VI YOUNG GERMANY (continued 6)

August Lewald, who to all intents and purposes belonged to the group, procured the annulment of the prohibition of his periodical, Europa, by making a declaration that he had never printed anything inimical to the Government, to religion, or to morality, and was consequently in no wise compromised by any of the mischievous proceedings of Young Germany. Eduard Duller, who had been co-editor with Gutzkow of the paper, Phoenix, publicly disclaimed all sympathy with the aims of Young Germany and declared his principles to be perfectly different from those of his former fellow-workers. Theodor Mundt professed that he had always kept clear of "that manufactured category," Young Germany, as it was plain that such an appellation must sooner or later become a literary nickname (Ekelname); and in the preface to his new periodical, Dioskuren für Wissenschaft und Kunst, he declared that his aim was to counteract the literary excesses of recent times by the display of a settled conviction devoid of any principle of destructiveness (worin nichts Verheerendes wuchert).

Meekest of all, perhaps, was Heinrich Laube, he who had been the most daring and defiant of the Young Germans, he whom Heine had called "one of those gladiators who die in the arena"—an appreciation which now seemed somewhat ridiculous. He affirmed, in the Allgemeine Zeitung, that in promising Dr. Gutzkow to contribute to his new review, he had never dreamt of aiding and abetting the party known by the name of Young Germany in its attacks on the existing conditions of society, much less in its attempts to disturb and overturn them. On the contrary, he had from the first plainly signified that he did not identify himself with the movement.

On New Year's day, 1836, in the announcement of his Mitternachtszeitung, which he had obtained permission to publish on condition that his name did not appear as editor, he wrote that he had become another man, that literature was no longer to him an expression of political desires, that it was not his intention to take any part in the literary disputes of the moment, "the rough-and-tumble fights with uncombed hair and unwashed hands"; no, it had long been his idea to form "a neo-Romantic school," and in it he would have no disintegrating, destructive elements. He would support the existing, not make war upon it. He would not identify himself with Menzel (actually!) but neither could he take part with the so-called Young Germany. He who had been the most daring of them all was the quickest and most adroit in wheeling round.

Day after day, too, as was to be expected, the newspapers contained declarations by the different university professors who had been incautious enough to promise their co-operation in the Deutsche Revue. Ulrici, Eduard Gans, Hotho, Rosenkranz and Trendelenburg, Hegelians and Anti-Hegelians, all, one after the other, cleared themselves from the charge of complicity. They repented with their official souls. They vied with each other in their utter repudiation of Gutzkow.

Heine did not belong to the number of those who lose their courage or their heads in a difficulty. And in any case, partly because of his established reputation, partly because of the personal security ensured by his residence abroad, this interdict was not such a serious blow to him as to the others. On the 28th of January 1836, after receiving intimation of the prohibition of his books, he addressed a solemn protest to the Federal Diet, a proceeding about which he immediately afterwards jokes in a private letter to his publisher. In this protest he expresses his astonishment at having been judged without a trial, and without having been given any opportunity to defend himself. He reminds the Federal Diet that Martin Luther did not meet with such treatment at the hands of the Holy Roman Empire—not that he would think of comparing himself with Luther, "but the pupil naturally appeals to the precedent of his master." But what he especially desires to protest against is his compulsory silence (which he was privately determined to break as soon as possible) being taken for an admission of culpable intentions, or even for a disavowal of his earlier writings. To Laube, of whose new attitude he was still ignorant, he wrote about the same time that, in the matter of politics, it was, for the present, allowable to make any number of concessions, political forms being of no consequence as long as the conflict for the highest life-principles was still going on; but they must hold to their right of free discussion of religious and moral topics, or there would soon be an end of all Protestant liberty of thought. Laube, as we know, finding himself obliged to give in to a certain extent, gave in all round at once, struck simultaneously his political, religious, and moral flags.

It was a slight consolation to the sufferers that the informer did not go unpunished. Heine wrote Ueber den Denunzianten and Börne wrote Menzel der Franzosenfresser ("The Frenchman-eater"), which is with reason regarded as his wittiest and at the same time most warm-hearted production.

But the more severe punishment came from Heine, who threw himself upon his victim with all his tiger-like strength, and shook him till there was nothing left of him but a shapeless, ridiculous bundle.

