That portion of the German public which did not comprehend the

significance and terrible necessity of this struggle blamed poor Voss

for the ruthless revelation of confidential relations and private

affairs, which, however, taken as a whole, conclusively proved the

correctness of his charges. Then certain so-called æsthetic souls, far

too exalted and refined for such petty gossip, raised an outcry, and

accused poor Voss of being a scandal-monger. Other good citizens, who

feared that the curtain might be drawn from them, and their own

miserable shortcomings be exposed, waxed indignant over the violation of

the established rules of literary polemics, which strictly forbid all

personalities and disclosures of private affairs. It so happened that

Fritz Stolberg died soon after, and his death was attributed to grief;

and when, immediately after his death, his _Liebesbüchlein_ was

published, in which he assumes the true Jesuitic tone, and speaks of his

poor deluded friend in terms of pious Christian forgiveness--then the

tears of German compassion fell thick and fast, and the German

Michel[10] assumed his most lugubrious expression, and all this flood of

sentimentality was turned into wrath against poor Voss; and most of the

abuse heaped upon him came from the very ones for whose intellectual and

material welfare he had battled.

When one gets soundly thrashed in Germany one can always count on the

pity and tears of the multitude. In this respect the Germans resemble

those old crones who never miss an opportunity of witnessing an

execution, and who eagerly press to the front of the curious spectators,

setting up a bitter lamentation at sight of the poor wretch, and even

taking his part. The snivelling old women who attend literary

executions, and put on such grief-stricken airs, would nevertheless be

very much disappointed if the poor sinner was suddenly to receive a

pardon, and they be sent trudging homeward without beholding the

anticipated flogging. Their worst fury would then be directed against

the one who had balked their expectation.

Meanwhile Voss's polemical writings exerted a powerful influence upon

the masses, and turned the current of public opinion against that

predilection for mediævalism which had been all the fashion. His

writings aroused Germany; many declared for Voss personally; a greater

portion supported his cause alone. The controversy waxed fiercer and

fiercer; attacks and rejoinders followed in quick succession, and the

last days of the old man were embittered by these quarrels. He had to

deal with the most dangerous opponents, the priesthood, who attacked him

under the most-varied guises. Not only the Crypto-Catholic, but also the

Pietists, the Quietists, the Lutheran Mystics; in brief, all the

supernaturalistic sects of the Protestant church, no matter how

decidedly they differed from one another in their creeds, yet they all

agreed in their great hatred of Johann Heinrich Voss, the rationalist.

This name is in Germany applied to those who hold that the claims of

reason should not be put aside in matters of religion, in opposition to

the supernaturalists, who to a greater or less degree discard reason in

religion. The latter, in their furious hate of the poor rationalists,

resemble the inmates of a lunatic asylum, who, although they will not

believe in each other's hallucinations, yet in a measure tolerate one

another. But with all the fiercer hate do they turn against the man whom

they consider their common enemy, who is no other than the physician who

seeks to restore their reason.

While the romantic school was severely damaged in public opinion by the

discovery of its Catholic tendencies, about the same time it received an

utterly crushing blow in its own temple, and that, too, from one of

those gods whom itself had enshrined there. For it was Wolfgang Goethe

who descended from his pedestal to pronounce the doom of the Schlegels,

the same high-priests who had offered him so much incense. That voice

annihilated the whole pack of hobgoblins; the spectres of the middle

ages fled; the owls crept again into their obscure castle-ruins, and the

ravens fluttered back to their old church-steeples. Frederic Schlegel

went to Vienna, where he attended mass daily and ate broiled fowl; A. W.

Schlegel withdrew into the pagoda of Brahma.

Frankly confessed, Goethe at that time played a very ambiguous rôle, and

cannot be unconditionally praised. It is true, the Schlegels never were

sincere with him; perhaps they built him an altar, and offered him

incense, and taught the multitude to kneel before him, only because, in

their warfare against the old school, they needed a living poet to set

up as a model, and found none more suited for their purpose than Goethe;

and, perhaps, also, because they expected some literary favours from

him. Moreover, he was at such an easy distance from them. The road from

Jena to Weimar leads through an avenue of fine plum trees, and the

luscious fruit is very acceptable to the wayfarer when parched with the

summer heat. The Schlegels often travelled this road, and in Weimar they

had many an interview with Herr Geheimrath von Goethe, who was always a

finished diplomat. He listened quietly to what the Schlegels had to say,

smiled approvingly, occasionally dined them, showed them various

favours, etc. They also approached Schiller, but the latter was an

honest, straight-forward man, and would have nothing to do with them.

The correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, which was published

three years ago, throws considerable light on the relations between

these two poets and the Schlegels. Goethe, haughtily and contemptuously,

mocks at them; Schiller is angry at their impertinent scandal-mongering,

and at their passion for notoriety, and he calls them "puppies."

But although Goethe assumed such haughty airs towards them, it is

nevertheless true that he was indebted to the Schlegels for the greater

portion of his fame, for it was they who introduced and promoted the

study of his writings. The contemptuous and insulting manner with which

he eventually cast them off has a very strong flavour of ingratitude.

Perhaps Goethe, with his clear insight, was vexed that the Schlegels

should seek to use him as an instrument to accomplish their projects.

Perhaps those projects threatened to compromise him as the minister of a

Protestant state. Perhaps it was the ancient pagan godlike wrath that

awoke in him at sight of the mouldy Catholic follies. For as Voss

resembled the stalwart one-eyed Odin, so did Goethe, in form and figure,

resemble great Jupiter. The former was compelled to pound long and

vigorously with his Thor's hammer; the latter needed but angrily to

shake his majestic head, with its ambrosial locks, and the Schlegels

trembled and crept out of sight. A public statement of Goethe's

opposition to the romantic school appeared in his journal, _Kunst und

Alterthum_, and bore the title, _Concerning the

Christian-Patriotic-New-German School of Art_. With this article Goethe

made his eighteenth brumaire in German literature, for by chasing the

Schlegels so summarily out of the temple, and attaching to himself so

many of their young and zealous disciples, and being hailed with

acclamations by the public, to whom the Schlegelian directory had long

been obnoxious, he established his autocratic sovereignty in German

literature. From that hour nothing more was heard of the Schlegels. Only

now and then their names were mentioned, just as one sometimes casually

speaks of Barras or of Gohier. Neither romantic nor classic poetry was

henceforth spoken of; everywhere it was nothing but Goethe. It is true

that several other poets arose in the meantime, who, in power and

imagination, were but little inferior to Goethe. But out of courtesy

they acknowledged him as their chief; they paid homage to him, they

kissed his hand, they knelt before him. These grandees of Parnassus

differed from the common multitude in being permitted to wear their

laurel-wreaths in Goethe's presence. Sometimes they even attacked him;

but they were always vexed when one of the lesser ones ventured to

assail him. No matter how angry aristocrats are with their sovereign,

they are always displeased when plebeians also dare to revolt. And, in

truth, the aristocrats of intellect had, during the last twenty years,

very good reasons to be irritated against Goethe. As I myself

unreservedly remarked at the time, not without bitterness, "Goethe

resembled Louis XI. of France, who abased the powerful nobility and

exalted the _tiers état_."

That was despicable. Goethe feared every writer of independence and

originality, but glorified and praised all the petty authorlings. He

carried this so far, that to be praised by Goethe came at last to be

considered a brevet of mediocrity.

Later I shall speak of the new poets who grew up during the Goethean

imperialism. They constitute a forest of young trees, whose true

magnitude has become perceptible only since the fall of that century-old

oak by whose branches they had been so completely overtopped and

overshadowed. As already stated, there was not lacking a bitter and

zealous opposition against Goethe, that giant oak. Men of the most

diverse opinions were banded together in this opposition. The orthodox

were vexed that in the trunk of this great tree there was no niche

provided for the statuettes of the saints, but that, on the contrary,

even the nude dryads of heathendom were permitted to carry on their

witchery beneath it. The pietists would gladly have imitated Saint

Boniface, and with consecrated axe have felled this magic oak. The

liberals, on the other hand, were indignant that they could not use it

as a liberty tree and as a barricade. But, in truth, the tree was too

lofty to have a red cap placed on its top, or a carmagnole danced

beneath it. But the public at large honoured it just because it was so

stately and independent; because it filled the whole world with its

delicious fragrance; because its branches towered majestically to the

heavens, so that the stars seemed to be merely the golden fruit of the

great and wonderful tree.

It is true, the opposition against Goethe began with the appearance of

the so-called pseudo _Wanderjahre_, which was published by Gottfried

Basse of Quedlinburg, under the title of _Wilhelm Meister's

Wanderjahre_, in 1821; that is, soon after the downfall of the

Schlegels. Goethe had announced a sequel to his Wilhelm _Meister's

Lehrjahre_, under this title, and very strangely it appeared

simultaneously with its literary double, in which not only was Goethe's

style imitated, but the hero of Goethe's original novel was represented

as the leading personage. This parody evinced much talent, and still

greater tact, for as the author managed to maintain his anonymity for a

considerable period, baffling all endeavours to discover his

personality, public interest was artificially stimulated. Finally it

transpired that the author was a hitherto unknown village parson, by the

name of Pustkuchen, which translated into French would be _omelette

soufflée_, a name which aptly describes the very essence of his book. It

was nothing else than the old, stale, sour dough of the pietists,

æsthetically kneaded over. In this book it was cast up to Goethe, as a

reproach, that his poems had no moral aim; that he could create no lofty

characters, but only low, vulgar creatures; that Schiller, on the

contrary, had produced the most ideal and exalted conceptions, and that

therefore the latter was a greater poet.

That Schiller was a greater poet than Goethe was the special point which

Pustkuchen's book sought to establish, and for which it was written. It

became the fashion to institute comparisons between the writings of the

two poets, and the public divided into partisan camps. The admirers of

Schiller enthusiastically praised the purity and nobility of a Max

Piccolomini, of a Thekla, of Posa, and other of Schiller's dramatic

heroes; on the other hand, they stigmatised Goethe's Philine, Käthchen,

Clärchen, and the like pretty creatures, as immoral jades. Goethe's

adherents would smilingly admit that neither Goethe's heroes nor his

heroines could be called moral, but they claimed that the promotion of

morality in nowise came within the province of art. In art, asserted

they, as in the universe itself, there is no ulterior purpose; it is

only man who introduces the conceptions of end and means. Art, like the

universe, said they, exists for itself alone. Although the opinions of

mankind concerning the universe are continually changing, the universe

itself remains ever the same; so also must art remain uninfluenced by

the temporary views of mankind. Art must be kept especially independent

of systems of morality, for these change on earth as often as a new

religion arises, and supersedes an older faith. In fact, as after the

lapse of a number of centuries a new religion always makes its

appearance, influences the customs, and thus makes itself felt as a new

system of morality, so in every period the art works of the past would

be branded as heretical and immoral, were they to be judged by the

temporary standard of morality. We have, in truth, lived to see good

Christians, who condemn the flesh as of Satan, experience a feeling of

anger at sight of the Greek mythological statues. Chaste monks have put

an apron on the antique Venus; the ridiculous custom of bestowing a fig

leaf on nude figures has continued even up to the present. A pious

Quaker went so far as to sacrifice his whole fortune in buying up and

burning Giulo Romano's most beautiful mythological paintings; truly he

deserves for his pains to reach heaven, and there to be flogged daily. A

religion which should recognise God in matter only, and should regard

the flesh only as divine, would, when it had impressed itself upon the

customs of men, give rise to a system of morality, according to which

those works of art which glorify the flesh would be alone deemed worthy

of praise; and on the contrary, those Christian art works which depict

the nothingness of the flesh would be considered as immoral. The works

of art which are accepted as moral in one land would be considered

immoral in another country, where a different religion had generated

different customs. Thus, our pictorial arts awaken the disgust of a

strict Mahometan, while much that in the harems of the Orient is

regarded as quite innocent would be an abomination in the eyes of

Christians. In India the occupation of a Bayadere is not regarded as

dishonourable; hence, the drama of "Vasantasena," the heroine of which

is a courtesan, is there not at all considered immoral. If, however,

the Théâtre Français ventured to produce this play, the whole pit would

raise the cry of "immorality"--the same pit that witnesses with delight

plays whose plots are amorous intrigues, and whose heroines are young

widows who remarry at the end of the play, instead of having themselves

burned to death on their deceased husband's funeral pyre, as required by

Hindoo morality.

