the young men now come up to college as very good performers on the
pianoforte and other instruments. I never know how they learn it,
considering the superior claims which cricket, football, the river, nay,
the classics and mathematics also have on their time at school. There
are musical clubs now at Oxford where the very best classical music may
be heard performed by undergraduates with the assistance of some
professional players from London. All this is due to the influence of
Sir F. Ouseley, and still more of Sir John Stainer, both professors of
Music at Oxford. They have made music not only respectable, but really
admired and loved among the undergraduates. Sir John Stainer has been
indefatigable, and the lectures which he gives both on the science and
history of music are crowded by young and old. They are real concerts,
in which he is able to illustrate all he has to say with the help of a
well-trained choir of Oxford amateurs. As to myself, I have long become
a mere listener. One learns the lesson, whether one likes it or not,
that there is a time for everything. Old fingers grow stiff and will no
longer obey, and if one knows how a sonata of Beethoven ought to be
played, it is most painful to play it badly. So at last I said:
“Farewell!” The sun has set, though the clouds are roseate still with
reflected rays. It may be that I have given too much time to music, but
what would life have been without it? I do not like to exaggerate, or
say anything that is not quite true. Musical ears grow sensitive to
anything false, whether sharp or flat. But let us be quite honest, quite
plain. Is there not in music, and in music alone of all the arts,
something that is not entirely of this earth? Harmony and rhythm may be
under settled laws; and in that sense mathematicians may be right when
they call mathematics silent music. But whence comes melody? Surely not
from what we hear in the street, or in the woods, or on the sea-shore,
not from anything that we hear with our outward ears, and are able to
imitate, to improve, or to sublimise. Neither history nor evolution will
help us to account for Schubert’s “Trockne Blumen.” Here, if anywhere,
we see the golden stairs on which angels descend from heaven to earth,
and whisper sweet sounds into the ears of those who have ears to hear.
Words cannot be so inspired, for words, we know, are of the earth
earthy. Melodies, however, are not of this earth, and the greatest of
musical poets has truly said:—
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS
I
I am the son of a poet, and I have tried very hard all my life not to be
a poet myself, if poet means a man who tries to make his thoughts dance
gracefully in the chains of metre and rhyme. In my own very prosaic work
I have had to suffer all my life from suppressed poetry, as one suffers
from suppressed gout. Poets will, no doubt, protest most emphatically
against so low a view of their art. They assure us that they never feel
their chains, and that they are perfectly free in giving expression to
their thoughts in rhyme and metre. Some of the more honest among them
have even gone so far as to confess that their best thoughts had often
been suggested to them by the rhyme. Platen may be quite right when he
says:
Was stets und aller Orten sich ewig jung erweist
Ist in gebundenen Worten ein ungebundener Geist.
(What proves itself eternal in every place and time
Is an unfettered spirit, free in the chains of rhyme.)
True, very true. You may get that now and then, but in our modern
languages it is but seldom that thought soars up quite free on the wings
of rhyme. Many and many a thought sinks down because of the weight of
the rhyme, many and many a thought remains altogether unspoken because
it will not submit to the strait jacket of the rhyme; many and many a
poor thought is due entirely to an irrepressible rhyme; and if some
brilliant thoughts have really been suggested by the rhyme, would it not
be better if they had been suggested by something else, whether you call
it mind or soul? The greatest masters of rhyme, such as Browning in
English or Rückert in German, and even H. Heine, often fall victims to
their own mastery. They spoil their poems in order to show that they can
find a rhyme for anything and everything, however grotesque the rhyme
may be. I remember once being bold enough to ask Tennyson what was the
use or excuse of rhyme. He was not offended, but was quite ready with
his answer: “Rhyme helps the memory,” he said—and that answer was as
honest as it was true. But what is useful for one purpose, for the
purpose of recollecting, may be anything but useful for other purposes,
it may be even hurtful, and in our case it has certainly proved hurtful
again and again to the natural flow and expression of thought and
feeling.
Nor should I venture to say a word against Platen’s _gebundene Worte_.