Heine points out how carefully Menzel has chosen the time for making his accusations, a time when the leaders of the movement were either in exile, or silent, or in safe keeping behind bolts and bars. He exposes Menzel's hypocrisy, showing how, as long as he was connected with Gutzkow, he looked on silently, though he knew Christianity to be in peril of its life. He is quite ready to give him credit for "a certain physical morality"—for a man can be virtuous alone, but to be vicious he must have a companion. Herr Menzel's personal appearance stands him in good stead when he is desirous to flee from vice. Heine has far too high an opinion of the good taste of vice to be able to believe that it would run after a Menzel. Poor Goethe was not so fortunately gifted in this particular. Of Menzel's political opinions Heine is afraid to speak for political reasons. Nor can he say what he thinks of his private life (as if by a printer's error Privatschelmenleben is substituted for Privatmenschenleben) in the first instance for want of space.

Never did Heine write anything at once so insulting and so crushing.

And how did matters stand with Gutzkow, who at the early age of twenty-four had become a kind of centre of literary events, and upon whom "the Goliath of the Philistine army" had fallen? For a moment he was astonished and cast down. It was his first instructive experience of life. His sin was that he had expressed his feelings naïvely and honestly in a second-rate novel, and its result was that he now found himself denounced as a plague of society, mocked at by his enemies, forsaken and disowned by his friends. With perfect calm he heard himself compared to the men who had prepared for the enormities perpetrated at Minister under Jan van Leyden—division of property, marriage with twelve wives, &c. He was inexperienced enough to look forward to the legal proceedings against him with expectations of victory, and when he was arrested at Mannheim, he went to prison with a feeling of relief. In prison he did not hear the yelling of the press; he heard nothing but the squeaking of the mice that ran over his bed. He could lead a peaceful life, a life of uninterrupted, quiet production. He wrote his novel Seraphine and a work entitled Philosophic der That und des Ereignisses ("Philosophy of Action and Event"), a kind of criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of History. When he came out of prison he took up his life-work again with firm determination, but for a time wrote anonymously and expressed himself more cautiously.

About a year before this he had fallen in love with a young girl in Berlin, and become engaged to her. But the Berlin newspapers called him an atheist. The young lady's mother was a foolish, hysterical woman. One day she would embrace Gutzkow, the next threaten to throw a knife at him and shriek to her daughter, "Choose between him and me!" As the wisdom of allowing her daughter to unite her fate with Gutzkow's became more and more questionable, the mother's amiable days became fewer, the unamiable more frequent, and in the end the young lady, as an obedient daughter, drew back altogether. This episode had made a tremendous impression on Gutzkow's young heart. It had taught him that to hold convictions contrary to those of the people one lives amongst isolates a man even in private life, and that he who sets the opinion of his neighbours at defiance cannot expect to be successful in life or in love.

His friends behaved no better to him. No sooner was he released from prison than he was overwhelmed with reproaches and complaints by persons to whom he had previously promised literary employment, and who were now not only disappointed in their hopes, but compromised by the patronage he had extended to them.

His first disappointment in love led to one of his best shorter stories, Der Sadducäer von Amsterdam. And the disappointment, combined with the general disillusionment, produced the frame of mind which characterises the dramatised version of the story which he published many years later under the title of Uriel Acosta—undoubtedly his best drama, probably his best work.

The hero is a historic personage, Gabriel, afterwards Uriel Acosta, born in 1594, a religious philosopher of Jewish nationality. His parents were baptised Christians, but he himself, on account of his disbelief in Christianity, was obliged to leave his native land, Portugal, and take refuge in Holland. Then he threw in his lot with the Jews, but soon began to publish works in which the Jewish doctrines were as freely criticised as the Christian. For this he was condemned to pay fines, and in the end was sentenced to a most humiliating penance. After public acknowledgment and recantation of his errors, he was to lie on the ground at the threshold of the synagogue and allow himself to be trodden under foot by the whole congregation of the faithful. After seven years of persecution he submitted to the sentence, but immediately afterwards, in despair at having retracted his opinions, shot himself (in 1647). He was the forerunner, and, if we may believe tradition, the teacher of Spinoza.