Starting with this idea, the Goetheans viewed art as a separate,

independent world, which they would rank so high, that all the changing

and changeable doings of mankind, their religions and systems of

morality, should surge far below it. I cannot unconditionally endorse

this view; but the Goetheans were led so far astray by it as to proclaim

art in and of itself as the highest good. Thus they were induced to hold

themselves aloof from the claims of the world of reality, which, after

all, is entitled to precedence.

Schiller united himself to the world of reality much more decidedly than

did Goethe; and he deserves praise for this. The living spirit of the

times thrilled through Frederic Schiller; it wrestled with him; it

vanquished him; he followed it to battle; he bore its banner, and, lo!

it was the same banner under which the conflict was being

enthusiastically waged across the Rhine, and for which we are always

ready to shed our heart's best blood. Schiller wrote for the grand ideas

of the Revolution; he razed the bastilles of the intellect; he helped to

erect the temple of freedom, that colossal temple which shelters all

nations like a single congregation of brothers: in brief, he was a

cosmopolitan. He began his career with that hate of the past which we

behold in _The Robbers_. In this work he resembles a diminutive Titan

who has run away from school, got tipsy with schnapps, and throws

stones at Jupiter's windows. He ended with that love for the future

which already in his _Don Carlos_ blossoms forth like a field of

flowers. Schiller is himself that Marquis Posa who is simultaneously

prophet and soldier, and battles for that which he foretells. Under that

Spanish cloak throbs the noblest heart that ever loved and suffered in

Germany.

The poet is, on a small scale, but the imitator of the Creator, and also

resembles God in creating his characters after his own image. If,

therefore, Carl Moor and the Marquis Posa are wholly Schiller himself,

so in like manner does Goethe resemble his Werther, his Wilhelm Meister,

and his Faust, in whom the different phases of his intellect can be

studied. While Schiller devotes himself to the history of the race, and

becomes an enthusiast for the social progress of mankind, Goethe, on the

other hand, applies himself to the study of the individual, to nature

and to art. The physical sciences must of necessity have finally become

a leading branch of study with Goethe, the pantheist, and in his poems,

as well as in his scientific works, he gave us the result of his

researches. His indifferentism was to a certain extent the result of his

pantheistic views. Alas! we must confess that pantheism has often led

men into indifferentism. They reasoned thus: if everything is God; if

everything is divine, then it is indifferent whether man occupies

himself with clouds or ancient gems; with folk-songs or the anatomy of

apes; with real human beings or play-actors. But that is just the

mistake. Everything is not God, but God is everything. He does not

manifest himself equally in all things, but He shows himself in

different degrees according to the various matters. Everything bears

within itself an impulse to strive after a higher degree of divinity,

and that is the great law of progress throughout all nature. The

recognition of this law, which has been most profoundly revealed by the

disciples of St. Simon, now makes pantheism a cosmic, universal theory,

which not only does not lead to indifferentism, but, on the contrary,

induces the most self-sacrificing endeavours. No, God does not manifest

himself in all things equally, as Wolfgang Goethe believed, who through

such a belief became an indifferentist, and, instead of devoting himself

to the highest interests of humanity, occupied himself with art,

anatomy, theories of colour, botanical studies, and observations of the

clouds. No, God is manifest in some things to a greater degree than in

others. He lives in motion, in action, in time. His holy breath is

wafted through the pages of history, which is God's true book of record.

Frederic Schiller felt this, and became an historian, a "prophet of the

past," and wrote the _Revolt of the Netherlands_, the _Thirty Years'

War_, the _Maid of Orleans_, and _William Tell_.

It is true Goethe also depicted a few of the great struggles of freedom,

but he portrayed them as an artist. Christian zeal was odious to him,

and he angrily turned from it; and the enthusiasm for philosophy, which

is characteristic of our epoch, he either could not understand or

purposely avoided understanding, for fear of ruffling his customary

tranquillity of mind; so he treated all enthusiasm objectively and

historically; as a datum, as a subject to be written about. In his hands

the living spirit became dead matter, and he invested it with a lovely

and pleasing form. He became thus the greatest artist of our literature,

and all that he wrote was a finished work of art.

The example of the master misled the disciples, and there arose in

Germany that literary epoch which I once designated as the "art

period," and which, as I then showed, had a most disastrous influence on

the political development of the German people. At the same time, I by

no means deny the intrinsic worth of the Goethean masterpieces. They

adorn our beloved fatherland just as beautiful statues embellish a

garden; but they are only statues after all. One may fall in love with

them, but they are barren. Goethe's poems do not, like Schiller's, beget

deeds. Deeds are the offspring of words; but Goethe's pretty words are

childless. That is the curse of all that which has originated in mere

art. The statue which Pygmalion wrought was a beautiful woman, and even

the sculptor himself fell in love with her. His kisses warmed her into

life, but, so far as we know, she never bore children. I believe a

similar idea has been suggested by Charles Nodier, and this thought came

into my mind while wandering through the Louvre, as my glance alighted

on the statues of the ancient gods. There they stood, with their white,

expressionless eyes, a mysterious melancholy in their stony smiles.

Perhaps they are haunted by sad memories of Egypt, that land of the dead

from which they came; or perhaps it is a mournful longing for the life

from which other divinities have expelled them, or a grieving over their

immortality of death. They seem to be awaiting the word that shall

liberate them from their cold, motionless rigidity and bring them back

to life. How strange that these antique statues should remind me of the

Goethean creations, which are likewise so perfect, so beautiful, so

motionless, and which also seem oppressed with a dumb grieving that

their rigidity and coldness separate them from our present warm,

restless life--that they cannot speak and rejoice with us, and that they

are not human beings, but unhappy mixtures of divinity and stone.

These few hints will explain the publicly-expressed opposition of the

various parties in Germany to Goethe. The orthodox were highly incensed

against the great heathen, as Goethe was generally called in Germany;

they feared his influence upon the people, whom he indoctrinated with

his manner of viewing the world through merry verses, even through the

simplest and most unpretentious ballads. They saw in him the most

dangerous foe of the Cross, which, as he expressed himself, was as

odious to him as vermin, garlic, and tobacco; at least, that is about

the purport of the Xenie which Goethe dared to publish in Germany, the

very country where vermin, garlic, tobacco, and the Cross form a holy

alliance, and are supreme over all. But it was not this that displeased

us, the party of action. As previously stated, we found fault with

Goethe for the barrenness of his writings; for the engrossing devotion

to art, which through him was diffused over Germany; for his influence

in creating among the German youth an apathy which was a hindrance to

the political regeneration of our fatherland. Hence the indifferentist

and pantheist was assailed from the most diverse sides. To use an

illustration from French parliamentary life, the extreme right and the

extreme left formed an alliance against him. While the cassocked priests

brandished the crucifix over him, furious _sans-culottes_ simultaneously

assaulted him with the pike.

Wolfgang Menzel, who had carried on the war against Goethe with a

display of talent worthy of a better cause, evinced in his polemics that

he was not merely a one-sided spiritualistic Christian, or a

discontented patriot; he rather based a portion of his attacks on the

latest remark of Frederic Schlegel, who, after his fall, from the

recesses of his Catholic cathedral, gave utterance to his woe

concerning Goethe; Goethe, "whose poetry lacked a central point." Menzel

went still further, and showed that Goethe was not a man of genius, but

only of talent; Schiller, however, was a genius, etc. This was some time

before the July Revolution; Menzel was at that time a great admirer of

the middle ages, of mediæval art as well as of institutions; he was

incessantly attacking Johann Heinrich Voss, and praising Joseph Görres

with an enthusiasm hitherto unheard of. These facts prove that Menzel

was sincere in his hatred of Goethe, and that he did not write against

him merely to make himself conspicuous, as many thought. Although I,

myself, was at that time an opponent of Goethe, yet I was displeased at

the harshness with which Menzel criticised him, and I complained of this

want of respect. I said, Goethe is nevertheless the king of our

literature, and in applying the knife of criticism to such a one, it

always behoves us to show a proper courtesy, just as the executioner who

was to behead Charles I., before performing the duties of his office,

knelt before the king and begged his royal forgiveness.

Among the opponents of Goethe was the famous Hofrath Müllner, and his

only remaining friend, Professor Schütz. There were several others of

less celebrity--Herr Spann, for instance, who had been imprisoned for a

long time on account of political offences--belonged to the public

adversaries of Goethe. In confidence, dear reader, it was a very motley

crowd. The ostensible reasons I have sufficiently indicated, but it is

more difficult to guess what special motive influenced each individual

to give publicity to his anti-Goethean sentiments. I know the secret

motives of only one of these persons, and as that one is myself, I will

frankly confess that I was envious of Goethe. To my credit I must say

that I assailed in Goethe only the man, never the poet. Unlike those

critics who, with their finely-polished glasses, claim to have also

detected spots upon the moon, I could never discern blemishes in

Goethe's works. What these sharp-sighted people consider spots are

blooming forests, silvery streams, lofty mountains, and smiling valleys.

Nothing is more foolish than to depreciate Goethe in order thereby to

exalt Schiller, whom it was always customary to praise in order to

disparage Goethe. Do such critics really not know that those

highly-extolled, highly-idealised figures, those sacred pictures of

virtue and morality which Schiller produced, were much easier to

construct than those frail, worldly beings of whom Goethe gives us a

glimpse in his works? Do they not know that mediocre painters generally

select sacred subjects, which they daub in life-size on the canvas? But

it requires a great master to paint with lifelike fidelity and technical

perfection a Spanish beggar-boy scratching himself, or a Netherlandish

peasant having a tooth extracted, or some hideous old woman such as we

see in Dutch cabinet pictures. In art it is much easier to picture large

tragic subjects than those which are small and droll. The Egyptian

sorcerers could imitate Moses in many of his tragic feats: they could

make serpents, and blood, and frogs; but when Moses created vermin,

which would seemingly be less difficult to copy, then they confessed

their impotence, and said, "It is the finger of God." Rail as you will

at the coarseness of certain portions of Faust, at the scenes on the

Brocken and in Auerbach's cellar, inveigh against the licentiousness in

_Wilhelm Meister_, it is nevertheless more than you can do; it is the

finger of Goethe! But I hear you say, with disgust, "We do not wish to

create such things. We are no sorcerers; we are good Christians." I know

quite well that you are no sorcerers.

