The power which an individual obeys as an artist, necessarily becomes
the power which in his works is exalted to the place of honor. That is
the reason why Heyse as an author glorifies nature. Not what a human
being thinks or desires, but what he is by nature interests Heyse in
him. The highest duty in his eyes is to honor nature and heed her
voice. Sin against nature is the true sin. Give her free scope, and let
her act her own pleasure.
There are, therefore, not many authors who are such marked fatalists as
Heyse. In free will, according to the traditional sense of the word,
he does not believe, and is evidently quite as sceptically opposed to
Kant's categorical imperative as his Edwin or his Felix.[2] But if he
does not believe in innate ideas, he does believe in innate instinct,
and this instinct is sacred to him. In his "novellen" he has described
how unhappy the soul feels when this instinct is either disturbed or
rendered uncertain. In his "Kenne Dich Selbst" (Know Thyself) it is
intelligence, in his "Reise nach dem Glück" (Journey after Happiness)
it is morality that is the disturber of the peace.
In the first of these "novellen" Heyse has represented the anguish
which proceeds from a too early or a premeditated invasion on the
instinctive life of the soul. "That beautiful stupor of youth, that
dreamy, unconscious plenitude of the powers, the pure faculty of
enjoyment of the yet unexhausted senses, was lost to young Franz
through his premature struggle for self-consciousness."[2] He here
portrays the sleeplessness of the mind, which is as dangerous for the
health of the soul as actual sleeplessness is for the welfare of the
body, and shows how one in whom the reflex faculty is maimed "loses
that mysterious, obscure substance which is the very pith and marrow of
our personality."
In "Die Reise nach dem Glück" it is conventional morality, which by
supplanting instinct has shattered the soul. A young girl, having
conquered her own natural impulses from motives of inculcated morality,
has banished her lover from her presence late at night, and thereby
become the innocent cause of his death. The remembrance of this
misfortune haunts her constantly. "If one's own heart does not point
out the way, one is sure to go astray. Once before in my life I was
made wretched because I refused to hearken to my heart, let it cry as
loudly as it would. Now I will pay heed if it but whispers to me, and I
will have ear for nothing else."[3]
In instinct the entire nature is present. Now if the inner devastation
which results where instinct has lost its guiding power, be in Heyse's
eyes the most profound of all misfortunes, to the characters he
delights most in delineating, the consciousness of life presents the
exact opposite; that is, the most profound sense of happiness in the
enjoyment of the totality and harmony of their natures. Heyse, as a
matter of course, is far removed from considering self-introspection
as a principle inimical to the healthy sense of life. His own views
appear to be about the same as those expressed by the invalid in
"Kenne Dich Selbst" in the words: just as agreeable as it may be for
him to awaken in the night, to consider and to know that he is able to
sleep still longer, just so glorious it appears to him to arouse from
his dreamy state of happiness, to collect his thoughts, to reflect,
and then, as it were, to turn over on the other side and indulge in
further enjoyment. At all events, in his romance "Kinder der Welt"
(Children of the World), he has permitted Balder, the most ideally
fashioned character in the book, to carry out this last thought in a
still more significant way. Melancholy views have just been expressed,
speculations regarding the sun which shines indifferently on the
just and on the unjust, and looks down upon more wretchedness than
happiness, and about the infinite, ever-recurring miseries of life, and
more to like effect. Franzel, the young socialist printer, has been
expatiating upon the opinion that one who had truly considered the
lot of humanity, could never find rest or peace, and in his distress
has called life a lie when Balder attempts to show him that a life
in which repose was possible, would no longer deserve the name. And
then Balder explains to Franzel in what the enjoyment of life for him
consists; namely, in "experiencing past and future in one." With the
utmost originality he declares that he could have no enjoyment if
his experiences were incomplete, and that in his silent moments of
contemplation all the scattered elements of his being were united in
one harmonious whole. "Whenever I have wished to do so, that is to
say, as often as I have desired to make for myself a genuine holiday
of life and to enjoy to the utmost my little existence, I have, as it
were, conjured up all the periods of my life at once: my laughing,
sportive childhood, when I was yet strong and well, then the first
glow of thought and feeling, the first pangs of youth, the foreboding
of what a full, healthy, mature life must be, and at the same time the
renunciation which usually becomes a habit only to very old people."