In the little old-fashioned story, Der Sadducäer von Amsterdam, the most important personages of the future drama are outlined. Judith, the vacillating and finally faithless woman, beloved of Acosta, was very evidently suggested by the inconstant Berlin lady. The style is artless and weak. Spinoza is introduced as follows: "She called, and her only child, a boy of seven, came running up to his uncle, whom he easily recognised in the moonlight. Bare your heads! That boy was Baruch Spinoza!"

What attracted Gutzkow as a young man to this theme was evidently its pathos, its being the story of the first martyr for free-thought.

In our days we read of such a life without being remarkably impressed by it. The spiritually emancipated know that all the advance that has been made amounts to this, that they are now tolerated. The life that they have lived has so accustomed them to hear all that they hold highest condemned, and all that they regard as base or foolish extolled, that no story of this kind affects them much.

It was different with the generation of 1830 in Germany. Even the fact that Uriel Acosta sued for pardon and recanted did not lessen Gutzkow's interest in him. In the novel he writes: "We who have been, as it were, born into a state of constant martyrdom for the sake of our convictions, who have lived in it all our lives, must refrain from condemning a man who had the courage to protest against the dogmas of a fanatical, intolerant religion, but who, nevertheless, was capable of cringing beneath the hand that had chastised him." He depicts the confusion in Uriel's soul: Faith is the blind man's staff; his eyes are suddenly opened; but they are utterly unaccustomed to distinguish objects; they cannot, like the staff to which he has been so long accustomed, save him from falling; and so he gropes more helplessly than before.

After the storm raised by Menzel had passed in all its fury over Gutzkow's head, the story of Acosta inevitably acquired quite a new significance for him. Considering it now, he saw not only its purely dramatic possibilities, but the correspondence of its main features with the main features of his own life story. He, too, had been placed under ban and interdict; he, too, after being cursed, had been deserted; he, too, had paid the penalty of intrepid thought; he, too, had been flung on the ground before the threshold of the injured Church, and the whole multitude had passed over him and trampled on him.

In 1846, in Paris, under the influence of the acting of great tragedians, Gutzkow dramatised the story. He made various alterations in it. To increase the interest of the plot, he idealised the chief female character. In the tragedy of Uriel Acosta, Judith is the betrothed of another; Uriel is her master. But when the Rabbis, with solemn ceremony, pronounced the terrible curse, when all draw back from him and he is left alone on one side of the stage, whilst the words:

"Fluch dem Freund Der Dir im Elend je die Treue hält! Nie giebt sich Dir ein liebend Herz des Weibes,"[2]

are being spoken, she crosses the stage and places herself by his side with the famous and beautiful speech ending with the line:

"Er wird geliebt! Glaubt besseren Propheten!"[3]

Of a personage who hardly appears at all in the novel, Gutzkow made an imperishable character, the best and most original in the drama, the aged Chief Rabbi, Ben Akiba. This old man has in reality only one conclusive speech, which he repeats again and again to Uriel and to the others:

"Es war alles da." (This has all been before.)

Admirable words! Ben Akiba is age, that has seen all these things before, seen the Church attacked, seen the Church triumphant, seen sceptics and champions arise, seen them humiliated, defeated, dead, and buried. The others believe that this is something new; it is all old, it all leads to no result. Ben Akiba is dogmatic conservatism in human form; he is experience, shaking its heavy head. If youth were to listen to him, despairing indifference would be the inevitable result.

Uriel lets himself be persuaded to recant. He does it for his mother's and Judith's sake. His old, blind, believing mother comes to him, and in a scene which never fails to affect the audience, persuades him to recant and submit to the ignominious punishment—persuades only by her silent dignity and the strength of her love, without a single entreaty to do this or anything else for her sake. Uriel takes the step, hoping that it will remove a weight from his mother's heart and make it possible for him to marry Judith. But whilst he is still in prison preparing for the penance, his mother dies, and Judith is forced to marry Ben Jochai. He degrades himself in vain. Judith poisons herself, and he (the drama in this point keeping to fact) shoots himself.

