the famous ballet-dancer, Fanny Elsler, at that time a girl
of nineteen. His infatuation for her knew no bounds. He writes: "I have
won her simply and solely by the magic power of my love. Until she
knew me she did not know that such love existed.... Think of the bliss
of daily undisturbed intercourse with a being whose every attribute
enraptures me ... in whose eyes, and hands, and every separate charm I
can absorb myself for hours, whose voice bewitches me, and with whom
I can carry on endless conversations; for I am educating her with
fatherly solicitude, and she is the aptest of pupils, a pupil who is at
once my beloved and my child."
The other surprising passion was for Heine's _Buch der Lieder_, then
just published. It was all very well for the old reactionary to call
the audacious poet a "crazy adventurer;" he could not resist his
sorcery. "I am still," he writes, "refreshing myself with the _Buch der
Lieder_. Like Prokesch, I bathe for hours in these melancholy waters.
Even the poems which verge upon actual blasphemy I cannot read without
the most profound emotion; I sometimes blame myself that I so often and
gladly return to them." His receptive nature could not withstand them.
He has rightly described himself as a woman. In a strain which reminds
us of the hermaphroditic traits in _Lucinde_, he writes to Rahel: "Do
you know the reason why the relation between us is such a perfect one?
I will tell you. It is because you are an infinitely productive and I
am an infinitely receptive being: you are a great man; I am the first
of all the women who have ever lived."
He was now so nervous that a vigorous handclasp would alarm him;
even the sight of a martial moustache was enough to disquiet him. In
well-intentioned travellers who came to make his acquaintance he saw
assassins in disguise. In the last year of his life his back was bent,
his gait timorous and unsteady. The clear, sagacious eyes, for which he
had been remarkable as a youth, were now, as it were, veiled by their
furtive expression. In company he fortified himself by wearing large
black spectacles.
One day at a fête, Fanny Elsler, presenting him with a foaming glass
of champagne which she had tasted, said teasingly: "Der Krug geht so
lange zu Wasser, his er bricht" (German proverb--The pitcher goes often
to the well, but comes home broken at last). Gentz replied: "It will
anyhow last out my time and Metternich's." His standpoint is indicated
and judged in these words.
In religious matters Gentz was extraordinarily vacillating. At one time
he would declare that religion was to him simply a matter of politics;
at another, though he never actually went over to Catholicism, he
would, in Romantic fashion, make great concessions to it. He prostrated
himself at the feet of the Catholic mystic, Adam Müller, who literally
took Napoleon to be the devil incarnate (writing, for instance, to
Gentz in July 1806, that "as Christians we must subdue the Bonaparte
within us"); and, when petitioning the Emperor for an appointment
in Austria, he gave as one of his reasons for leaving Prussia, "my
long-felt enmity to Protestantism, in the original character and
increasingly evil tendencies of which I believe I have discovered,
after much and careful proving of the matter, _the root of all the
corruption of our times, and one of the main causes of the decay of
Europe._"
In politics he is the representative of unequivocal, conscious
reaction, and he does not, like some other hypocritical reactionaries,
fight shy of the word. In a letter written at Verona in 1822, he
relates that at a dinner-party at Metternich's he has just met
Chateaubriand, who has been extremely amiable and complimentary to
him. "In the course of conversation he mentioned it as a remarkable
phenomenon, one which could not possibly escape the notice of the
historian, that four or five years ago, when the condition of Europe
seemed quite hopeless, a mere handful of men--not more than could be
counted on one's fingers--had determined to combat the Revolution, and
that these men had been so successful that to-day they were taking the
field, with Governments and armies supporting them, against the common
enemy. As marking the most important moments in this _bold reaction_,
he mentioned the founding of _Le Conservateur_, and the Congress
of Karlsbad. He looks forward to the future with sanguine courage,
regarding the victory of the good cause as certain. All true power
and real talent are upon our side, contained in some ten or twelve
heads. Nothing could be more dangerous for us than to attach too much
importance to the attacks of the Revolutionaries, or to be in any way
afraid of these said Revolutionaries, who, for all their uproar, are
mere babblers. I could scarcely conceive, he added, how such men as
Benjamin Constant, Guizot, and Royer-Collard had sunk in the public
estimation. This and more he said, not with any fire and eagerness, but
calmly and coldly."
Gentz was far from guessing, when he penned these words, how great a
surprise this same man held in store for him. Two years later the event
occurred which forms the turning-point, the watershed, as it were,
in the spiritual history of the first half of the century, namely,
Chateaubriand's dismissal from the Ministry and entrance into the ranks
of the Liberal opposition, whose leader he became. It was this event
in combination with Byron's death, which happened about the same time,
that called Liberalism throughout the whole world to arms.
Gentz could not control his wrath. After the appearance of
Chateaubriand's article in the _Journal des Débats_ on the abolition of
the censorship, he wrote to a friend: "I subscribe to every word you
say about Chateaubriand. It is long since anything has agitated and
incensed me in the manner this really villainous article has done. It
is the work of a man who, because he has not succeeded in disturbing
the peace of his enemies with drums and pipes, grasps a torch and
sets fire to the roof over their heads. Not that there is anything
incomprehensible in such a performance, for Frenchmen are now at
liberty to do whatever they please; and the man who, in his vindictive
antagonism, could immediately violate every sense of duty, honour, and
decorum, as this monster did on the third day after his dismissal, was
bound in the end, irritated by the feeling of his own impotence, to go
as far as he could without running the risk of imprisonment--a risk
practically non-existent in his country." But all Gentz's wrath could
not check the current of events, and before long the reaction which he
represents was struggling in its death throes.
In a letter to Pilat, written in 1820, he writes: "What is Duller, what
is La Mennais, what (with the exception of Bonald) are all the writers
of our day in comparison with Maistre? His book _On the Pope_ is, to
my mind, the greatest and most important of the last half century. You
have not read it, or you could not have failed to mention it. Take
my advice--do not read it _à batons rompus_, amidst the noise and
distractions with which you are constantly surrounded, but keep it for
a time when you have unbroken quiet and can concentrate your thoughts.
Your so-called friends must know the book, but not a word do they say
of it. Such meat is too strong for these lukewarm, critical souls. It
has cost me some sleepless nights, but what enjoyment have they not
purchased me! Profundity of thought in combination with astonishing
erudition and with political insight superior to Montesquieu's, the
eloquence of a Burke, and an enthusiasm which at times rises to the
height of genuine poetry--to this add the characteristics of the man of
the world, adroitness, refinement, the knack of sparing the feelings
of the individual whilst treading his doctrines and opinions under
foot, a prodigious knowledge of men and things--and think of it all
employed in such a cause, to produce such results! Yes; now I fully and
firmly believe that the Church will never fall. If such a star made its
appearance in her sky but once in a century, she would not only stand,
but prevail. The book has _some_ weak points! I say this in order that
my admiration may not seem blind--but they are lost like spots in the
sun. Others before Maistre may have felt what the Pope is, but no other
writer has expressed it as he has done. This extraordinary book, which
the contemptible generation of to-day barely condescends to notice,
represents the labour of half a lifetime. The author, now a man of more
than seventy, has evidently been engaged upon it for twenty years. A
monument should be erected to him in one of the great churches of
Rome. Kings should take counsel with him. As a matter of fact, after
he has exhausted his private means, all that he has obtained from his
Government, and that not without difficulty, is the title of Minister,
and an income sufficient to live upon in Turin with the greatest
economy. Never has a human being had a better right to say to his
children:--
'Disce puer virtutem ex me, verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis!'