Goethe's greatest merit consists in the perfection of all his works.

Here are no portions that are strong while others are weak; here no one

part is painted in detail while another is merely sketched; here is no

confusion, nor any of the customary padding, nor any undue partiality

for certain special characters. Goethe treats every person that appears

in his romances and dramas as if he or she were the leading character.

So it is with Homer, so with Shakespeare. In the works of all great

poets there are, in fact, no minor characters at all; every character in

its place is the chief personage. Such poets are absolute monarchs, and

resemble the Emperor Paul of Russia, who, when the French ambassador

remarked that a man of importance in his empire was interested in a

certain matter, sharply interrupted the speaker with the memorable

words--"In my empire there is no man of importance except he to whom I

may happen to be speaking; and he is of importance only so long as I

address him." An absolute poet, who also holds power by the grace of

God, in like manner views that person in his intellectual realm as the

most important who at that particular moment is speaking through his

pen. From this art-despotism arises that wonderful perfection of the

most trivial and unimportant figures which we find in the works of

Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe.

If I have spoken rather harshly of Goethe's adversaries, I should have

cause to criticise his defenders still more severely, for most of the

latter, in their zeal, have been guilty of even greater follies. At the

head of those who have made themselves ridiculous in this respect is one

by the name of Eckermann, a writer not generally lacking in talent. In

the campaign against Pustkuchen, Carl Immermann, who is now our greatest

dramatic poet, won his spurs as a critic by publishing an excellent

_brochure_. Berlin chiefly distinguished itself on this occasion.

Goethe's leading champion, at all times, was Varnhagen von Ense, a man

whose heart is filled with thoughts grand as the universe, and who

expresses them in words as precious and as dainty as cut jewels. He is

the noble-minded man in whose judgment Goethe ever placed the most

reliance. Perhaps it may be well to mention here that Wilhem von

Humboldt once wrote an excellent book concerning Goethe. During the last

ten years every Leipsic Fair has brought to light a large number of

works on Goethe. Herr Schubart's studies of Goethe are among the marvels

of fine criticism. Herr Häring, whose _nom de plume_ is Willibald

Alexis, has written for various periodicals clever and valuable articles

on Goethe. Herr Zimmermann, professor at Hamburg, has, in his oral

lectures, given some most excellent criticisms of Goethe; in his

writings on dramaturgy we find similar thoughts, more briefly expressed,

perhaps, but more profound. At various German universities there were

courses of lectures on Goethe, and of all his works the public chiefly

devoted itself to the study of _Faust_. It was the theme of endless

dissertations and commentaries, and became the secular Bible of the

Germans.

I would be no true German if I wrote of _Faust_ without giving

expression to some explanatory thoughts concerning it, for from the

greatest thinker down to the most insignificant penny-a-liner, from

philosophers down to professors of philosophy, every one tries his wit

on this book. It is, in fact, as wide in its compass as the Bible; like

the latter, it embraces heaven and earth, mankind and its exegesis. The

subject matter of _Faust_ is the chief reason of its popularity, and its

selection from among the many folk-legends is a proof of Goethe's

profound judgment and genius, which ever seized on that which was

nearest and best. I may assume that the story of _Faust_ is familiar to

my readers, for the book has recently become celebrated in France also;

but I know not if the original legend itself is known here. I know not

if at your annual rustic fairs there is hawked for sale a little book of

grey, fleecy paper, badly printed, with rude woodcuts, containing a

circumstantial account of how the arch-sorcerer, Johannes Faustus, a

learned scholar who had studied all the sciences, finally threw away his

books and made a compact with the devil, by which he was enabled to

enjoy all the material pleasures of the earth, but in return for which

his soul was to be given up to the powers of hell. During the middle

ages the populace attributed all extraordinary intellectual powers to a

compact with the devil, and Albertus Magnus, Raimond Lullus,

Theophrastus Paracelsus, Agrippa von Nettesheim, and Roger Bacon in

England, were held to be magicians, sorcerers, and conjurers. But the

ballads and romances tell much stranger stories concerning Doctor

Faustus, who is reputed to have demanded from the devil not only a

knowledge of the profoundest secrets of nature, but also the most

realistic physical pleasures. This is the self-same Faust who invented

printing,[11] and who lived at a time when people began to inveigh

against the strictness of church authority, and to make independent

researches. With Faust the mediæval epoch of faith ends, and the modern

era of critical, scientific investigation begins. It is, in fact, of the

greatest significance that Faust should have lived, according to popular

tradition, at the very beginning of the Reformation, and that he himself

should have invented printing, the art which gave science the victory

over faith; an art, however, which has also robbed us of the catholic

peace of mind, and plunged us into doubts and revolutions, and had

finally delivered us into the power of Satan. But no! knowledge,

science, the comprehension of nature through reason, eventually gives us

the enjoyments of which faith, that is, Catholic Christianity, has so

long defrauded us; we now recognise the truth that mankind is destined

to an earthly, as well as to a heavenly equality. The political

brotherhood which philosophy inculcates is more beneficial to us than

the purely spiritual brotherhood, for which we are indebted to

Christianity. The thought becomes transformed into words, the words

become deeds, and we may yet be happy during our life on this earth. If

in addition to this, we also attain after death that heavenly felicity

which Christianity promises so assuredly, so much the better.

The German people had, for a long time, felt a profound presentiment of

this, for the Germans themselves are that learned Doctor Faust; they

themselves are that spiritualist, who, having at last comprehended the

inadequateness of the spiritual life alone, reinstates the flesh in its

rights. But still biassed by the symbolism of Catholic poetry, in which

God is pictured as the representative of the spirit, and the devil as

that of the flesh, the rehabilitation of the flesh was characterised as

an apostasy from God, and a compact with the devil.

But some time must yet elapse ere the deeply-significant prophecy of

that poem will be fulfilled as regards the German people, and the spirit

itself, comprehending the usurpation of spiritualism, become the

champion of the rights of the flesh. That will be the Revolution, the

great daughter of the Reformation.

Less known in France than _Faust_ is Goethe's _West-Ostlichen Divan_, a

later work with which Madame de Staël was unacquainted, and which

demands especial notice. It reveals the peculiar thoughts and feelings

of the Orient in graceful ballads and pithy proverbs, which exhale an

atmosphere of fragrance and passion, like a harem of love-sick

odalisques, with the dark eyes of gazelles, and amorous white arms. The

reader is filled with a mixed sensation of shuddering and desire, like

lucky Caspar Debureau, when he stood at the top of a ladder in

Constantinople, and beheld _de haut en bas_ what the Commander of the

Faithful is wont to see only _de bas en haut_. At times a feeling steals

o'er the reader as if he lay comfortably stretched upon a Persian

carpet, smoking a long Turkish pipe, filled with the yellow tobacco of

Turkestan, while a negress slave gently waves over him a variegated fan

of peacock feathers, and a handsome boy serves a cup of Mocha

coffee--the sweetest and most blissful sense of life and its pleasures

has Goethe expressed in these verses--in verses so dainty, so

felicitous, so airy, so ethereal, that one is lost in astonishment that

such things are possible in the German language. In addition to all

this, the book contains the most beautiful prose descriptions and

explanations of the customs and manners of the Orient, the patriarchal

life of the Arabs; and withal Goethe is as easy, merry, and harmless as

a child, and yet as full of wisdom as a greybeard. Goethe's prose in

this work is as translucent as the green sea, when, on a bright, calm

summer afternoon, we can look far down into the depths below, and catch

glimpses of ancient drowned cities, and all their fabulous splendours.

Then, at times, that prose is as magical and as mysterious as the

firmament, when the darkness of twilight has lifted, and the grand

Goethean thoughts appear, pure and golden, like the stars. The charm of

this book is indescribable; it is a salaam sent by the Occident to the

Orient, and many a quaint and curious flower is gathered there;

passionate red roses, snowdrops white as a maiden's bosom, comical

dandelions, purple digitalis like long human fingers, contorted

crocuses, and peeping slyly forth, in the midst, modest German violets.

The meaning of this salaam is that the Occident, grown weary of its

frigid, meagre spiritualism, seeks again to refresh itself amid the

wholesome physical pleasures of the Orient. After Goethe had expressed

in _Faust_ his aversion to abstract spiritualism, and his desire for

realistic enjoyments, in writing the _West-Ostlichen Divan_ he threw

himself with his whole soul, as it were, into the arms of sensualism.

Hence it is of the utmost significance that this work appeared soon

after _Faust_. It was the last phase of Goethe's genius, and his example

was of the greatest influence upon literature. The Orient was now the

theme of our lyric poets. It may be worthy of mention, that while Goethe

so rapturously celebrated Persia and Arabia in his verses, he expressed

the most decided aversion to India. The bizarre and confused

characteristics of that country were repugnant to him, and perhaps this

dislike originated in the suspicion that some Catholic stratagem was at

the bottom of the Sanscrit studies of the Schlegels and their friends.

These men regarded Hindostan as the cradle of Catholicism; they claimed

to have discovered there the model of the Catholic hierarchy, the

doctrine of the trinity, of the incarnation, of penance, of atonement,

of the maceration of the flesh, and all their other favourite crotchets.

Goethe's antipathy towards India nettled these people not a little, and

A. W. Schlegel, with transparent malice, called him "a heathen converted

to Mahometanism."

Amongst the most noteworthy writings on Goethe which have appeared this

year is a posthumous work by Johannes Falk, entitled _Goethe aus

Persönlichen Umgange Dargestellt_. With the exception of a detailed

treatise on _Faust_, which, of course, must not be omitted, the author

of this book has given us most excellent sketches of Goethe; he has

depicted him in all the walks of life, naturally, impartially, with all

his virtues and all his failings. In this book we behold Goethe in his

relations to his mother, whose temperament was so wonderfully reflected

in that of her son; we see him as the naturalist, watching a caterpillar

developing into a butterfly; we see the great Herder expostulating with

him against the indifferentism with which he let the development of

humanity itself pass before him, unregarded; we behold him at the court

of the Grand Duke of Weimar, seated among the blonde court dames, making

merry improvisations, like Apollo guarding the flocks of King Admetus;

again we see him, with the haughtiness of a Dalai-Lama, refusing to

recognise Kotzebue; then we see the latter giving a public celebration

in honour of Schiller, in order thereby to depreciate Goethe; we see him

in all things, wise, handsome, amiable, a blessed and inspiring figure,

like the eternal gods.

In fact, that harmony of personal appearance with genius, which we

demand in eminent men, existed in its fullest degree in Goethe. His

outward appearance was as impressive as the thoughts that live in his

writings. His figure was symmetrical and majestic, and in that noble

form Grecian art might be studied as in an ancient statue. That stately

form was never bent in Christian humility; the features of that noble

countenance were never distorted with Christian self-reproach; those

eyes were never downcast with Christian remorse, nor turned devoutly

and tremulously towards heaven. No, his eyes had a godlike

steadfastness, for it is in general the distinctive mark of a god, that

his look is unmoved. Hence when Agni, Varuna, Yama, and Indra assume the

form of Nala at Damayanti's wedding, the latter recognises her lover by

the twitching of his eyes, for, as I have said, the eyes of a god are

always steadfast and unmoved.

