metre[5] possesses not merely accidental similarity with your own
accustomed metre, but probably owes its most secret rhythm to your
songs—those dear Müller-songs which I came to know at the very time
when I wrote the Intermezzo. At a very early time I let German
folk-song exercise its influence upon me. Later on, when I studied at
Bonn, August Schlegel opened many metrical secrets to me; but I
believe it was in your songs that I found what I looked for—pure tone
and true simplicity. How pure and clear your songs are, and they are
all true folk-songs. In my poems, on the contrary, the form only is to
a certain extent popular, the thoughts belong to our conventional
society. Yes, I am great enough to repeat it distinctly, and you will
sooner or later find it proclaimed publicly, that through the study of
your seventy-seven poems it became clear to me for the first time how
from the forms of our old still existing folk-songs new forms may be
deduced which are quite as popular, though one need not imitate the
unevennesses and awkwardnesses of the old language. In the second
volume of your poems the form seemed to me even purer and more
transparently clear. But why say so much about the form? What I yearn
to tell you is that, with the exception of Goethe, there is no lyric
poet whom I love as much as you.
Another fragment of the same letter occurs on page 195 (951). Here
Heine, referring to his North Sea poems, writes:—
The “North Sea” belongs to my last poems, and you can see there what
new keys I touch, and on what new lines I move along. Prose receives
me in her wide arms, and in the next volume of my “Reisebilder” you
will find in prose much that is mad, bitter, offensive, angry, and
very polemical. Times are really too bad (1826), and whoever has
strength, freedom, and boldness has also the duty seriously to begin
the fight against all that is bad and puffed up, against all that is
mediocre, and yet spreads itself out so broad, so intolerably broad. I
beg you, keep well disposed towards me, never doubt me, and let us
grow old together in common striving. I am conceited enough to believe
that when we are both gone my name will be named together with yours.
Let us therefore hold together in love in this life also.
I never came to know Heine. I knew he was in Paris when I was there in
1846, but he was already in such a state of physical collapse that a
friend of mine who knew him well, and saw him from time to time, advised
me not to go and see him. However, one afternoon as I and my friend were
sitting on the Boulevard, near the Rue Richelieu, sipping a cup of
coffee, “Look there,” he said, “there comes Heine!” I jumped up to see,
my friend stopped him, and told him who I was. It was a sad sight. He
was bent down, and dragged himself slowly along, his spare greyish hair
was hanging round his emaciated face, there was no light in his eyes. He
lifted one of his paralysed eyelids with his hand and looked at me. For
a time, like the blue sky breaking from behind grey October clouds,
there passed a friendly expression across his face, as if he thought of
days long gone by. Then he moved on, mumbling a line from Goethe, in a
deep, broken, and yet clear voice, as if appealing for sympathy:—
“Das Maulthier sucht im Düstern seinen Weg.”
Thus vanished Heine, the most brilliant, sparkling, witty poet of
Germany. I have seen him, that is all I can say, as Saul saw Samuel, and
wished he had not seen him. However, we travel far to see the ruins of
Pompeii and Herculaneum, of Nineveh and Memphis, and the ruins of a mind
such as Heine’s are certainly as sad and as grand as the crumbling
pillars and ruined temples shrouded under the lava of Vesuvius. “Eine
schöne Welt ist da versunken,” I said to myself, and I went home and
read in Heine’s “Buch der Lieder.” “Du bist wie eine Blume,” “Ich habe
im Traum geweinet,” “Ein Tannenbaum steht einsam.” “Yes,” I said,
“snow-white lilies spring from muddy ponds, and small mushrooms are said
to grow on fresh-fallen snow.”
Few poets in Germany have been or are still so admired and loved as
Heine, but few poets also have been so viciously maligned as Heine.
Society, no doubt, had a right to frown on him, but against such
calumnies as were heaped on him by envy, hatred, and malice, it is well
to remember some of his last lines:—
Hab’ eine Jungfrau nie verführet
Mit Liebeswort, mit Schmeichelei,
Ich hab’ auch nie ein Weib berühret,
Wüsst’ ich, dass sie vermählet sei.
Wahrhaftig, wenn es anders wäre,
Mein Name, er verdiente nicht
Zu strahlen in dem Buch der Ehre,
Man dürft’ mir spucken in’s Gesicht.