By reason of its theme, the tragedy of Uriel Acosta occupies a unique place in the German literature of the day. It is a tragedy of free-thought, a drama that gives us a better idea than anything else does of the period which produced it—a period of energetic struggle for liberty, and of still more energetic oppression—and of the spirit of that Young Germany which was so gallant in advance, but so prone to defection and retractation. It is a play, too, which bears unmistakable testimony to its author's qualities of head and heart. Any one who compares Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta with Heine's Almansor, will subscribe to the affirmation already made, that the best men of Young Germany in their best moments displayed a manly earnestness which we do not find in Heine.

On the German stage Uriel Acosta has now long been a favourite play. The pure style and the treatment of the subject remind us of Lessing's Nathan der Weise, but in energy and pathos Gutzkow in this case surpasses Lessing. In spite of some weak parts, such as the Spinoza scene, the dramatic construction is excellent.

Of all Gutzkow's works, this play has had the widest circulation. It has been translated into all the Slavonic and all the Latin languages, into English, Hungarian, and Swedish.

In Germany it was for a time, as Gutzkow himself aptly remarked, a sort of barometer indicating the state of public opinion. When the ecclesiastical reaction was in the ascendant, it was prohibited in many of the theatres. When there was a change of system, the prohibition was cancelled. It is significant that in Austria its performance was always permitted in the provinces, but that the Concordat with the Pope stood in the way of its being played in the Burg Theater of Vienna. As was to be expected, the play was long in reaching Denmark; it was first played there in the Nineties.

After 1835 Gutzkow writes nothing childish or crude. From this time onwards he is the great, indefatigable literary worker; a student and critic who possessed the faculty of discerning and explaining the relation in which all characters, past or present, stood to the requirements and problems of his day; an acute distinguisher of the various drifts of the times; a psychologist distinguished for his understanding of individual character. His Goethe (1836) is a thoughtful little work, in the first instance a protest against Menzel; his long series of portraits (Zeitgenossen afterwards Säkularbilder) show qualities which somewhat later stood him in good stead as a novelist; his Life of Börne (1840) is a tribute to the memory of that progenitor of Young Germany and a challenge to Heine, whose injudicious and ungenerous work on Börne had lowered him in the estimation of the young generation.

A special interest attaches to Gutzkow's dramatic attempts from the fact that he and Laube were the first German authors of any position since the days of Kleist to connect themselves with the theatre and to win an honourable place for themselves on the German stage. Gutzkow makes a laboured beginning with sentimental dramas that no longer satisfy the public taste. His Richard Savage, oder der Sohn einer Mutter (1839) is from beginning to end a high-flown extravaganza. A talented English poet, who has grown up in ignorance of his parentage, discovers his mother in a beautiful, brilliant, aristocratic woman of the world, who refuses to acknowledge him or to have anything whatever to do with him. The play is a series of representations of his fruitless attempts to win this mother's cold heart. Werner, oder Herz und Welt (1840), is a pathetic, middle-class drama, turning on a theme on which Gutzkow rang many changes, the struggle in a man's heart between an old attachment and a more recently formed connection. Heinrich Werner has allowed himself to be adopted by people in a position above his own. He has been ennobled under the name of von Jordan, and has deserted a poor but charming young girl in order to marry a lady of position. But in his new, affluent circumstances, he misses his former plain, studious life, and, most of all, Marie Winter, the girl to whom he had been engaged, and whom he cannot forget. He suddenly meets her again as governess in his own house. He is long distracted between his duty to his wife and his attraction to this girl, whom he is determined to love only platonically, but whom he really loves above everything. At last things come to a crisis. The wife asserts her rights, rights that Heinrich refuses to acknowledge. His morality is a higher, a freer than hers. She "shudders at his principles." The knot is finally cut by a deus ex machinâ. A young friend of Heinrich's comes to an agreement with Marie that he and she will marry, and so prevent the breaking up of the family. The tragic motive is thus, we observe, deprived of its point.