Napoleon's eyes possessed this peculiarity, and hence I am convinced

that he also was a god. Goethe's eyes, even at an advanced age, remained

just as godlike as in his youth, and although time could whiten, it

could not bow that noble head. He always bore himself proudly and

majestically, and when he spoke he seemed to grow statelier still, and

when he stretched out his hand it seemed as though he could prescribe to

the stars the paths they should traverse. It is said that a cold,

egotistic twitching might be observed around the corners of his mouth.

But this trait is also peculiar to the eternal gods, and especially to

the father of gods, great Jupiter, to whom I have already likened

Goethe. When I visited him at Weimar I involuntarily glanced around to

see if I might not behold at his side the eagle with the thunderbolt in

its beak. I was about to address him in Greek, but, as I noticed that he

understood German, I told him in the latter language that the plums

along the roadside from Jena to Weimar were excellent. Many a long

winter's night I had pondered on the exalted and profound remarks I

should make to Goethe if I should ever see him. And now that I did at

last see him face to face, I told him that the plums of Saxony were

delicious. And Goethe smiled. He smiled with the same lips with which he

had once kissed the beautiful Leda, Europa, Danaë, Semele, and many

another princess or ordinary nymph.

_Les Dieux s'en vont._ Goethe is dead. He died on March 22nd, last year,

that memorable year in which the world lost its greatest celebrities. It

is as if death had become suddenly aristocratic, and sought to designate

particularly the great ones of this earth by sending them

contemporaneously to the grave. Perhaps death wished to found a _pairie_

in the shadowy realms of Hades, in which case its _fournée_ were well

chosen. Or, perhaps, on the contrary, death sought during the past year

to favour democracy by destroying these great celebrities, and their

authority over the minds of men, and thus to bring about an intellectual

equality. Was it out of respect or from irreverence that death spared

the crowned heads during the past year? In a fit of abstraction death

did raise his scythe over the King of Spain, but he recollected himself

in time, and spared his life. During the past twelve months not a single

king has died. _Les Dieux s'en vont_--but the kings are still with us.

* * * * *

Schelling's influence on the romantic school was chiefly of a personal

nature, but in addition to this, by the philosophy of nature which came

into vogue through him, the poets have elevated themselves to much more

profound conceptions of nature. One portion let themselves be absorbed

with all their human emotions into nature; others remembered a few magic

formulas, with which to conjure out of nature something that possessed

human form and speech. The former were the genuine mystics, and

resembled in many respects the devotees of India, who dissolve in

nature, and at last begin to feel as if they and nature were one. The

latter were rather sorcerers, who by their own will summoned forth even

hostile spirits; they resembled those Arabian magicians, who, at their

caprice, could endow stones with life, and turn living beings into

stone. Novalis belonged to the first class, Hoffman to the latter.

Novalis saw marvels in everything, and charming marvels they were. He

listened to the language of the plants, he knew the secret of every

young rose, finally he identified himself with all nature, and when

autumn came and the leaves began to fall, then he died. Hoffman, on the

contrary, saw spectres in everything; they nodded to him from every

Chinese tea-pot, and from under each Berlin periwig. He was a sorcerer

who transformed human beings into beasts, and beasts into human beings,

even into royal Prussian court-counsellors. He would raise the dead from

their graves, but life itself turned away from him, as from some gloomy

spectre. He realised this; he felt that he himself had become a ghost.

All nature was to him an imperfect mirror, in which he saw, distorted in

a thousand ways, the cast of his own dead face; and his works are naught

else than a horrible shriek of terror in twenty volumes.

Hoffman does not belong to the romantic school. He did not come into

contact with the Schlegels, and was in no way affected by their

tendencies. I only mention him in contrast to Novalis, who was

peculiarly a poet of that school. Novalis is less known here than

Hoffman, who has been introduced to the French public by Loeve-Veimars

in a very attractive form, and thus has acquired a great reputation in

France. In Germany, Hoffman is by no means _en vogue_, but he was so

formerly. In their time his works were much read, but only by persons

whose nerves were either too strong or too weak to be affected by less

violent accords. The minds that were really intellectual, and the

natures that were truly poetical, would have nothing to do with him.

Such as these much preferred Novalis. But frankly confessed, Hoffman was

a much greater poet than Novalis, for the latter with his idealistic

pictures ever floats in the blue skies; while Hoffman, notwithstanding

all his grotesque bogies, still clings fast to earthly realities. Just

as the giant Anteus remained strong and invincible so long as his feet

rested on mother earth, and lost his strength the moment Hercules held

him aloft; so also the poet is strong and mighty as long as he does not

forsake the _terra firma_ of reality, but becomes powerless as soon as

he attempts to float enraptured in the blue ether.

The great resemblance between these two poets lies in the fact that

their poetry was really a disease. It has been said that it does not

come within the province of the critic, but of the physician, to pass

judgment on their writings. The rosy glow in Novalis's poems is not the

hue of health, but the hectic flush of consumption; and the brilliant

light in Hoffman's fantastic conceptions is not the flame of genius, but

of fever.

But have we a right thus to criticise--we, who are ourselves not blest

with robust health? and especially now, when all literature appears like

one vast hospital? or is poetry, perhaps, a disease of humanity, as the

pearl is the morbid matter of the diseased oyster?

Novalis was born May 2nd, 1772. His real name was Hardenberg. He loved a

young lady who was afflicted with consumption, and died of that dread

disease. This sad experience left its impress upon all his writings. His

life was but a dreamy, lingering death, and he also died of consumption

in 1801, before he had completed his twenty-ninth year, or his romance.

This romance, in its present shape, is only the fragment of a great

allegorical poem, which, like the divine comedy of Dante, was to embrace

all earthly and celestial matters. Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the

celebrated poet, is the hero of this romance. We see him as a youth in

Eisenach, the pretty little village which lies at the foot of the

ancient Wartburg, which has been the scene of some of the greatest, as

well as some of the most stupid, deeds; for here Luther translated his

Bible, and here, also, a few silly Teuto-maniacs burned Kamptz's

_Gendarmerie-Codex_. At this burg was held the famous tournament of

minstrelsy, at which, among other poets, Heinrich von Ofterdingen met

Klingsohr of Hungary in the perilous duel of poetry, an account of which

has been handed down to us in the Manessa collection. The head of the

vanquished was to be forfeited to the executioner, and the Landgraf of

Thuringia was the judge. Wartburg, the scene of his later glory, towers

ominously over the hero's cradle, and we behold him, in the beginning of

Novalis's romance, under the paternal roof at Eisenach. "The parents are

abed and asleep, the old clock on the wall keeps up its monotonous

ticking, the wind howls and the windows rattle; ever and anon the room

is lit up by fitful glimpses of the moon.

"The youth lay tossing restlessly on his couch, thinking of the stranger

and his narratives. 'It is not the treasures that have awakened within

me such an unspeakable longing,' said he to himself; 'far from me is all

avarice; but I yearn to behold the blue flower. It is always in my

thoughts, and of nought else can I think or muse. I never felt so

strangely before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if in

my sleep I had passed into another world; for in the world in which I

formerly dwelt, who would there have concerned themselves about flowers?

And so strange a passion for a flower, I never heard of there.'"

These are the opening words of _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_, and the whole

romance is full of the fragrance and the radiance of the blue flower. It

is remarkable and significant that the most fabulous personages in this

book seem as well known to us, as though in earlier times we had lived

in friendly, confidential intercourse with them. Old memories awaken,

Sophia's features are so familiar, and memory brings back long avenues

of beech trees, the scene of so many promenades and tender caresses. But

all this lies dimly back of us, like some half-forgotten dream.

The muse of Novalis was a fair and slender maiden, with earnest blue

eyes, golden hyacinthine tresses, smiling lips, and a small mole on the

left side of the chin, for I imagine his muse to be the self-same maid

through whom I first became acquainted with his works, as I saw the red

morocco-bound, gilt-edged volume, containing _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_,

in her dainty fingers. She always dressed in blue, and her name was

Sophia. She lived a few stations from Göttingen with her sister, the

postmistress--a merry, buxom, ruddy-cheeked dame, whose full bust,

surmounted with stiff white lace, resembled a fortress. This fortress,

however, was impregnable; the good dame was a very Gibraltar of virtue.

She was an industrious, practical housewife, and yet her only pleasure

consisted in reading Hoffman's romances. Hoffman was just the writer who

could agitate her coarse-grained nature and awaken pleasant emotions.

But her pale, delicate sister was disagreeably affected at the mere

sight of one of Hoffman's books, and if she accidentally laid hands on

one, she shrank from the touch. She was as delicate as a sensitive

plant, and her words were so fragrant and melodious, that, taken

together, they were poetry. I have written down some of her sayings, and

they are poems wholly after the manner of Novalis, only more tuneful

and ethereal. One of them, which she recited to me as I bade her

farewell ere setting out on my travels to Italy, is an especial

favourite of mine. The time is autumn; the scene, a garden wherein there

had been an illumination, and we hear the conversation between the last

glimmering taper, the last rose, and a wild swan. The morning mists

approach, the solitary light flickers and dies out, the rose leaves

fall, and the swan unfolds its white wings and flies away to the south.

For Hanover abounds with wild swans that seek the warm south in autumn,

and return again in summer. They probably spend the winter in Africa,

for in the breast of a dead swan an arrow was once found, which

Professor Blumenbach recognised as of African origin. The poor bird,

with the arrow in its breast, had returned to its northern nest to die.

But many a swan, when pierced by such an arrow, may not have the

strength for such a journey, and is left helpless in the burning

deserts, or with wearied pinions is perched on some Egyptian pyramid,

gazing with longing eyes towards the north, towards the cool summer home

in Hanover.

Late in the autumn of 1828, as I returned from the south, also with a

burning arrow in my heart, my route led through the vicinity of

Göttingen, and I stopped over at the dwelling-place of my old friend,

the postmistress, in order to change horses. A long time had elapsed

since I last saw her, and a woeful change had taken place in the good

dame. Her buxom form still resembled a fortress,--but a ruined and

dismantled fortress. The bastions were razed, no sentinels were on

guard, and her heart, the citadel, was broken. The postillion, Pieper,

informed me that she had even lost her relish for Hoffman's novels, but,

as a substitute, she indulged all the more freely in brandy at bedtime.

The latter is a much simpler plan, for the brandy is always at hand,

whereas the novels must be procured at the Deurlich circulating library

at Göttingen, at some hours' distance. Postillion Pieper was quite

diminutive, and looked as sour as if the contraction in his size was the

result of drinking vinegar. When I asked the fellow concerning the

postmistress's sister, he answered, "She will soon die; she is already

an angel," How good a being must she have been to draw from such a

churlish person the remark, "She is an angel." While saying this, he was

driving off the fluttering, cackling poultry, by kicking at them with

his high top-boots. The house, once so white and cheerful, had changed

for the worse, like its mistress; its colour was now a sickly yellow,

and the walls were wrinkled with fissures. In the court-yard lay broken

vehicles, and a postillion's scarlet mantle, soaking wet, was hanging on

a post to dry. Mademoiselle Sophia stood by the window, reading, and

when I approached her, I found it was a gilt-edged volume, bound in red

morocco; it was Novalis's _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_. She had read and

re-read this book, until its pages had inoculated her with consumption,

and now she looked like a luminous shadow. But her beauty was now so

ethereal, that the sight of it touched me most painfully. I took both of

her pale, thin hands in mine, and looked steadily into her blue eyes,

and then I asked, "Mademoiselle Sophia, how are you?" "I am well," she

answered, "and I shall soon be still better!" Then she pointed out of

the window to a little hillock, in the new churchyard, not far from the

house. On this barren mound stood a small, thin, solitary poplar, almost

leafless, and it swayed to and fro in the autumn winds, not like a

living plant, but like the ghost of a tree.