That is strong language and evidently meant as an answer to his spies
and enemies. But why will people always spy into the most uninteresting
part of a poet’s life? Why are they bent on knowing on what terms Dante
stood to Beatrice, Petrarch to Laura, Goethe to Frau von Stein, Heine to
George Sand. Volumes have been written on their intimate relations, and
yet whom does it concern, and what can it teach us? Let the dead bury
their dead.
Whilst at Leipzig as a young student I still imagined myself a poet, and
from time to time some of my poems appeared, to my great joy, in the
local papers. I even belonged to a poetical society, and I remember at
least two of us who in later times became very popular writers in
Germany. One was a Jew of the name of Wolfsohn, whose play, “Only a
Soul,” giving the tragedy of a Russian peasant girl, proved a great
success all over Germany, and is still acted from time to time. He died
young. Another, Theodor Fontane, is alive, and one of the best known and
best loved novel-writers of the day. He was a charming character, a man
of great gifts, full of high spirits and inexhaustible good humour. He
began life in a chemist’s shop, and had a very hard struggle in his
youth, which may have prevented his growing to his full height and
strength. He might have been another Heine, but the many years of hard
work and hopeless drudgery kept him from soaring as high as his young
wings would have carried him. I remember but little of his poetry now,
there remains but the sense of pleasure which I derived from it at the
time. Now and then, as it happens to all of us, a few long-forgotten
lines rise to the surface. In a political poem of his, I remember a
young Liberal being warned with the following words:—
Sonst spazierst du nach Siberien
In die langen Winterferien,
Die zugleich Hundstage sind!
And I have never forgotten the last lines of his beautiful poem, “Die
schöne Rosamunde,” where he says of the King:—
Ihn traf des Lebens grösster Schmerz:
Der Schmerz um dieses Leben!
All young poets in Germany were then liberal and more than liberal, all
dreamt and sang of a united Germany. But being thirty years ahead of
Bismarck, they were unmercifully sent to prison, and often their whole
career was ruined for life. Living much in that society, I too, a
harmless boy of eighteen, was sent to prison as a person highly
dangerous to the peace of Europe. The confinement in the academic career
was not very severe, however, except in one respect. From time to time
one was allowed to go out, provided one kept on good terms with the
attendants. But the serious thing was that as one became a popular
character all one’s friends came to visit one, and they expected of
course to be hospitably entertained. The consumption of beer and tobacco
was considerable, and so was the bill at the end of my political
incarceration. More of that perhaps by-and-by. Nearly all the political
poetry of that time, much as it then stirred the people, is now
forgotten; even the names of the poets are known to but few, though they
have found their way into the various histories of German literature. I
remember as one of the best, Herwegh, who came to Leipzig when I was a
student, and who, of course, was _fêted_ by the Burschenschaft at a
brilliant supper. Much beer was drunk, much tobacco was smoked, many
speeches were made. The police were present, and the names of all who
had taken part were entered in the Black Book, mine among the rest.
Herwegh was a real poet, unfortunately he spent nearly all his poetical
genius on political invective. How well I remember his poem in which
every verse ended with the words:—
Wir haben lang genug geliebt,
Wir wollen endlich hassen!
But there were some poems of his which well deserved a longer life. One
began with the words: “Ich möchte hingehen wie das Abendroth.” Very
beautiful, but my memory does not serve me further, and my copy of his
poems has vanished from my library like many other volumes which I lent
to my friends.[6]
I well remember the pleasure which Herwegh’s poems gave me, but the
words themselves are gone. It is the same with so many of our
recollections. I can still feel the intense delight, the hushed
reverence with which I looked the first time at Raphael’s Madonna di San
Sisto, and looked at it again and again whenever I passed through
Dresden. But whether the colour of the Virgin’s dress is red or blue I
cannot tell. I dare say it is all there, in the treasure-house of my
memory. Nay, sometimes it suddenly appears, only never when I call for
it. What is forgotten, however, does not seem to be entirely forfeited;
it can be gotten again, and it probably forms, though unknown, the
fertile soil for new harvests: that which thou sowest is not quickened
except it die.
Another famous political poet whose acquaintance I made when he was an
old man was Moritz Arndt. His poetry was not very great, but the effect
which he produced by his “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland” has been, and
is still, perfectly marvellous. If Bismarck finished the unity of
Germany, Arndt laid the foundation of it, and in the grateful memory of
the people his song will probably be remembered long after Bismarck’s
diplomatic triumphs have been forgotten. I shall never forget old Arndt,
for, old as he was, he gave me such a grip of the hand that I thought
the blood would squirt from my nails.