The first of Gutzkow's plays that it still gives one a reasonable amount of pleasure to see is Zopf und Schwert ("Pigtail and Sword"), written in 1843. It is a play which has kept its place on the German stage, but which never gained a firm footing outside of Germany from the fact of its being a species of national drama. The beat of a Prussian's heart is felt in it. Gutzkow's aim was to represent Frederick William I. and his court in a comedy like those which Scribe was bringing out so successfully about the same time. The historic appreciation is, however, far from being so superficial as in Scribe's comedies. Gutzkow had an eye for the admirable as well as for the comical qualities of the miserly family tyrant, the monarch of Spartan severity. But the very fact of the play being a comedy made a really profound study of the character an impossibility. And it was not Gutzkow's habit, and still less was it Laube's, to investigate into historical characters and situations until they arrived at the historic, as opposed to the traditional truth. Their history was simply the vehicle of a more or less cleverly concocted plot. We have only to open the first volume of Carlyle's Frederick the Great to find such an immensely more powerful and impressive picture of the eccentric Prussian king with his tall grenadiers, that Gutzkow's in comparison shrinks into a mild pleasantry. And we have only to look at a few pages of the Memoirs of Gutzkow's heroine, Wilhelmine of Bayreuth, to see that in the relations between her and her father there was no suggestion of comedy. But, putting aside all thought of historical correctness, we have a very pretty intrigue-play, with a historic colouring which cannot fail to appeal to lovers of Prussia. Zopf und Schwert is a species of light-hearted pendant to Kleist's serious Prins von Homburg.

Of the other plays written by Gutzkow in the Forties, Das Urbild des Tartüffe ("The Prototype of Tartuffe") has been the most successful, but it is a much over-estimated work. A very charming little work is Der Königslieutenant, an unassuming play, written for Goethe's centenary, and treating of him in his youthful days.

The long historical novels, Die Ritter vom Geist ("The Knights of the Spirit"), Der Zauberer von Rom ("The Roman Magician"), &c., which Gutzkow wrote during the reaction period after 1848, and which immensely strengthened his hold over the minds of his contemporaries, do not come within the scope of the present work. They were the forerunners of Spielhagen's long series of novels.

Next to Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube (born in Sprottau, in Silesia, in 1806) was the most eminent member of the new group. He is a clear-cut type, a man with plenty of fresh, vigorous talent, exuberant spirits, an intuitive perception of what is effective, a gift of slight, but in most instances adequate character delineation, and, to start with, many daring but shallow and second-hand ideas. He is not devoid of feeling, nor totally devoid of earnestness, but his distinguishing quality is his brisk, energetic practicalness. Between 1826 and 1832 he studied theology at Halle and Breslau. In 1832 he embarked on the career of a journalist in Leipzig. In his unpedantic literary style, as also in his outward appearance, there was something that seemed to point to Slavonic blood in his veins. As a student he loved to go about in a Polish braided coat, and eccentric caps and cloaks of his own invention. He wrote with a fluency and vehemence, with a crude naturalness and a want of exactitude which were not German. His blood was hot and flowed quickly; he had the sanguine, choleric temperament, without a touch of melancholy.

As a member of a student's union (Burschenschaft) and because he had given too free expression to his sympathy with the Revolution of July and its results in Germany, he was, in 1834, expelled from Saxony and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment in Berlin. In the introduction to his drama, Monaldeschi, we find an account of his life in prison, of the monotony of that beautiful summer of 1834, which he spent in his cell, without a book—nothing but a bed, a table, a stool, and a pitcher of water. He also gives an indirect and more effective description of the same experience in the Third Part of Das junge Europa, where Valerius, upon scraps of paper procured with the greatest difficulty, writes his impressions during a long confinement in a Prussian prison.

We know what his conduct was after the Federal Council had prohibited his writings as belonging to the Young German school; but to judge him fairly we must remember that this blow came upon him immediately after his release, and that, in spite of his subsequent cautious behaviour, he was again, soon after his marriage in 1837, condemned to imprisonment for participation in the doings of the Burschenschaften. This time the punishment was mild, thanks apparently to the protection of Prince Pückler-Muskau. The place of imprisonment was a country house on the Prince's property of Muskau; for a cell he was given a hall; instead of a skylight he had eight windows, looking in three different directions. Even a short daily walk in the famous park was permitted. He might read and write as much as he chose. His wife shared his imprisonment. From this time onwards he shows extreme moderation in politics. When, in 1848, he is elected a member of the German National Assembly, he sides, not with the republican, but with the "hereditary-imperial" party.