Mademoiselle Sophia now lies under that poplar, and the gilt-edged, red

morocco volume, Novalis's _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_, which she left me

as a souvenir, lies on the desk before me as I write. I have used it in

the composition of this chapter.

* * * * *

Jean Paul Richter anticipated the Young Germany school in its most

marked tendency. The latter, however, occupied with practical questions,

avoided the abstract intricacies, the abrupt mannerisms, and the

unenjoyable style of Jean Paul Richter. No Frenchman with a clear,

well-regulated mind can form a conception of that peculiar style. Jean

Paul's style is a structure consisting entirely of very small

compartments, which are sometimes so narrow that when one thought

encounters another, their heads collide and bruise each other. From the

ceiling are suspended hooks, on which Jean Paul hangs all sorts of

ideas, and the walls are full of secret drawers, in which he conceals

emotions. No German author is so rich as Jean Paul in ideas and in

emotions; but he never permits them to ripen; and, notwithstanding his

wealth of mind and heart, he excites more astonishment than pleasure.

Thoughts and sentiments which would grow into colossal trees, if

permitted to strike root properly and develop all their branches,

blossoms, and leaves--these he uproots while they are still

insignificant shrubs, mere sprouts even; and whole intellectual forests

are thus served up to us as an ordinary dish. Now, although curious,

this is decidedly unpalatable fare, for not every stomach can digest

such a mess of young oaks, cedars, palms, and banana trees. Jean Paul is

a great poet and philosopher; but no one can be more inartistic than he

in his modes of thought and work, In his romances he has brought to

light some truly poetical creations, but all his offspring carry with

them a long umbilical cord in which they become entangled and choke.

Instead of thought he gives us his thinking itself. We see the material

activity of his brain; he gives us, as it were, more brain than thought,

and meanwhile the flashes of his wit skip about, like the fleas of his

heated imagination. He is the merriest, and, at the same time, the most

sentimental of authors. In fact, sentimentality always finally overcomes

him, and his laughter abruptly turns into tears. He sometimes disguises

himself as a gross, beggarly fellow; but then, like stage princes, he

suddenly unbuttons the coarse overcoat and reveals the glittering

insignia of his rank.

In this respect Jean Paul resembles Laurence Sterne, with whom he has

been often compared. The author of _Tristram Shandy_, when apparently

sunk in the most vulgar trivialities, possesses the art of rising by

sudden transitions to the sublime, reminding us that he is of princely

rank and the countryman of Shakespeare. Jean Paul, like Laurence Sterne,

reveals in his writings his own personality, and lays bare his own human

frailties; but yet with a certain awkward bashfulness, especially in

sexual matters. Laurence Sterne parades before the public entirely

unrobed, quite naked; but Jean Paul has only holes in his trousers. A

few critics erroneously believe that Jean Paul possessed more true

feeling than Sterne, because the latter, whenever the subject under

treatment reaches a tragic elevation, suddenly assumes a merry, jesting

tone. Jean Paul, on the contrary, if the subject verges in the least

towards the serious, gradually becomes lachrymose, and composedly lets

his tears trickle. Sterne probably felt more deeply than Jean Paul, for

he is a greater poet. Laurence Sterne, like Shakespeare, was fostered

by the muses on Parnassus. After the manner of women, they early spoiled

him with their caresses. He was the special pet of the pale Goddess of

Tragedy. Once, in a paroxysm of fierce tenderness, she kissed him so

passionately, with such fervour, with so ardent a pressure of her lips,

that his young heart began to bleed, and at once understood all earthly

sorrows, and was filled with a boundless compassion. Poor young

poet-heart! But the younger sister, the rosy Goddess of Mirth, sprang

quickly to his side, took the suffering lad into her arms, and sought to

cheer him with song and merriment. She gave him as playthings the mask

of comedy and the jingling bells, and pressed a soothing kiss upon his

lips; and with that kiss she imbued him with all her levity, all her

frolicsome mirth, all her sportive wit.

And since then Sterne's heart and Sterne's lips have drifted into a

strange contradiction. Sometimes, when his soul is most deeply agitated

with tragic emotion, and he seeks to give utterance to the profound

sorrows of his bleeding heart, then, to his own astonishment, the

merriest, most mirth-provoking words will flutter from his lips.

* * * * *

The Baron de la Motte-Fouqué was formerly a major in the Prussian

military service, and is one of the most conspicuous of those

poet-heroes, or hero-poets, whose lyre and sword won renown during the

so-called war of liberation.

His laurels are of the genuine kind. He is a true poet, and the

inspiration of poetry is on his brow. Few authors receive such universal

homage as did our good Fouqué. Now his readers consist only of the

patrons of the circulating libraries. But that public is still large

enough, and Fouqué may boast that he was the only one of the romantic

school who was also received with favour by the lower classes. At the

time when at the aesthetic tea-gatherings in Berlin it was the fashion

to sneer at the fallen knight, in a little Hartz village I became

acquainted with a lovely maiden, who spoke of Fouqué with a charming

enthusiasm, and blushingly confessed that she would gladly give a year

of her life if she might but once kiss the author of "Undine"--and this

maiden had the prettiest lips that I have ever seen.

"Undine" is indeed a charming poem. This poem is itself a kiss! The

genius of poetry kissed the sleeping spring, and as it opened its

laughing eyes all the roses exhaled their sweetest perfumes, and all the

nightingales sang; and the fragrance of the roses and the songs of the

nightingales, all this did our good Fouqué clothe in words, and called

it "Undine."

I know not if this novel has been translated into French. It is the

story of a lovely water-fairy who has no soul, and who only acquires one

by falling in love with an earthly knight. But, alas! with this soul she

also learns human sorrows. Her knightly spouse becomes faithless, and

she kisses him dead. For in this book death also is only a kiss.

This "Undine" may be regarded as the muse of Fouqué's poetry. Although

she is indescribably beautiful, although she suffers as we do, and

earthly sorrows weigh full heavily upon her, she is yet no real human

being. But our age turns away from all fairy-pictures, no matter how

beautiful. It demands the figures of actual life; and least of all will

it tolerate water-fays who fall in love with noble knights. This

reactionary tendency, this continual praise of the nobility, this

incessant glorification of the feudal system, this everlasting

knight-errantry balderdash, became at length distasteful to the

educated portion of the German middle classes, and they turned their

backs on the minstrel who sang so out of time. In fact, this everlasting

sing-song of armours, battle-steeds, high-born maidens, honest

guild-masters, dwarfs, squires, castles, chapels, minnesingers, faith,

and whatever else that rubbish of the middle ages may be called, wearied

us; and as the ingenuous hidalgo Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué became

more and more immersed in his books of chivalry, and, wrapped up in the

reveries of the past, he ceased to understand the present, and then even

his best friends were compelled to turn away from him with dubious

head-shakings.

His later writings are unenjoyable. The faults of his earlier works are

repeated, only more glaringly. His knights are combinations of iron and

sentimentality; they have neither flesh nor common-sense. His heroines

are mere semblances of women; they are dolls, whose golden tresses

daintily curl over features that are as pretty and as expressionless as

flowers. Like the works of Walter Scott, so also do Fouqué's romances of

chivalry remind us of the fantastic tapestries known as gobelins, whose

rich texture and brilliant colours are more pleasing to our eyes than

edifying to our souls. We behold knightly pageantry, shepherds engaged

in festive sports, hand to hand combats, and ancient customs, charmingly

intermingled. It is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow,

brilliant superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouqué, as among the

imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portraying--not the inner

nature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and

appearance--was carried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and

frivolous style is still in vogue in Germany, as well as in England and

France. Even if the portrayal no longer attempts to glorify the age of

chivalry, but is directed to our modern affairs, it is still the same

mannerism, which grasps not the essential points of phenomena, but

merely the superficial and the accidental. In lieu of a knowledge of

mankind, our recent novelists evince a profound acquaintance with

clothes; they perhaps justify themselves by the old saying: "The tailor

makes the man." How different from the older, especially the English,

novelists! Richardson gives us the anatomy of the emotions. Goldsmith

treats of the affections of his heroes pragmatically. The author of

_Tristram Shandy_ reveals to us the profoundest depths of the human

soul; he opens, as it were, a crevice of the soul; permits us to take

one glance into its abysses, into its paradise and into its filthiest

recesses; then quickly lets the curtain fall over it. We have had a

front view of that marvellous theatre, the soul; the arrangements of

lights and the perspective have not failed in their effects, and while

we imagined that we were gazing upon the infinite, our own hearts have

been exalted with a sense of infinity and poetry. Fielding at once takes

us behind the scenes, and there shows us all the emotions covered with

deceitful rouge; the gross motives that underlie the most generous

deeds; the colophony that is afterwards to blaze aloft into enthusiasm;

the bass drum, while on it repose the drumsticks, which are destined to

sound the furious thunder of passion. In short, he shows us the whole

interior machinery by which theatrical effects are produced; he exposes

the colossal deceit by which men assume an appearance far different from

the reality, and through which the truth and gladness of life are lost.

But what need to cite the English as an example, since our own Goethe

has given us in his _Wilhelm Meister_ the best model of a novel?

Fouqué's romances are a legion in number; he is one of the most prolific

of authors. _The Magic Ring_ and _Thiodolph the Icelander_ merit a

specially favourable mention. His metrical dramas, which were not

intended for the stage, contain great beauties. _Sigurd the

Serpent-slayer_ is a bold work, in which the ancient Scandinavian

mythology is mirrored with all its gigantesque and magical

characteristics. Sigurd, the chief personage of the drama, is a colossal

creation. He is as strong as the rocky crags of Norway, and as fierce as

the sea that beats around their base. He has as much courage as a

hundred lions, and as much sense as two asses.

Herr Ludwig Uhland is the true lyric poet. He was born in Tübingen in

1787, and is now an advocate at Stuttgard. This author has written a

volume of poems, two tragedies, and two treatises on Walther von der

Vogelweide, and on the French troubadours. The latter are two small

historical researches, and give evidence of a diligent study of the

middle ages. The tragedies are entitled _Louis the Bavarian_, and _Duke

Ernest of Suabia_. I have not read the former, nor is it considered the

better of the two. The latter, however, contains many beauties, and

pleases by its noble and exalted sentiments. It is fragrant with the

sweet breath of poetry, such as we fail to find in the pieces that reap

so much applause on the stage at the present day. German fidelity is the

theme of the drama, and we see it here strong as an oak, defying all

storms. German love blossoms, scarcely visible, in the far distance, but

its violet-perfume appeals the more touchingly to our hearts. This

drama, or rather this poem, contains passages which are among the most

precious pearls of our literature; notwithstanding which, the

theatre-going public received, or rather rejected, the piece with

indifference. I will not censure the good people of the pit too

severely for that. These people have certain needs, which they demand

that the poet shall gratify. The poet's productions must not merely

express the sympathies of his own heart, but must accord with the

desires of the audience. The latter resembles the hungry Bedouin in the

desert, who thinks he has found a sack of peas, and opens it eagerly,

but, alas! they are only pearls.