Lesser poets and writers whom I knew at that time, while I was a student
at Leipzig, were Karl Beck, of Hungarian extraction, Robert Blum
(_fusillé_ at Vienna by Windischgrätz, 9th November, 1848), Herlossohn,
Kühne, Laube, and several more whose names I could find in Histories of
German Literature, or the Conversations-Lexicon, but no longer in the
camera obscura of my memory. And yet some of their poems were really
beautiful, full of high thoughts and deep feeling. But the world does
not recognise a poet of one poem, or even of ten or twenty. In order to
be a poet a man must produce hundreds of poems, volume after volume,
good, bad, and indifferent. Nor is there here anything like the survival
of the fittest. Although ever so many of Schiller’s or Goethe’s poems
have become old and antiquated—few will deny this—yet no one is
satisfied with a selection of the best, few people would ever agree as
to which are the best. We must take them all or none. In that respect
the ancient poets are certainly much better off. What is left of
Tyrtaeos or Sappho, or of Horace and Catullus, can be carried in our
waistcoat pocket, nay, in the folds of our brains; and though even here
sifting might increase enjoyment, yet we can take in whatever there is
without sinking under the burden. But who can remember Goethe or
Wordsworth or Victor Hugo, aye, who has time even to read all their
verses, so as to mark, learn, and inwardly digest them?
In towns like Paris and London, if a poet once succeeds in attracting
attention, and gathering some male and female admirers around him, the
very atmosphere which he breathes, the wide survey of humanity which he
commands, strengthen and inspire him. No one becomes an Alpine climber
who has no Alps to climb, and many a poetical soul languishes and
withers if confined within the walls of a small provincial town. I have
known very ordinary mortals who when they came to write for a great and
influential newspaper became inspired like the prophetess on the Delphic
tripod, and wrote well, while their ordinary writings remain feeble. I
have known poets in small provincial towns who became changed after they
had changed their provincial public for the public of a large capital. I
remember a dear cousin of mine at Dessau, Adolf von Basedow, who was my
playfellow when we were children, and remained my true friend all
through life. He had a quite exceptional gift for occasional poetry, and
later in life he wrote many things without ever being able to find a
proper publisher. Some of his plays were acted and proved successful on
neighbouring stages, but he never received that response which inspires
and nerves a poet for higher efforts. He was very modest, nay, almost
shy, and in these days humility, however charming in the man, is not
likely to open the road to success. Now that he is gone, there are all
his poetical productions laid aside and soon to be forgotten, while some
of the poetry we are asked to admire in these days is far inferior to
those fallen leaves. He was an officer and went through the whole of the
Franco-German war, having, like so many others, to leave his wife and
children at home. He returned home safe, but his health had suffered,
and he never was himself again. I have seldom known a more high-minded
and truly chivalrous character, content with the small surroundings in
which he had to move, but never making the smallest concession to
expediency or meanness. He was proud of his name, and whatever we may
think of the small nobility in Germany, their manly pride keeps up a
standard of honour without which the country would not be what it is. We
may laugh at their courts of honour and their duels, arising often from
very trifling causes, but in our age of self-seeking and pushing we want
some true knights as the salt of the earth.
While I was at the University at Leipzig I well remember meeting Robert
Blum in literary circles. He certainly was not a poet, but when required
he could speak very powerfully and wield his pen with great effect.
Never shall I forget the horror I felt when I heard of his execution at
Vienna. No doubt there was danger when the mob broke into the
Kaiserburg, shouting and yelling, and when Prince Metternich said to the
Emperor, who had asked him what this hideous noise could mean, “Sire,
c’est que Messieurs les démocrates appellent la voix de Dieu.” But for
all that, to shoot a member of the German Parliament then sitting at
Frankfurt was an outrage for which Austria has had to pay dearly. Still
more cruel was the execution at the same time of a little helpless Jew,
Jellineck, whom I had known as belonging to a small class reading Arabic
with Professor Fleischer at Leipzig. Robert Blum may have been a
dangerous man in the then state of German political excitement, but
Jellineck was nothing but a perfectly harmless scholar, and if he was
found guilty by a court-martial, it could only have been because he
could never express himself intelligibly. If he had been killed in the
streets of Vienna like many others, all one could have said would have
been, “Qu’allait-il faire dans cette galère?” but to shoot a harmless
student after a short court-martial was no better than lynching. There
has been a Nemesis for all that, as Austria knows too well, and what
would the world be without that invisible Nemesis?