It was only the very necessity of finding a word to answer to _time_
which led me to speak of chains of _rhyme_. _Gebundene Worte_ are not
necessarily rhymed words, they are measured words, and these are no
doubt quite natural and quite right for poetry. Metre is measure, and
metrical utterance, in that sense, was not only more natural for the
expression of the highest thoughts, but was probably everywhere more
ancient also than prose. In every literature, as far as we know, poetry
came first, prose second. Inspired utterance requires, nay produces,
rhythmic movements not only of the voice (song and prosodia), but of the
body also (dance). In Greek, _chorus_ means dance, measured movement,
and the Greek choruses were originally dances; nay, it can be proved
that these dancing movements formed really the first metres of true
poetry. Hence, it was quite natural that David should have danced before
the Lord with all his might. Language itself bears witness to the fact
that the oldest metres were the steps and movements of dancers. As the
old dances consisted of steps, the ancient metres consisted of feet.
Even we ourselves still speak of feet, not because we understand what it
means, but simply because the Greeks and Romans spoke of feet, and they
said so because originally the feet really marked the metre.
The ancient poets of the Veda also speak of feet, and they seem to have
been quite aware why they spoke of metrical feet, for in the names of
some of their metres we still find clear traces of the steps of the
dances which accompanied their poems. _Trishtubh_, one of their ancient
metres, meant three-step; _Anushtubh_, the later Sloka, meant by-step[1]
or Reigen. The last syllables or steps of each line were called the
_Vritta_, or the turn, originally the turn of the dancers, who seem to
have been allowed to move more freely till they came to the end of one
movement. Then, before they turned, or while they turned, they marked
the steps more sharply and audibly, either as iambic or as trochaic, and
afterwards marched back again with greater freedom. Hence in ancient
Sanskrit the end or turn of each line was under stricter rules as to
long and short steps, or long and short syllables, whereas greater
freedom was allowed for the rest of a line. Thus Sanskrit _Vritta_, the
_turn_, came to mean the metre of the whole line, just as in Latin we
have the same word _versus_, literally the turn, then verse, and this
turn became the name for verse, and remained so to the present day.
There is no break in our history, and language is the chain that holds
it together. A strophe also was originally a turning, to be followed by
the antistrophe or the return, all ideas derived from dancing. The
ancient Sanskrit name for metre and metrical or measured speed was
_Kh_andas. The verb _Kh_and would correspond phonetically to Latin
_scandere_, in the sense of marching, as in _a-scendere_, to march
upward, to mount, and _de-scendere_, to march downward, all expressing
the same idea of measured movement, but not of rhyme or jingle. These
movements were free and natural in the beginning; they became artificial
when they became traditional, and we find in such works as the Sanskrit
V_ri_tta-ratnâkara, “the treasury of verse,” every kind of monstrosity
which was perpetrated by Hindu poets of the Renaissance period, and
perpetrated, it must be confessed, with wonderful adroitness.
But I must not tire my friends with these metrical mysteries. What I
want them to know is that in the most ancient Aryan poetry which we
possess there is no trace of rhyme, except here and there by accident,
and that everywhere in the history of the poetry of the Âryas, rhyme, as
essential to poetry, is a very late invention. It is the same in Semitic
languages, though in Semitic as well as in Aryan speech, in fact,
wherever grammatical forms are expressed chiefly by means of
terminations, rhyme even in prose is almost inevitable. And this was no
doubt the origin of rhyme. In languages where terminations of declension
and conjugation and most derivative suffixes have retained a full-bodied
and sonorous form, it was difficult to avoid the jingle of rhyme. In
Latin, which abounds in such constantly recurring endings as _orum_,
_arum_, _ibus_, _amus_, _atis_, _amini_, _tatem_, _tatibus_, _inibus_,
etc., good prose writers had actually to be warned against allowing
their sentences to rhyme, while poets found it very easy to add these
ornamental tails to their measured lines.
There can be little doubt that it was the rhymed Latin poetry, as used
in the services of the Roman Catholic Church, which suggested to the
German converts the idea of rhymed verses. The pagan poetry of the
Teutonic races had no rhymes. It was what is called alliterative. In the
German dialects the accent remained mostly on the radical syllable of
words, and thus served to shorten the terminations. Hence we find fewer
full-bodied terminations in Gothic than in Latin, while in later
Teutonic dialects, in English as well as in German, these terminations
dwindled away more and more. Thus, we say _Di’ chter_ when the Romans
would have _Dicta’ tor_, _Pre’ diger_ for _prœdica’ tor_, _cha’ ncel_
for _cance’ lla_. In order to bind their poetical lines together the
German poets had recourse to initial letters, which had to be the same
in certain places of each verse, and which, if pronounced with strong
stress or strain, left the impression of the words being knitted
together and belonging together. Here is a specimen which will show that
the rules of alliteration were very strictly observed by the old German
poets, far more strictly than by their modern imitators. The old rule
was that in a line of eight arses there should be two words in the first
and one in the second half beginning with the same letter, consonant or
vowel, and always in syllables that had the accent. Here is a line from
the old “Song of Hildebrand,” dating from the eighth century:—
=H=iltibraht joh =H=adhubrant =H=iltibraht and =H=adhubrant
Untar =h=arjum tuâm, etc. Between =h=osts twain, etc.