* * * * *

...Twenty years ago I was a lad, and what overflowing enthusiasm would I

then have lavished upon Uhland! At that time I could better appreciate

his merits than now; we were then more akin in modes of thought and

feeling. But so much has happened since then! What then seemed to me so

grand: all that chivalry and Catholicism; those cavaliers that hack and

hew at each other in knightly tournaments; those gentle squires and

virtuous dames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minnesingers;

the monks and nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling with prophetic powers;

colourless passion, dignified by the high-sounding title of

renunciation, and set to the accompaniment of tolling bells; a ceaseless

whining of the Miserere; how distasteful all that has become to me since

then! But once, it was, oh! so different. How often have I sat on the

ruins of the old castle at Düsseldorf on the Rhine, declaiming the

loveliest of all Uhland's poems:--

A wandering shepherd, young and fair,

Beneath the royal castle strayed;

And when the princess saw him there,

Love's longing thrilled the maid.

And then with accents sweet, she said,

"Oh! would that I might come to thee!

How white the lambkins there; how red

The flowerets on the lea."

The youth made answer from below,

"If thou would'st but come down to me!

How rosy red thy cheeks do glow,

How white those arms I see."

And every morn, with silent pain,

He drove his flock the castle by,

And gazed aloft, until again

His love appeared on high.

"Oh, welcome! welcome! princess sweet!"

His joyous tones rang bright and clear.

Then softly she in turn did greet,

"Kind thanks, my shepherd dear."

Cold winter fled, spring came again,

The flowerets blossomed far and near.

The shepherd sought his love;--in vain!

No more did she appear.

"Oh, welcome! welcome! princess fair!"

His words were mournful now, and drear.

A spirit voice rang through the air,

"Farewell, my shepherd dear."

And as I sat on the ruins of the old castle and recited this poem, at

times I heard the water-fays of the Rhine mockingly, and with comic

pathos, take up my refrain, and from amidst the sighing and the moaning

of the river that ran below I could hear in faint tones----

"A spirit voice ring through the air,

'Farewell, my shepherd dear.'"

But I would not let myself be disturbed by the bantering of the

mermaids, even when at some of the most beautiful passages in Uhland's

poems they tittered ironically. At that time I modestly ascribed the

tittering to myself, particularly when the twilight was sinking into

darkness, and I raised my voice somewhat to overcome the mysterious

feeling of awe with which the old castle ruins inspired me, for there

was a legend that the ruins were haunted by a headless woman. At times I

seemed to hear the rustling of her silken gown, and my heart beat

quickly;--that was the time, and that the place, to be an enthusiast

over the poems of Ludwig Uhland.

I hold the same volume again in my hands, but twenty years have flown

since then, and I have seen much and learned much. I no longer believe

in headless human beings, and the old ghost story has no longer power to

move me. The house wherein I sit and read is situated on the Boulevard

Montmartre; the fiercest turmoil of the day breaks in tumultuous billows

around this spot, and loud and shrill are heard the voices of the modern

epoch. First, a burst of laughter; then a heavy rumbling; next, drums

beating quick time; and then, like a flash, the national guards dash by

in quick march; and every one speaks French. And is this the place to

read Uhland's poems? Thrice have I again declaimed the concluding lines

of the same poem, but I do not feel the keen, unspeakable pain that once

thrilled me when the little princess died, and the handsome shepherd lad

so pathetically calls to her, "Oh, welcome! welcome! princess fair!"

"A spirit voice rang through the air,

'Farewell, my shepherd dear.'"

Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for this class of poems also partly arises

from my experience that the most painful love is not that which fails to

win possession of the object of its affections, or loses her through

death. In truth, it is more painful to fold the loved one in our arms,

and yet have her worry us with her contrariness, and her silly caprices,

until night and day are rendered unendurable, and we are finally forced

to close our heart against her who is most precious, and send the dear

plague of a woman off in a post chaise--

"Farewell, oh! princess fair!"

Verily, more grievous than the loss through death is the loss through

life; for instance, when the loved one in the spirit of mischievous

coquetry turns away from us; when she insists upon going to a masked

ball, to which no respectable person dare escort her; and when there,

with jaunty dress and roguish curls, takes the arm of the first scamp

that comes along, and leaves you all alone.

"Farewell, my shepherd dear!"

Perhaps Herr Uhland himself fared no better than ourselves. Perhaps his

temperament has changed since then. With a few exceptions, he has

produced no new poems in twenty years. I cannot believe that this

beautiful poet soul was so stingily endowed by Nature, and had but one

spring-time. No, I explain Uhland's silence as the result of the

contradiction between the tendencies of his muse and his political

position. The elegiac poet, in whose ballads and romances the praises of

the Catholic-feudal past were sung so beautifully; the Ossian of the

middle ages has since then become a member of the assembly of notables

in Wurtemburg, a zealous champion of popular rights, and a bold advocate

of the equality of all citizens, and of freedom of opinion. Herr Uhland

has proved the absolute sincerity of his democratic and Protestant

convictions by the great personal sacrifices that he has made in their

behalf. In his earlier days he fairly earned the poet's laurels, and now

he has also won the bays of civic virtue. But just because he was so

honest in his sympathy for the modern epoch, he could no longer sing the

olden songs of the olden time with the former fervour. His Pegasus was a

knightly steed that gladly trotted back to the past, but obstinately

refused to budge when urged forward into modern life; and so our worthy

Uhland smilingly dismounted, quietly unsaddled the unruly steed, and led

it back to the stable. There it remains to this very day; like its

colleague, the famous war-horse Bayard, it possesses all possible

virtues, and only one fault; it is dead.

It will not have escaped keener eyes than mine, that the stately

war-horse, decked with its brilliant coat of arms and proudly-waving

plumes, was never rightly suited to its _bourgeois_ rider, who, instead

of boots with golden spurs, wore shoes with silk stockings; and who,

instead of helm, wore the hat of a Tübingen professor. Some claim to

have discovered that Herr Ludwig Uhland never was wholly in sympathy

with his theme; that in his writings, the naïve, rude, powerful tones of

the middle ages are not reproduced with idealised fidelity, but rather

they are dissolved into a sickly, sentimental melancholy. It is claimed

that Uhland has taken up into his temperament the strong, coarse strains

of the heroic legends and folk-songs, and boiled them down, as it were,

to make them palatable to our modern public. And in truth, when we

closely observe the women in Uhland's poems, we find that they are only

beautiful shadows, embodied moonshine; milk flows in their veins, and

sweet tears in their eyes; that is, tears which lack salt. If we compare

Uhland's knights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to us as

if the former were composed of suits of leaden armour, which were

entirely filled with flowers, instead of flesh and bones. Hence Uhland's

knights are more pleasing to delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts,

who wore heavy iron trousers, and were huge eaters, and still greater

drinkers.

But that is no reason for finding fault with Herr Uhland; he did not

seek to give an exact copy of the German past; perhaps he only wished to

please us with a fanciful reflection, and so he mirrored a flattering

picture by the crepuscular lights of his genius. This perhaps lends an

especial charm to his poems, and wins for them the admiration and

affection of many gentle and worthy persons. The pictures of the past

cast some of their magic glamour over us, even in the feeblest

conjuration. Even the men who have warmly espoused the cause of

modernism always retain a secret sympathy for the heritages of the olden

time. Those ghostly voices of the past, no matter how faint their

re-echo, marvellously stir our souls. Hence it is to be readily

understood that the ballads and romances of our worthy Uhland not only

received the most cordial applause from the patriots of 1813, from pious

youths and sentimental maidens, but also from more powerful and more

modern minds.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

[A considerable portion of this, which is one of Heine's most

important works, marked by luminous exposition and bold and

brilliant ideas, is here presented. It was published in French,

under the title _De l'Allemagne depuis Luther_, in the _Revue des

Deux Mondes_ for 1834, and shortly afterwards it appeared in

German, terribly mutilated by the censor, like nearly everything

that Heine wrote. It was written at the suggestion of Prosper

Enfantin, and dedicated to him, as at that time, in Heine's

opinion, the foremost champion of human progress. The translation

here given is Mr. Fleishman's; it has been revised and brought

closer to the original.]

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION (1852).

...The book which lies before you is a fragment, and shall remain a

fragment. To be candid, I would prefer to leave the book wholly

unprinted; for since its first publication my views concerning many

subjects, particularly those which relate to religious questions, have

undergone a marked change, and much that I then asserted is now in

opposition to my better convictions. But the arrow belongs not to the

archer when once it has left the bow, and the word no longer belongs to

the speaker when once it has passed his lips, especially when it has

been multiplied by the press.... At that time I was yet well and hearty;

I was in the zenith of my prime, and as arrogant as Nebuchadnezzar

before his downfall.

Alas! a few years later, a physical and spiritual change occurred. How

often since then have I mused over the history of that Babylonian king

who thought himself a god, but who was miserably hurled from the summit

of his self-conceit, and compelled to crawl on the earth like a beast,

and to eat grass (probably it was only salad). This legend is contained

in the grand and magnificent book of Daniel; and I recommend all godless

self-worshippers to lay it devoutly to heart. There are, in fact, in the

Bible many other beautiful and wonderful narrations, well deserving

their consideration; for instance, the story of the forbidden fruit in

Paradise, and the serpent which already six thousand years before

Hegel's birth promulgated the whole Hegelian philosophy. This footless

blue-stocking demonstrates very sagaciously how the absolute consists in

the identity of being and knowing; how man becomes God through

knowledge, or, what amounts to the same thing, how God arrives at the

consciousness of himself through man. To be sure, this formula is not so

clear as in the original words: "If ye eat of the tree of knowledge, ye

shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Dame Eve understood of the

whole demonstration only this--that the fruit was forbidden; and because

it was forbidden she ate of it. But no sooner had she eaten of the

tempting apple than she lost her innocence, her naïve guilelessness, and

discovered that she was far too scantily dressed for a person of her

quality, the mother of so many future kings and emperors, and she asked

for a dress--truly, only a dress of fig-leaves, because at that time

there were as yet no Lyons silk fabrics in existence, and because there

were in Paradise no dressmakers or milliners--oh, Paradise! Strange,

that as soon as a woman arrives at self-consciousness her first thought

is of a new dress!