With every year my own work became more and more prosaic, and yet more
and more absorbing. Neither at Berlin nor afterwards at Paris, had I
time or inclination to make new friends or cultivate literary society.
Berlin never was rich in poets or poetry; Paris also, when I was there
in 1844, and again in 1847 and 1848, had no names to attract me.
Lamartine had some fascination for me, and I managed to see him and hear
much about him from a common friend, Baron von Eckstein. This German
Baron was a well-known character in Paris between 1840 and 1850, a
German settled there for many years, a Roman Catholic, much mixed up, I
believe, in small political transactions, and a constant contributor to
the _Augsburger Zeitung_, at that time the _Times_ of Germany. He was a
man of wide interests, a student of Sanskrit, chiefly attracted by the
mystic philosophy of the Upanishads and the Vedânta. When he heard of my
having come to Paris to attend Burnouf’s lectures and to prepare the
first edition of the “Rig Veda,” he toiled up to my rooms, though they
were _au cinquième_ and he was an old man and a martyr to gout. He was
full of enthusiasm, and full of kindness for a poor student. I was very
poor then; I hardly know now how I managed to keep myself afloat, yet I
never borrowed and never owed a penny to anybody. I disliked giving
lessons, but I worked like a horse for others, copying and collating
manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Royale. I lived like a Hindu Sannyâsin,
but, as Heine said,
Und ich hab’ es doch ertragen—
Aber fragt mich nur nicht wie.
Baron Eckstein’s eyes were too weak to allow him to copy and collate
Sanskrit manuscripts, and I gladly did it for him. I recollect copying
for him, among other texts, the whole of the Aitarêya Brâhmana in Latin
letters. I still possess a copy of it. He paid me liberally, and he
often invited me to lunch with him at his _café_, which was welcome to a
young man of good appetite, who had to be satisfied with wretched
dinners at the Palais Royal, but not at Véfour’s or the Trois Frères
Provençaux. Being the Paris correspondent of the leading German paper,
the Baron was on friendly terms with many of the political and literary
celebrities of the time. I believe he was in receipt of a literary
pension from the French Government, but I do not know it for certain. He
offered to introduce me to George Sand, to Lamennais, to the Comtesse
d’Agout (Daniel Stern), to Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and others. But I
shut my eyes and shook my head; I had no time then for anything but the
Veda, and getting ready for the great battle of life that was before me.
I am sorry for it now, but, without self-denial, we can never do
anything.
When the February revolution came, Baron d’Eckstein was very active. His
friend Lamartine was then in the ascendant, and through him he knew all
that was going on. No revolution, I believe, was ever made with so
little preparation. There was no conspiracy of any kind. A night or two
before the contemplated banquet to Ledru Rollin, Lamartine was asked by
his friends, Eckstein being present, whether he would accept office
under the Duchesse d’Orléans, provided she was proclaimed Regent in the
Chamber. He laughed as if it were an idle dream, outside the sphere of
practical politics, as we now say, but he accepted. The Duchesse and her
friends counted on him, and his prestige at that time was so great that
he might have carried anything. But no one knows his own prestige, and
when the moment came, when the Duchesse d’Orléans was present in the
Chamber and Lamartine was expected to speak, there was confusion and
fright; some shots had been fired in the Assembly, the name of the
Republic had been shouted, the Deputies broke up, and the Duchesse had
to fly. Never was kingdom lost with so little excuse. I saw the whole
so-called revolution from my windows at the corner of the Rue Royale and
the Boulevard de la Madeleine. I may have to describe what I saw at some
other time. At present I am thinking of the poet-statesman only, of
Lamartine and his brilliant speech from the balcony of the Hôtel de
Ville.