Rückert has imitated this alliterating poetry in his poem of “Roland”:—
=R=oland der =R=ies
=I=m =R=athhaus zu Bremen
=S=teht er im =S=tandbild
=S=tandhaft und wacht.
Kingsley has attempted something like it in his “Longbeard’s Saga,” but
with much greater freedom, not to say licence:—
=S=caring the wolf cub,
=S=caring the horn-owl,
=S=haking the snow-wreaths
Down from the pine boughs.
But to return to our modern poetry and to the poets whom I have known,
and of whom I have something to tell, does it not show the power of
tradition if we see them everywhere forcing their feet into the same
small slippers of rhyme? And who would deny that they have achieved, and
still are achieving, wonderful feats?—_tours de force_, it is true, but
so cleverly performed that one hardly sees a trace of the force
employed. No doubt much is lost in this process of beating, and
hammering, and welding words together (a poet is called a
_Reimeschmied_, a smith of rhymes, in German); much has to be thrown
away because it will not rhyme at all (_silver_ has been very badly
treated in English poetry, because it rhymes with nothing, at present
not even with gold), but what remains is often very beautiful, and, as
Tennyson said, it sticks to the memory. One wishes one could add that
the difficulty of rhyme serves to reduce the number of unnecessary poets
that spring up every year. But rhyme does not strangle these numerous
children of the Muses, and it is left to our ill-paid critics to perform
every day, or every week, this murder of the innocents.
It may not seem very filial for the son of a poet thus to blaspheme
against poetry, or rather, against rhyme. Well, I can admire rhymed
poetry, just as I can admire champagne, though if the wine is really
good I think it is a pity to make it mousseux.
H. Heine, who certainly was never at a loss for a rhyme, writes, at the
end of one of his maddest poems, “Die Liebe”: “O Phœbus Apollo, if these
verses are bad, I know thou wilt forgive me, for thou art an all-knowing
god, and knowest quite well why for years I could not trouble myself any
longer with measuring and rhyming words!” And he adds: “I might, of
course, have said all this very well in good prose.” He ought to know,
but there will not be many of his admirers to agree with him.[2]
I hardly remember having ever seen my father, and I came to know him
chiefly through his poetry. He belonged to the post-Goethe period,
though Goethe (died 1832) survived him. He was born in 1794, and died in
1827, and yet in that short time he established a lasting reputation not
only as a scholar, but as a most popular poet. His best known poems are
the “Griechenlieder,” the Greek songs which he wrote during the Greek
war of independence. Alas! in those days battles were won by bravery and
the sword, now by discipline and repeating guns. These Greek songs, in
which his love of the ancient Greeks is mingled with his admiration for
heroes such as Kanaris, Mark Bozzaris, and others who helped to shake
off the Turkish yoke, produced a deep impression all over Germany,
perhaps because they breathed the spirit of freedom and patriotism,
which was then systematically repressed in Germany itself. The Greeks
never forgot the services rendered by him in Germany, as by Lord Byron
in England, in rousing a feeling of indignation against the Turk, and as
the marble for Lord Byron’s monument in London was sent by some Greek
admirers of the great poet, the Greek Parliament voted a shipload of
Pentelican marble for the national monument erected to my father in
Dessau.
My father’s lyrical poems also are well known all over Germany,
particularly the cycles of the “Schöne Müllerin” and the “Winterreise,”
both so marvellously set to music by Schubert and others. He certainly
had caught the true tone of the poetry of the German people, and many of
his poems have become national property, being sung by thousands who do
not even know whose poems they are singing. As a specimen showing the
highest point reached by his poetry, I like to quote his poem on
_Vineta_, the old town overwhelmed by the sea on the Baltic coast. The
English translation was made for me by my old, now departed, friend, J.