...Officious, pious Christian souls seem very anxious to know how my

conversion was brought about, and seem desirous that I should impose

upon them an account of some wonderful miracle. With true Christian

importunity they inquire if I did not, like Saul, behold a light when on

the way to Damascus; or if, like Balaam, the son of Beor, I was not

riding a restive ass, which suddenly opened its mouth and discoursed

like a human being. No, ye credulous souls, I never journeyed to

Damascus. Even the name would be unknown to me if I had not read the

"Song of Songs," wherein King Solomon compares the nose of his beloved

to a tower looking towards Damascus. Nor have I ever seen an ass--that

is, no four-footed one--that spoke like a human being; whereas I have

met human beings in plenty that every time they opened their mouths

spoke like asses. In fact, it was neither a vision, nor a seraphic

ecstasy, nor a voice from heaven, nor a remarkable dream, nor any

miraculous apparition, that brought me to the path of salvation. I owe

my enlightenment simply to the reading of a book! one book! yes, it is a

plain old book, as modest as nature, and as simple; a book that appears

as work-day-like and as unpretentious as the sun that warms, as the

bread that nourishes us; a book that looks on us as kindly and benignly

as an old grandmother, who, with her dear tremulous lips, and spectacles

on nose, reads in it daily: this book is briefly called _the_ book--the

Bible. With good reason it is also called the Holy Scriptures: he that

has lost his God can find Him again in this book, and towards him who

has never known Him it wafts the breath of the divine word. The Jews,

who are connoisseurs of precious things, well knew what they were about

when, at the burning of the second temple, they left in the lurch the

gold and silver sacrificial vessels, the candlesticks and lamps, and

even the richly-jewelled breast-plate of the high-priest, to rescue only

the Bible....

* * * * *

...Distinguished German philosophers who may accidentally cast a glance

over these pages will superciliously shrug their shoulders at the

meagreness and incompleteness of all that which I here offer. But they

will be kind enough to bear in mind that the little which I say is

expressed clearly and intelligibly, whereas their own works, although

very profound, unfathomably profound--very deep, stupendously deep--are

in the same degree unintelligible. Of what benefit to the people is the

grain locked away in the granaries to which they have no key? The masses

are famishing for knowledge, and will thank me for the portion of

intellectual bread, small though it be, which I honestly share with

them. I believe it is not lack of ability that holds back the majority

of German scholars from discussing religion and philosophy in proper

language. I believe it is a fear of the results of their own studies,

which they dare not communicate to the masses. I do not share this fear,

for I am not a learned scholar; I, myself, am of the people. I am not

one of the seven hundred wise men of Germany. I stand with the great

masses at the portals of their wisdom. And if a truth slips through, and

if this truth falls in my way, then I write it with pretty letters on

paper, and give it to the compositor, who sets it in leaden type and

gives it to the printer; the latter prints it, and then it belongs to

the whole world.

The religion of Germany is Christianity. Therefore I shall have to

relate what Christianity is, how it became Roman Catholicism, how out

of this sprang Protestantism, and out of the latter German philosophy.

Inasmuch as I am about to speak of religion, I beg beforehand of all

pious souls not to be uneasy. Fear naught, ye pious ones! No profane

witticisms shall offend your ears. It is true that these are yet

necessary in Germany, where, at this juncture, it is important to

neutralise ecclesiastical power. For there we are now in the same

situation that you in France were before the Revolution, when

Christianity was yet in the closest union with the old _régime_. The

latter could not be overthrown so long as the former maintained its sway

over the masses. Voltaire's keen ridicule was needed ere Samson could

let his axe descend. But neither the ridicule nor the axe proved

anything; they only effected something. Voltaire could only wound the

body of Christianity. All his jests gathered from the annals of the

Church, all his witticisms against the doctrines and public worship of

the Church, against the Bible, this holiest book of humanity, against

the Virgin Mary, that loveliest flower of poesy, the whole encylclopædia

of philosophical shafts which he launched against the clergy and

priesthood, wounded only the outward, mortal body of Christianity, not

its inner being, not its profound spirit, nor its eternal soul.

For Christianity is an idea, and as such is indestructible and immortal,

like every idea. But what is this idea?

Just because this idea has not yet been clearly comprehended, and

because the essential has been mistaken for the fundamental, there is as

yet no history of the Church. Two antagonistic factions write the

history of the Church, and contradict each other incessantly. But the

one as little as the other will ever distinctly state what that idea

really is which is the underlying principle of Christianity, of its

symbolism, of its dogma, of its public worship, and which strives to

reveal itself throughout its whole history, and has manifested itself in

the actual life of Christian nations.

...How this idea was historically evolved, and disclosed itself in the

world of phenomena, may be discovered as early as the first centuries

after the birth of Christ, if we study impartially the history of the

Manicheans and the Gnostics. Although the first were branded as

heretics, and the latter defamed, and both anathematised by the Church,

yet their influence on the doctrines of the Church was lasting. Out of

their symbolism Catholic art was developed, and their modes of thought

penetrated the whole life of Christendom. The First Cause of the

Manicheans does not differ much from that of the Gnostics. The doctrine

of the two principles, the good and the evil, constantly opposing each

other, is common to both. The Manicheans derived this doctrine from the

ancient Persian religion, in which Ormuz, the light, is at enmity with

Ahriman, the darkness. The others, the real Gnostics, believed in the

pre-existence of the good principle, and accounted for the rise of the

evil through emanation, through the generation of Æons, which, the

farther they are removed from their origin, the more vicious and evil do

they become.

...This Gnostic theory of the universe originated in ancient India, and

brought with it the doctrine of the incarnation of God, of the

mortification of the flesh, of spiritual introspection and

self-absorption. It gave birth to the ascetic, contemplative, monkish

life, which is the most logical outgrowth of the Christian principle.

This principle has become entangled among the dogmas of the Church, and

has been able to express itself but very obscurely in the public

worship. But everywhere we find the doctrine of the two principles

prominent; the wicked Satan is always contrasted with the good Christ.

Christ represents the spiritual world, Satan the material; to the former

belong our souls, to the latter our bodies. Accordingly, the whole

visible world, which constitutes nature, is originally evil, and Satan,

the prince of darkness, through it seeks to lure us to ruin. Therefore

it behoves us to renounce all the sensuous joys of life, to torture the

body, which is Satan's portion, in order that the soul may the more

majestically soar aloft to the bright heavens, to the radiant kingdom of

Christ.

This theory of the universe, which is the true fundamental idea of

Christianity, spread itself with incredible rapidity, like a contagious

disease, over the whole Roman empire. These sufferings, at times strung

to fever-pitch, then again relaxing into exhaustion, lasted all through

the middle ages; and we moderns still feel in our limbs those

convulsions and that debility. And if among us, here and there, there be

one who is already convalescent, he cannot flee from the universal

hospital, and feels himself unhappy as the only healthy person among

invalids.

When once mankind shall have recovered its perfect life, when peace

shall be again restored between body and soul, and they shall again

interpenetrate each other with their original harmony, then it will be

scarcely possible to comprehend the factitious feud which Christianity

has instigated between them. Happier and more perfect generations, begot

in free and voluntary embraces, blossoming forth in a religion of joy,

will then smile sadly at their poor ancestors, who held themselves

gloomily aloof from all the pleasures of this beautiful world, and

through the deadening of all warm and cheerful sensuousness almost

paled into cold spectres. Yes, I say it confidently, our descendants

will be more beautiful, more happy, than we; for I have faith in

progress; mankind is destined to be happy, and I have a more favourable

opinion of the Divinity than those pious souls who imagine that He

created mankind only to suffer. Already here on earth, through the

blessings of free political and industrial institutions, would I seek to

found that millennium which, according to the belief of the pious, is

not to be until the day of judgment. The one is perhaps as visionary a

hope as the other, and possibly there will be no resurrection of

humanity, either in the politico-moral or in the apostolic-Catholic

sense. Perhaps mankind _is_ doomed to eternal misery; the masses _are_

perhaps condemned to be for ever trodden under foot by despots, to be

plundered by their accomplices, and to be jeered at by their lackeys.

Alas! in that case we must seek to maintain Christianity, even if we

recognise it to be an error. Barefoot, and clad in monkish cowls, we

must traverse Europe, preaching the vanity of all earthly good, and

inculcating resignation. We must hold up the consoling crucifix before

scourged and derided humanity, and promise, after death, all the seven

heavens above.

...The final fate of Christianity is dependent upon our need of it. This

religion has for eighteen centuries been a blessing to suffering

humanity; it was providential, divine, holy. All that it has benefited

civilisation, by taming the strong and strengthening the weak, by

uniting the nations through like emotions and a like language, by all

that its panegyrists extol--all these are insignificant in comparison

with that great consolation which in itself is bestowed upon mankind.

Eternal praise is due to that symbol of a suffering God, the Saviour

with the crown of thorns, the Christ crucified, whose blood was a

soothing balsam dripping into humanity's wounds. The poet, in

particular, will reverently recognise the solemn grandeur of that

symbol. The whole system of allegory, as expressed in the life and art

of the middle ages, will in all times excite the admiration of poets.

What colossal consistency in _the_ Christian art!--that is, in

architecture! How harmoniously those Gothic cathedrals are adapted to

the religious services of the Church, and how the fundamental idea of

the Church itself is revealed in them! Everything towers upward;

everything transubstantiates itself; the stone blossoms into branches

and foliage and becomes a tree; the fruits of the vine and of the

wheat-stalk become blood and flesh; man becomes God, and God becomes a

pure, abstract spirit. The Christian life during the middle ages is for

the poet a rich, inexhaustible store-house of precious materials. Only

through Christianity could, in this world, such varied phases

arise--contrasts so striking, sorrows so diverse, beauties so strange,

that one is inclined to believe that they never did exist in reality,

and that all was but a colossal fever-dream, a delirious fantasy of an

insane God. Nature herself appeared in those times fantastically

disguised; but notwithstanding that man, occupied with abstract

metaphysical speculations, turned peevishly away from her, yet at times

she awoke him with a voice so solemnly sweet, so deliciously terrible,

so enchanting, that he involuntarily listened and smiled, then shrank

back with terror, and sickened even unto death. The story of the

nightingale of Basle here comes to my mind, and, as it is probably

unknown to you, I will relate it.

In May 1433, at the time of the Ecumenical Council, a party of

ecclesiastics, prelates, learned scholars, and monks of every shades

took a walk in a grove near Basle, wrangling over theological

disputations, drawing hair-splitting distinctions, or arguing concerning

annates, expectatives, and reservations, debating whether Thomas of

Aquinas was a greater philosopher than Bonaventura, and what not! But

suddenly, in the midst of their abstract and dogmatical discussions,

they paused, transfixed, before a blooming linden-tree, on which sat a

nightingale, trilling and trolling the sweetest and tenderest strains.

The learned men were ravished with delight. The glowing melodies of

spring penetrated to their scholastic, musty, bookworm hearts, their

souls awoke from the mouldy, wintry sleep, they looked at one another in

astonished ecstasy. But finally one of them made the sagacious remark

that such things could not come of good, that the nightingale might be a

devil, and that this devil might be seeking through its sweet music to

decoy them from their pious conversations and to lure them to

voluptuousness and similar pleasant sins; and then he began to exorcise,

probably with the usual formula--"Adjuro te per cum, qui venturus est,

judicare vivos et mortuos," etc. It is said that at this conjuration the

bird replied, "Yes, I am an evil spirit!" and flew away, laughing. But

those who heard its song sickened that very night, and soon after died.

This legend needs no commentary. It bears distinctly the horrible

impress of a time when all that was sweet and lovely was denounced as

diabolical. Even the nightingale was slandered, and it was customary to

make the sign of the cross when she sang. The true Christian, like an

abstract spectre, walked timorously, with closed senses, amidst the

loveliness of nature.

...As regards the good principle, the same conception prevailed over all

the Christian countries of Europe. The Roman Catholic Church took care

of that, and whoever deviated from the prescribed faith was a heretic.