Whatever Lamartine was, a poet, a dreamer, an aristocrat, he had the
spirit of _noblesse_ in him, and that spirit prevailed at the time. It
was due to him, I believe, that capital punishment was then abolished
once for all for political offences. Sinister elements came to the
surface, but they had soon to hide again. I remember another speaker at
the Hôtel de Ville, speaking after Lamartine in support of the abolition
of every kind of title and privilege, and, before all, for the abolition
of the nobility. He was eloquent, he was furious, and after he had
summed up all the crimes committed by the French nobility and laughed at
those who had grown rich and powerful by the misdeeds of their noble
ancestors, he finished up in a loud voice, “Soyons ancêtres nous-mêmes,”
a sentiment loudly applauded by the unwashed multitudes who aspired to
take the place of the _ancêtres_ whom they had just heard execrated from
the balcony of their terrible Hôtel de Ville.
All the walls in the streets where I lived were then chalked with the
mysterious words, _Liberté_, _Egalité_, _Fraternité_. Not far from my
house there was a tobacconist’s shop, called _Aux trois blagues_, with
three tobacco pouches painted over the window. My friend, the
tobacconist, was an _aristo_, so he left the _trois blagues_ and simply
wrote underneath, _Liberté_, _Egalité_, _Fraternité_.
But I must not forget another poet, the greatest German poet I have ever
known, and of whom I saw a great deal at Berlin before I migrated to
Paris, I mean Rückert. It is strange how little his poems are known in
England and France. He has never had an apostle, nor would a mere herald
do him much service. He was a poet somewhat like Wordsworth, who must be
laid siege to, not till he surrenders, but till we surrender to him. If
he is known at all in England, it is through his lyric poems, which have
been set to music, as they deserved to be, by Schumann. Who has not
heard “Du, meine Seele, du, mein Herz,” one of the grandest songs of our
age? But, alas! either the words are murdered in a translation which
would break the heart both of the poet and the composer, or the German
words are often pronounced so badly that no one can tell whether they
are English or German or Sanskrit. Rückert was one of the richest poets.
There is hardly a branch of poetry which he has not cultivated. I say
cultivated on purpose, for his poetry was always a work of art,
sometimes almost of artifice. He was not equally successful in all his
poetical compositions: particularly towards the end of his life he
disappointed many of his admirers by his dramatic attempts. He is like
Wordsworth in this respect also, that one cannot enjoy all he writes,
yet in the end one comes to enjoy much that has been put aside at first,
because it comes from him.
I may be prejudiced, yet a poet whose verses Goethe repeated on his
deathbed is not likely to be overrated by me. These are the verses
which, we are told, Goethe murmured before he exclaimed, “More light,
more light!” and passed away:—
UM MITTERNACHT.
Um Mitternacht
Hab’ ich gewacht
Und aufgeblickt zum Himmel,
Kein Stern am Sterngewimmel
Hat mir gelacht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Hab’ ich gedacht
Hinaus in dunkle Schranken;
Es hat kein Lichtgedanken
Mir Trost gebracht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Nahm ich in Acht
Die Schläge meines Herzens;
Ein einz’ger Puls des Schmerzens
War angefacht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Kämpft’ ich die Schlacht
O Menschheit, deiner Leiden;
Nicht konnt’ ich sie entscheiden
Mit meiner Macht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Hab’ ich die Macht
In deine Hand gegeben:
Herr über Tod und Leben,
Du hältst die Wacht
Um Mitternacht.
If I had a strong personal liking for Rückert it might be excused. He
was really an Eastern poet, rich in colour, but equally rich in thought.
The first poems of his I knew in my youth were his “Oestliche Rosen.” My
father reviewed them (“Vermischte Schriften,” vol. v., p. 290). He
declared he might have judged them by one letter, the letter K, which in
Roman times meant condemnation, but which in Rückert’s case would give
to his “Oestliche Rosen” their right title of “Köstliche Rosen.” One of
Rückert’s greatest works, a real treasury of meditative thought and
mature wisdom, was his “Weisheit des Brahmanen,” and this also appealed,
no doubt, strongly to my own personal tastes. His translations of
Oriental poetry, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, are perfect masterpieces.
They often take away one’s breath by the extraordinary faithfulness and
marvellous reproduction in German of plays on words and jingle of rhymes
that seemed to be possible once, and once only, whether in Persian,
Arabic, or Sanskrit. I may have been influenced by all this, and still
more by my personal regard for the poet, but for all that I should
strongly advise all who care for poetry, and for German poetry, to judge
for themselves, and not to be disheartened if they do not strike gold on
the first pages they open.