A. Froude:—
VINETA.
I. I.
Aus des Meeres tiefem, tiefem From the sea’s deep hollow faintly
Grunde pealing,
Klingen Abendglocken dumpf und Far-off evening bells come sad and
matt, slow;
Uns zu geben wunderbare Kunde Faintly rise, the wondrous tale
revealing
Von der schönen alten Wunderstadt. Of the old enchanted town below.
II. II.
In der Fluthen Schoss hinabgesunken On the bosom of the flood reclining
Bleiben unten ihre Trümmer stehn, Ruined arch and broken spire,
Ihre Zinnen lassen goldne Funken Down beneath the watery mirror
shining
Wiederscheinend auf dem Spiegel Gleam and flash in flakes of golden
sehn. fire.
III. III.
Und der Schiffer, der den And the boatman who at twilight
Zauberschimmer hour
Einmal sah im hellen Abendroth, Once that magic vision shall have
seen,
Nach derselben Stelle schifft er Heedless how the crags may round
immer, him lour,
Ob auch rings umher die Klippe Evermore will haunt the charmèd
droht. scene.
IV. IV.
Aus des Herzens tiefem, tiefem From the heart’s deep hollow
Grunde faintly pealing,
Klingt es mir, wie Glocken, dumpf Far I hear them, bell-notes sad and
und matt: slow,
Ach! sie geben wunderbare Kunde Ah! a wild and wondrous tale
revealing
Von der Liebe, die geliebt es hat. Of the drownèd wreck of love below.
V. V.
Eine schöne Welt is da versunken. There a world in loveliness
decaying,
Ihre Trümmer bleiben unten stehn, Lingers yet in beauty ere it die;
Lassen sich als goldne Phantom forms across my senses
Himmelsfunken playing,
Oft im Spiegel meiner Träume sehn. Flash like golden fire-flakes from
the sky.
VI. VI.
Und dann möcht’ ich tauchen in die Lights are gleaming, fairy bells
Tiefen, are ringing,
Mich versenken in den Wiederschein, And I long to plunge and wander
free
Und mir ist als ob mich Engel Where I hear those angel-voices
riefen singing
In die alte Wunderstadt herein. In those ancient towers below the
sea.
That the poet did not consider rhyme an essential element of poetry, he
has shown in some of his assonantic poems, such as:
Alle Winde schlafen
Auf dem Spiegel der Flut;
Kühle Schatten des Abends
Decken die Müden zu.
Luna hängt sich Schleier
Ueber ihr Gesicht,
Schwebt in dämmernden Träumen
Ueber die Wasser hin.
Alles, alles stille
Auf dem weiten Meer,—
Nur mein Herz will nimmer
Mit zur Ruhe gehn.
In der Liebe Fluten
Treibt es her und hin,
Wo die Stürme nicht ruhen,
Bis der Nachen sinkt.
Though my father was a great admirer of Goethe, he seems to have
incurred his displeasure and to have been brought into personal
collision with the grand old poet. Goethe had translated some modern
Greek songs; it may be, as my father thought, without having fully
mastered the difficulties of the spoken Greek language. My father
published a complete translation of Fauriel’s collection of Greek
popular poetry,[3] and Goethe did not like comparisons between his work
and that of anybody else, least of all of quite a young poet. “Die
schöne Müllerin” also may have seemed to Goethe an encroachment on a
domain peculiarly his own. In fact, when my father, with my mother, went
to Weimar to pay their respects to Goethe, his Excellency was somewhat
stiff and cold. My mother, also, had evidently not been sufficiently
careful and respectful. She was the granddaughter of the famous
pedagogue Basedow, the reformer of national education all over Germany,
who had been a friend of Goethe in his youth. Goethe speaks of him in
his poem, “Prophete rechts (Basedow), Prophete links (Lavater), das
Weltkind (Goethe) in der Mitten.” And he also complains bitterly of
Basedow in his “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” as being never without a pipe in
his mouth, and as lighting his pipe with most offensive
tinder—_Stinkschwamm_, as Goethe calls it. My mother, when asked by
Goethe, “Was für eine geborene” she was (What had been her maiden
name?), could not resist the temptation, and replied, laughing: “Your
Excellency ought to scent it; I am the granddaughter of Basedow.”