But in relation to the evil principle and the empire of Satan, different

views were held in different countries, and the Germanic North had quite

different conceptions from the Latin South. This was caused by the fact

that the Christian priesthood did not reject the previously existing

national gods as baseless fantasies of the brain, but conceded to them

an actual existence; asserting, however, that all these gods were

nothing but male and female devils, who, through the victory of Christ,

had lost their power over mankind, and now sought through wiles and

stratagems to lure them to sin. All Olympus was now transformed into an

airy hell; and if a poet of the middle ages sang of Grecian mythology

ever so beautifully, the pious Christian would persist in seeing therein

only devils and hobgoblins. The gloomy fanaticism of the monks alighted

with special severity on poor Venus: she was considered a daughter of

Beelzebub, and the good knight Tannhäuser tells her to her face--

"O Venus, lovely wife of mine,

You are but a she-devil!"

Tannhäuser had been enticed by her into that wondrous mountain-cavern

called the Venusburg, where, according to tradition, dwelt the beautiful

goddess with her nymphs and her paramours, beguiling the hours with the

most wanton carousings and dancing. Even poor Diana was not spared, and,

notwithstanding her previous reputation for chastity, similar scandals

were fastened on her good name. It is said that she, together with her

nymphs, indulged in nightly rides through the forest; hence the legend

of a strange midnight chase, by wild and furious hunters. This legend

reveals clearly the then pervading Gnostic theory of the degeneration

of the former divinities. In this transformation of the ancient national

religion the underlying principle of Christianity is most fully

manifested. The national religion of Europe in the North, even more than

in the South, was pantheism. All the mysteries and symbols of that

religion were founded on and had reference to a worship of nature; each

of the elements was regarded as the embodiment of some mysterious being,

and as such was revered and worshipped; in every tree dwelt a divinity,

and all nature swarmed with gods and goddesses. Christianity exactly

reversed this, and in place of gods it substituted devils and demons.

The cheerful figures of Grecian mythology, beautified as they were by

art, had taken root in the South along with Roman civilisation, and were

not so easily to be displaced by the hideous, weird, and satanic

divinities of the German North. The latter seemed to have been fashioned

without any particular artistic design, and even before the advent of

Christianity they were as sombre and as gloomy as the North itself.

Hence there could not arise in France so frightful a devil-dom as among

us in Germany, and even the witchcraft and sorcery of the former assumed

a cheerful guise. How lovely, fair, and picturesque are the popular

superstitions of France as compared with the bloody, hazy, and misshapen

monsters which loom gloomily and savagely from out the mists of German

legendary lore!

Those German poets of the middle ages who chose such themes as had

originated, or been first treated, in Brittany and Normandy, thereby

invested their poems with somewhat of the cheerfulness of the French

temperament. But the old Northern sombreness, of whose gloom we can now

scarcely form any idea, exercised full sway over such of our literature

as was distinctly national, and over such popular traditions as have

been orally transmitted. The superstitions of the two countries offer as

striking a contrast as that which exists between a Frenchman and a

German. The supernatural beings that figure in old French _fabliaux_ and

legends are bright and cheerful creations, and remarkable for a

cleanliness which is noticeably lacking in our filthy rabble of German

hobgoblins. French fairies and sprites are as distinguishable from

German spectres as a spruce and daintily-gloved dandy, jauntily

promenading the Boulevard Coblence, is different from a burly German

porter, carrying a heavy load upon his shoulders. A French nixen, such

as a Melusina, is to a German elf as a princess to a washerwoman. The

fay Morgana would stand aghast at sight of a German witch, her body

naked and besmeared with ointment, riding on a broom-stick to the

Brocken. The Brocken is no merry Avalon, but a rendezvous for all that

is weird and hideous. On the very summit of the mountain sits Satan, in

the shape of a black goat. The infamous sisterhood form a circle around

him and dance, and sing, "Donderemus! Donderemus!" Mingled in the

infernal din are heard the bleating of the goat and the shouting of the

demoniac crew. If, during the dance, a witch happens to drop a shoe, it

is an evil omen, and portends that she will be burned at the stake ere

the year ends. But all the terror which such a portent inspires is

forgotten amid the wild and maddening Berlioz-like music of the witches'

sabbath--and when in the morning the poor witch awakens from her

delirium, she finds herself lying, stark naked and tired, by the

glimmering embers of her hearth.

The most complete account of witches we find in the learned Dr. Nicolai

Remigius's _Demonology_. This sagacious man had the best opportunity to

learn the tricks of witches, as he officiated at their trials, and

during his time, in Lotharingia alone, eight hundred women were burned

at the stake, after trial and conviction. The trial was generally as

follows:--Their hands and feet were tied together, and then they were

thrown into the water. If they went under and were drowned, it was a

proof that they were innocent, but if they floated on the surface, they

were recognised as guilty and burned. Such was the logic of those

times.... When the learned Dr. Remigius had completed his great work on

witchcraft, he deemed himself so great a master of his subject as to be

able to work magic, and, conscientious man that he was, did not fail to

accuse himself before the courts; in consequence of which accusation he

was burned as a sorcerer.

...I must confess that Luther did not understand the real nature of

Satan. Whatever evil may be said of the devil, it cannot be denied that

he is a spiritualist. Still less did Luther understand the real nature

of Catholicism. He did not comprehend that the fundamental idea of

Christianity, the deadening of the senses, was too antagonistic to human

nature to be ever entirely practicable in life; he did not comprehend

that Catholicism was a concordat between God and the devil--that is to

say, between the spirit and the senses, in which the absolute reign of

the spirit was promulgated in theory, but in which the senses were

nevertheless practically reinstated in the enjoyment of their rights.

Hence a wise system of concessions allowed by the Church to the senses,

always, however, under formalities which cast a slur on every act of the

senses, and maintained the sham usurpation of the spirit. You might

yield to the tender impulses of your heart and embrace a pretty girl,

but you must confess that it was a flagrant sin, and for this sin you

must make atonement. That this atonement might be made with money was

as beneficial to humanity as useful to the Church. The Church imposed

fines, so to say, for every indulgence of the flesh; hence there arose

taxes on all sorts of sins, and there were pious colporteurs who, in the

name of the Roman Catholic Church, hawked for sale through the land

absolutions for every taxed sin. Such a one was that Tetzel against whom

Luther first entered the field.

...Leo X., the keen Florentine, the pupil of Politian, the friend of

Raphael, the Greek philosopher with the triple crown, bestowed by the

Conclave, probably because he suffered from a disease, nowise due to

Christian abstinence, which was then very dangerous, Leo of Medici, how

he must have smiled at the poor, chaste, simple-minded monk who imagined

that the evangelic gospels were the chart of Christianity, and that this

chart must be a truth! Perhaps he never comprehended what Luther was

aiming at, for at that time he was busily occupied with the building of

St. Peter's Cathedral, the cost of which was defrayed by the money

derived from these sales of absolutions, so that sin actually furnished

the means wherewith to build this church, which became thereby, as it

were, a monument to the lusts of the flesh, like that pyramid which an

Egyptian girl built with the money she had earned by prostitution. Of

this house of God it perhaps might be said more truly than of Cologne

Cathedral, that it was built by the devil. This triumph of spiritualism,

compelling sensualism itself to build its most beautiful temple--this

reaping from the multitude, by concessions made to the flesh, the means

wherewith to beautify spiritualism, was not understood in the German

North. For there, more easily than under the burning skies of Italy, was

it possible to practice a Christianity that should make the fewest

concessions to the senses. We Northerners are cold-blooded, and needed

not so many price-lists of absolution for sins of the flesh as the

fatherly Leo sent us. The climate makes the exercise of Christian

virtues easier for us; and when, on the 31st of October 1517, Luther

nailed to the door of St Augustine's Church his thesis against

indulgences, the city moat of Wittenberg was, perhaps, already frozen

over with ice thick enough for skating, which is a chilly pleasure, and

therefore no sin.

...In Germany the battle against Catholicism was nothing else than a war

begun by spiritualism when it perceived that it only reigned nominally

and _de jure_; whereas sensualism, through conventional subterfuges,

exercised the real sovereignty and ruled _de facto_. When this was

perceived, the hawkers of indulgences were chased off, the pretty

concubines of the priests were exchanged for plain but honest wedded

wives, the charming Madonna pictures were demolished, and there reigned

in certain localities a puritanism inimical to every gratification of

the senses. In France, on the contrary, during the seventeenth and the

eighteenth centuries, the war was begun by sensualism against

Catholicism, when it saw that while it, sensualism, reigned _de facto_,

yet every exercise of its sovereignty was restrained in the most

aggravating manner by spiritualism, and stigmatised as illegitimate.

While in Germany the battle was fought with chaste earnestness, in

France it was waged with licentious witticisms, and while there

theological disputations were in vogue, here many satires were the

fashion.

...Truly, Jansenism had much more cause than Jesuitism to feel aggrieved

at the delineation of Tartuffe, and Molière would be as obnoxious to the

Methodists of to-day as to the Catholic devotees of his own time. It is

just because of this that Molière is so great, for, like Aristophanes

and Cervantes, he levelled his _persiflage_ not only at temporary

follies, but also against that which is ever ridiculous--the inherent

frailties of mankind. Voltaire, who always attacked only the temporary

and the unessential, is in this respect inferior to Molière.

...Then why my aversion to spiritualism? Is it something so evil? By no

means. Attar of roses is a precious article, and a small vial of it is

refreshing, when one is doomed to pass one's days in the closely-locked

apartments of the harem. But yet we would not have all the roses of life

crushed and bruised in order to gain a few drops of the attar of roses,

be they ever so consoling. We are like the nightingales, that delight in

the rose itself, and derive as delicious a pleasure from the sight of

the blushing, blooming flower as from its invisible fragrance.

...But there was one man at the Diet of Worms who, I am convinced,

thought not of himself, but only of the sacred interests which he was

there to champion. That man was Martin Luther, the poor monk whom

Providence had selected to shatter the world-controlling power of the

Roman Catholic Church, against which the mightiest emperors and most

intrepid scholars had striven in vain. But Providence knows well on

whose shoulders to impose its tasks; here not only intellectual but also

physical strength was required. It needed a body steeled from youth

through chastity and monkish discipline to bear the labour and vexations

of such an office.

...Luther was not only the greatest, but also the most thoroughly German

hero of our history. In his character are combined, on the grandest

scale, all the virtues and all the faults of the Germans, so that, in

his own person, he was the representative of that wonderful Germany.

For he possessed qualities which we seldom find united, and which we

usually even consider to be irreconcilably antagonistic. He was

simultaneously a dreamy mystic and a practical man of action. His

thoughts possessed not only wings, but also hands; he could speak and

could act. He was not only the tongue, but also the sword of his time.

He was both a cold, scholastic word-caviller, and an enthusiastic,

God-inspired prophet. When, during the day, he had wearily toiled over

his dogmatic distinctions and definitions, then in the evening he took

his lute, looked up to the stars, and melted into melody and devotion.

The same man who could scold like a fish-wife could be as gentle as a

tender maiden. At times he was as fierce as the storm that uproots oaks;

and then again he was mild as the zephyr caressing the violets. He was

filled with a reverential awe of God. He was full of the spirit of

self-sacrifice for the honour of the Holy Ghost; he could sink his whole

personality in the most abstract spirituality, and yet he could well

appreciate the good things of this earth, and from his mouth blossomed

forth the famous saying--