To such a conception of life, human existence is not divided into
moments, which vanish, leaving us to bemoan their disappearance, nor
is it broken into fragments in the service of reciprocally contending
impulses and thoughts; to one who possesses the faculty of casting out
an anchor at any moment, of realizing the totality and reality of one's
own being, life cannot lacerate like a bad dream. "Do you not think,"
says Balder, "that he who can generate within himself at any moment,
if he but choose, such a fulness of the sense of existence, must
consider it empty talk when people say, it were better never to have
been born?"[4] It must be remembered that it is a cripple whose days
are numbered, who utters these words; and a cripple, moreover, whom
the poet has evidently modelled after the image of the so differently
thinking Leopardi. The peculiar kind of epicurean philosophy expressed
by them, and which, through a synthetic reflection, gathers together
all time in the eternal present, is in reality the poet's conclusive
conception of life. It is the hearkening of harmoniously planned
nature to her own harmonies. The infinite gods make all their gifts to
their favorites complete, all the infinite joys and all the infinite
sorrows. This life-philosophy admits into its inner harmony even the
discord of infinite pain, and succeeds in finding for it a satisfactory
solution. Here is the point wherein Heyse most sharply differs from
Turgenief and the other great modern pessimists of poetry. He makes
bold to impute to his favorite characters even the most unlovely and
shocking errors, in order that he may restore to them, after divers
trials and afflictions, their inner peace. The young baron in the
romance, "Im Paradiese" (In Paradise), is an instance of this. A sin
against his better self weighs upon his conscience. He has lost that
inner harmony with his own emotional nature, "on which everything
depends." It becomes manifest in the course of the book that through
this failing, he has, besides, transgressed against his best friend.
Nevertheless, through all the mistakes and misfortunes, which are the
inevitable result, he finds himself again. The harmony of nature was
but temporarily set aside; not, as he had feared, hopelessly destroyed.
Instinct is directly the voice of the blood. Hence it comes that
Heyse's characters are deeply rooted in family and race. Like the
law of Moses, they seem to teach that the soul is in the blood. They
follow the voice of the blood, and to it they appeal. The undeveloped
ones among them are the vigorous expression of the type of a race;
the developed ones know their own nature and respect it; they accept
it as it is with the feeling that it cannot be altered; they are
as thoroughly guided by the instinct of their natures as are the
characters of Balzac by selfishness. In order to render clear my
meaning, let me quote a few passages from the "Kinder der Welt."
When Edwin falls passionately in love with Toinette, his brother
Balder, unknown to him, goes to her to implore her not to reject his
brother, through caprice or frivolity, and throw herself away on a
stranger. Her answer to his appeal is that she has but just learned
and comprehended wherefore it is that in her whole life she has never
been able to gain happiness. She has been informed of the secret of
her origin, namely, that her unhappy mother had been betrayed into
her father's power through force, and from this fact she draws the
certainty that it is impossible for her to love. "My friend," says
she, "I feel sure you mean well by me, you and your brother, but it
would be criminal in me to persuade myself that you could help me now
that everything is so clear to me, and that I am convinced that my
destiny irrevocably _lies in the blood_." (The words are emphasized in
the text.) This is in her eyes the last irrefutable argument. In all
the characters of the book this respect for nature, almost bordering
on superstition, is prominent. As it is with Toinette, so it is in
the case of her opposite pole Lea. They are contrasts in every point;
in this one particular alone they accord. After Lea, who has become
the wife of Edwin, has learned how much power the memory of Toinette
still exercises over his heart, and is overpowered with grief at the
discovery, she is one day reading a book by Edwin, and for a time
consoling herself by considering how much she understands of his
writings that would be above the comprehension of another woman, when
suddenly she flings away the book, for the thought rushes through her
brain "how powerless is all comprehension of _minds_ in comparison with
the blind, irrational elemental attraction of _natures_ which enslaves
all freedom and infatuates the wisest." She is a woman apparently of
a purely intellectual mould. A lively, ardent desire for knowledge
and for clearness of mental vision has led her to Edwin; he gave her
instructions in--philosophy. One would therefore suppose that she,
on her part, would at this crisis have attempted to combat the magic
power of the blood by an appeal to the intellectual forces which have
for so long united her with Edwin. On the contrary. Far from being
characterized as all mind and soul, she is beyond all else a _nature_.