Happily my mother was very beautiful, and was pardoned the liberty she
had taken. Still, the relations between my father and Goethe always
remained rather strained, and all that I find in his album is a
medallion portrait of Goethe with the following lines, dated 7th
November, 1825:—
Meinen feyerlich Bewegten
Mache Dank und Freude kund;
Das Gefühl das Sie erregten
Schliesst dem Dichter selbst den Mund.
He was on much warmer terms with the poets of the Swabian school,
Uhland, Schwab, Justinus Kerner, etc. In the year before his death,
1827, he spent some time with them in Würtemberg, and in many respects
he may be reckoned as belonging to their school. The verses which Uhland
wrote in my father’s album have often been quoted as a curious prophecy
of his early death. It seems that some conversations which he had with
the Seherin of Prevorst[4] when staying in Justinus Kerner’s house near
Weinsberg, had filled him and his friends with misgivings. Uhland’s
lines were:—
Wohl blühet jedem Jahre
Sein Frühling, süss und licht,
Auch jener grosse, klare—
Getrost, er fehlt dir nicht;
Er ist dir noch beschieden
Am Ziele deiner Bahn,
Du ahnest ihn hienieden
Und droben bricht er an.
Zu freundlicher Erinnerung an,
L. UHLAND.
Stuttgart, den 13 Sept., 1827.
Justinus Kerner himself also wrote some lines in which he alludes to the
apparition of spirits. His rooms, as my mother assured me, were always
full of them, and they all seemed on the most familiar terms with the
other inmates.
Nicht wie Geister, nein! wie Sterne
Kamt ihr freundlich in der Nacht,
Ja, so ernst und mild wie Sterne
Hat uns euer Bild gelacht
Oft wenn schweigt der Welt Getümmel
Wird’s so treten in den Himmel
Den die Lieb uns angefacht.
JUSTINUS KERNER
und seine Hausfrau,
FRIEDERICKE.
Weinsberg, 7, 15, ’27.
am Tage euerer nächtlichen
Erscheinung.
I once came myself in personal contact with Uhland, the head of the
Swabian school of poetry, when he was already an old man. He came to
Leipzig when I was a student there, and stayed at the house of Professor
Haupt, the famous Latin and German scholar. Uhland was a very shy and
retiring man, and had declined every kind of public reception. However,
the young students would not be gainsayed, and after assembling in the
afternoon to consider what should be done to show their respect to the
German poet and the liberal German politician, they marched off, some
600 or 800 of them, drew up in front of the house where they knew Uhland
was staying, and sang some of Uhland’s songs. At last Uhland, a little,
old, wrinkled man, appeared at the window, and expected evidently that
some one should address him. But no arrangements had been made, and no
one ventured to speak, fearing that at the same time two or three others
might step forward to address the old poet. After waiting a considerable
time, the position became so trying that I could bear it no longer; I
stepped forward, and in a few words told Uhland how he was loved by us
as a poet, as a scholar, and as a fearless defender of the rights of the
people, and how proud we were to have him amongst us. We then waited to
hear him speak, but he could not overcome his shyness, and sent a
message to ask some of us to come into his room to shake hands with him.
Even then he could say but very little, but when he knew that I was the
son of his old friend, Wilhelm Müller, he was pleased. To me it was like
a vision of a bygone age when I looked the old poet in the eyes, and
whenever I hear his song, “Es zogen drei Burschen wohl über den Rhein,”
or when I read his beautiful ballads, I see the silent poet looking at
me with his kind eyes, unable to use meaningless words, but simply
saying “Thank you.”
Another poet who was a friend and admirer of my father, and whom I saw
likewise like a vision only passing before me, was Heinrich Heine. He
was younger than my father (1799–1856), and evidently looked up to him
as his master. “I love no lyric poet,” he wrote, “excepting Goethe, so
much as Wilhelm Müller.” I found a letter of his which deserves to be
preserved. Alas! the whole of my father’s library and correspondence was
destroyed by fire, and this letter escaped only because my mother, a
great admirer of Heine’s poems, had preserved it among her own books.
Here is the letter, or at least parts of it. The original was sent about
the years 1841–43, when I was a student at Leipzig, to Brockhaus’
_Blätter für Litterarische Unterhaltung_, but the original was never
returned to me. It has often been quoted in histories of German
literature, and I give the extracts here from Gustav Karpeles’ “Heinrich
Heine’s Autobiographie,” Berlin, 1888, pp. 149, 150:—
Hamburg, 7th June, 1826.