"On the contrary," says another, "Paul Heyse is very masculine. He is
pronounced weak by some because he is pleasing, because a finished
grace has lent its impress to his creations. People do not realize how
much strength is requisite in order to have this exquisite charm!"
"What is Heyse?" says a third. "The denizen of a small town, who has
so long played hide and seek with Berlin, with the social life of the
world, with politics, that he has estranged himself from our present,
and only feels at home among the troubadours in Provence. I always
scent out something of the Provençale and of the provincialist in his
writings."
"This Heyse," remarks a fourth, "in spite of his fifty years and the
maturity of his authorship, has the weakness to wish to persuade us
throughout that he is an immoral, lascivious poet. But no man believes
him. That is his punishment."
"I have never in my life been so greatly envied," once said a lady, an
old friend of Heyse's youth, in my presence, "as I was to-day, in one
of our higher schools for young ladies, which I was visiting, when the
rumor was circulated that I was about to pass the evening in a circle
where I would meet him. The little damsels (Backfische) unanimously
commissioned me to carry to him their enthusiastic greetings. How
gladly would they one and all have thrown themselves into his arms! He
is and always will be the idolized author of young maidens."
"One can define Paul Heyse," said a critic, "as the
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy of German poetry. He appears like Mendelssohn
when compared to the great masters. His nature, like that of
Mendelssohn, is a German lyric, sensitive temperament, permeated with
the most refined Southern culture. Both men lack the grand pathos,
the energetic power, the storm of the dramatic element; but both have
natural dignity in earnestness, charming amiability and pleasing grace
in jest, they are thoroughly cultured in regard to form, they are
virtuosos in execution."
[1]
One's movements, step by step to measure,
Mars all one's chances.
Who dares not follow one's own pleasure (sich gehen zu lassen)
Not far advances.--_P. H._
[2] Gesammelte Werke, iv. 135.
[3] Ibid., v. 199.
[4] Kinder der Welt, ii. 162.
[5] Kinder der Welt, iii. 210, 242, 256.
[6] Kinder der Welt, iii. 109.
[7] Kinder der Welt, i. III; Gesammelte Werke, vi. 206.
[8] Gesammelte Werke, iii. 300.
[9] Kinder der Welt, ii. 47.
[10] Gesammelte Werke, v. 201. On page 175 the word "vornehm" is used
by her.
[11] Gesammelte Werke, viii. 44, 246, 321.
[12] Kinder der Welt, ii. 355. "That you are the best, deepest, purest,
noblest of women"--"Poor, brave, free-born breast--bow well it has
preserved its patent of nobility." Kinder der Welt, iii. 309.
[13] Im Paradiese, iii. 6.
[14] Gesammelte Werke, v. 197.
[15] Gesammelte Werke, ix. 73.
[16] Gesammelte Werke, viii. 168.
[17] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 71: "I have been sold once in my life. How
mankind will now blame me if I give myself as a free-will offering in
order to suppress the anguish of that disgrace!"
[18] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 40.
[19] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 5.
[20] Heyse und Kurz, Novellenschatz des Auslandes, Bd. VIII.
[21] Heyse und Kurz, Deutscher Novellenschatz, Bd. I. s. xix.
[22] Kinder der Welt, ii. 265.
[23] Did not a critic of this sort take it upon himself to get up a
"warning" in the same style, against Goethe's "Faust"? "The purport
of this immoral work," he wrote, "is the following: A physician (Dr.
Med.), already pretty well advanced in years, is weary of study, and
hankers after carnal pleasures. Finally he signs a bond with the
devil. The latter leads him through divers low diversions (which, for
instance, consist in making half-drunk students still more drunk) to
a burgher's daughter, a young maiden, whom Faust (the doctor) at once
attempts to seduce. A couple of rendez-vous at the house of an old
procuress prepare the way for this. As the seduction, however, cannot
be brought about speedily enough, the devil gives Faust a jewel-case
to present to the young maiden. Wholly powerless to resist this gift,
that is to say, not even seduced, simply purchased, Gretchen yields
to Faust; and in order to be all the more undisturbed with her lover
she doses her old mother with a narcotic, which kills the old woman.
Then after being the cause of her brother's death, she destroys her
child, the fruit of her shame. In prison she employs herself in
singing obscene songs. That her lover left her in the lurch we cannot
wonder when we consider his religious principles. He is, as the scene
in which his donna questions him about his faith clearly proves, no
Christian; indeed, he does not even seem to believe in a God, although
he endeavors to grasp at all sorts of empty subterfuges to conceal his
absolute unbelief.
"As this wicked book, notwithstanding all this, finds, as we hear to
our astonishment, many readers, indeed, even lady readers, and is in
constant demand at the circulating libraries in our city, we beg of
all fathers of families to watch over the spiritual welfare of those
belonging to them, to whom such profligate reading is all the more
dangerous because its immoral teachings are veiled in a polished,
insinuating form."
[Illustration: HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN.]