She has always loved Edwin passionately, but she has feared that his
love, less ardent than her own, would be made to recoil by outbursts
of her passion, and yet she--the philosopher--has said to herself, in
her loneliness: "Love is folly--blissful madness--laughter and weeping
without sense or meaning. Thus I have always loved him until reason was
lost and forgotten." Now that the happiness of her wedded life is at
stake, she breaks out into the words: "If he perceives that the blood
of my mother flows in my veins,--hot Old Testament blood,--perhaps he
will discover that he made a grievous mistake when he thought that
he could form with such a being 'a marriage of reason.' Perhaps the
day may come when I dare tell him everything, because he himself is
no longer satisfied with a modest life-happiness, because he has come
to demand something prouder, more unrestrained, more overwhelmingly
profuse--and then I can say to him, 'You need not seek far; still
waters are deep.'"[5] Everything is here characteristic, the tracing
back to origin and race, as well as the protest of this ardent,
passionate nature against the disguise of spontaneous passion as a
reasonable sacrifice. Only those who are familiar with this fundamental
trait of Heyse will have true comprehension of and interest in one of
his dramas which might otherwise be considered his weakest, and which
in many respects appears to me not wholly worthy of him; I mean "Die
Göttin der Vernunft" (The Goddess of Reason). Is it not extremely
singular that Heyse, with the whole gigantic French Revolution to
choose from, should single out this theme of all others and treat it in
precisely the way he has done? Many a poet in the selection of such a
subject would have in view an organ for the pathos of the revolution,
or would allow the purely ideal inspiration of the goddess of reason
in the historic crisis to ennoble a past which, though frivolous and
undignified, has nevertheless tragically avenged itself. Such a poet
as Hamerling could no doubt make something appropriate out of the
theme. Heyse, true to his temperament, paused awestruck before this
apparition: a woman, a bit of nature, with feminine instincts and
feminine passion, is proclaimed to be reason, the goddess of reason,
that is to say, the dry, rigid, dead, rationalistic reason of the
eighteenth century! Thereupon Heyse creates a fictitious woman who
by virtue of the depth of her nature (upon the whole, far in advance
of her time) is overpowered by the feeling that vast, all-embracing
life does not admit of being traced back to any scholastic formula,
a woman who loves and fears, suffers and hopes, who trembles for the
life of her father and that of her lover, who in her anguish lest her
lover should misunderstand her, falls into a state of despondency,
who as a genuine child of her author has said: "To me the highest aim
is to do nothing which causes me to be at variance with myself," and
then permits this woman--her every fibre quivering with passion, in
a frenzy of personal despair, without a thought of the universal and
the abstract, of the Republic or of intellectual freedom, and while
her father is being murdered before the church door--to be driven to
proclaim from the altar the new gospel of reason, which she herself has
once mockingly designated the world's law that two times two make four.
This drama appears to me of far greater value as a contribution to the
psychology of its author than from a poetic point of view.
Nevertheless, it would be an injustice to Heyse to infer from what
has hitherto been made prominent, that he recognizes nothing higher
than elemental nature and its impulses. By the word instinct is meant
something wholly different from _isolated_ impulses. Instinct is the
inner need of being true to one's self. Therefore, it is that Heyse
can consistently permit an independent sympathy to triumph over the
ties of blood, and even over the closest bonds of relationship. In
the novel "Der verlorene Sohn" (The Lost Son), a mother conceals, and
tends unawares the innocent murderer of her son, and after he, through
his amiability, has won the heart of the mother as well as that of the
daughter, the poet makes him lead home the daughter as his bride. "The
lost son" had been killed in honorable self-defence in the midst of
great peril, and his opponent did not even know his name. Even when
the mother learns the particulars concerning the death of her son, she
places no hindrances on account of them in the way of the marriage, but
bears alone, and without confiding her secret to a living mortal, the
misfortune that has befallen her. Here, then, with the full accord of
her character, a purely spiritual tie enters into the place of the ties
of blood; the mother adopts as a son him through whose hand her own
son has fallen; but in so doing she acts in harmony with the depths of
her nature, and preserves her soul intact. It is the same in all cases
where Heyse allows the personality, through considerations of duty, to
repress a genuine passion, a deep love. Wherever this takes place (as
in the drama "Marie Moroni," in the novelette "Die Pfadfinderin"--The
Path-finder--or in the romance "Die Kinder der Welt") it is in order
to maintain loyalty to self, in order not to forfeit the unity and
healthfulness of the individual being, and duty may be seen to flow
freely forth from the well-springs of one's own nature, inasmuch as the
command not to be at variance with self is esteemed the highest law of
duty. So far is Heyse removed from conceiving nature to be inimical to
spirituality and duty.
In his eyes nature is all-embracing; everything that lies within the
range of our possibilities, all that we perform or achieve, so far as
it be of any value, bears infallibly her stamp, and over all which
is not within our power, over our entire hereditary destiny, she
rules directly, immediately, all-powerfully, and absolutely. Even the
most unfortunate character which Heyse has portrayed, however badly
fate may have dealt with him, finds consolation in the fact that he
is a child of nature; that is to say, that he has not been shorn of
his birthright. "If the elements of my being, which exclude me from
happiness, have met and become intermingled through a great blind
dispensation of the universe, and if I be doomed to ruin because of
this combination, it is an unpleasant, but by no means an unendurable
thought. On the other hand, a Heavenly Father, who _de cœur léger_, or
perchance through pedagogic wisdom, would permit me, poor creature, to
drift about so sorrowfully between heaven and earth, in order to accord
me later a recompense throughout eternity, for my wasted time--no, dear
friend, all the royal or unroyal theology in the world cannot make that
seem plausible to me."[6]
Thus with Heyse, even he whose life has been the most aggravating
failure, takes his refuge in the conception of nature as the last
consoling thought; and thus he himself, in the most painful moments
of his life, takes refuge therein, and to this the marvellous poems
"Marianne" and "Ernst," the most profound and most touching of all his
writings, have remained as witnesses. Nature is his starting-point and
his final goal, the source of his poetry and its last word, his one and
all, his consolation, his creed.