Laube makes his début in literature as a disciple of Heine. His Reisenovellen, a long series of volumes, are the direct offspring of the Reisebilder. But along with the influence of Heine we trace that of Heinse. From Heine Laube takes liveliness and ingenuity of style, and also to a certain extent the personal coxcombry by which we are sometimes very unpleasantly affected; but it is from Wilhelm Heinse, for whom he had an extreme admiration, and whose works he edited, that he derives the undisguised sensualism which displays itself in a positive cult of woman's outward charms constantly and loudly proclaimed. In Heinse's case this worship of female form and colouring, this adoration of the fleshly, is more primitive, more naïvely Bacchanalian, more sincerely religious, than in Laube's. Laube at times offends by coarseness, at times by an almost personal boastfulness of woman-killing qualities, and at times it is too perceptible that he is writing for the purpose of annoying his respectable neighbours.

When, in his old age, he began to republish his youthful works, the new generation were astounded by the breaches of good taste which youthful readers some forty years before had admired, and many assented to the severe judgment which had lately been passed on him by Emil Kuh in the chapter on Young Germany contained in his book on Hebbel. But it is unfair to allow a little coarseness and want of taste here and there to keep us from estimating Laube's work in its integrity.

In the Reisenovellen, in spite of the off-hand way in which they are written, there is little originality. At the very beginning, in the division entitled Leipzig, with its French sympathies and its reverence of Napoleon, there is too strong a suggestion of the Reisebilder. Laube, like Heine, in his childhood saw the great Emperor; so he gives us to understand, but in such an uncertain manner that we are left in doubt as to whether it was in a dream or in reality; and Laube, too, has—in the person of Gardy the dragoon—his drummer Legrand.

Those who wish to get a real, full impression of what Laube was as a young man, ought to read his novel, Das junge Europa (4 vols. 1833-37). A whole, long stage of his development is placed clearly before us in this now pardonably forgotten book, which retains its interest only for the historian. Its three parts—the Poets, The Soldiers, The Citizens—are three works differing very much from each other in kind and in quality.

In the First Part the author is completely under the influence of Heinse's Ardinghello. "The Poets" is a sort of prose hymn to female beauty and free love, in the old-fashioned form of a novel in letters, which communicate the love fates of about a dozen people. When the reader has struggled through them, there is left on his mind an impression of the wild ecstatic desire of young, vigorous, hopeful men, and of the resolute self-surrender of young and daring or tender women, the impression of a generation in whose veins glows a desire for liberty—political, social, erotic—which breaks down all forms and all conventions. We see into an imaginary, romantic world, the world of Laube's youthful dreams, where there is abundance of power and of life, and of illusions as to the renovation of the world by means of revolutions of various kinds. It is a romance of beautiful bodies and beautiful souls, male and female, the essence of whose being is revolt against Christianity and against marriage.

Between the First and the Second Part, a considerable change has evidently come over the author's views; he has received his impression of the strength of the reaction; he has ripened into a man. In the First Part one could hardly help mixing up the characters, for the men were only distinguished from each other by their more or less fiery, erotic, uncontrollable temperaments, the woman only by the dissimilarity of their physical charms; in the Second Part we are introduced into a world where a real struggle for national and political liberty is going on. The letter form is abandoned, and there are comparatively few characters.

It is the revolt of Poland which is described; Valerius, one of the principal characters in the First Part, is led by his enthusiasm for liberty in general to join the Poles. The subject-matter is interesting, though here and there we have too much of the purely historical. The Poles as a people are described impartially and with a sure touch; their characteristics—the strong patriotic feeling inspiring high and low, the prejudices and tyranny of the nobility, the savagery and vigour of the lower classes—are depicted as they mirror themselves in the mind of the German volunteer. The distrust with which he, as a foreigner, is received, the want of liberal-mindedness in the devotees of liberty, which he observes more especially in their conduct to his friend, a Polish officer of Jewish descent, gradually dissipate the illusions which he had cherished of a golden future for Europe, the final outcome of the Revolution of July. There is a tragic tone throughout the book. We are shown how fruitless the rebellion of the Poles is, how it ends, as it was fated to end, in crushing defeat; and we are shown how the young Jew, Joel, in spite of his valiant endeavours on the battlefield to gain for himself those rights which his aristocratic countrymen enjoy, can never rise from his position as the pariah of Polish society. The woman he loves dares not give him her hand; a common peasant disdains his sympathy. After the revolt is suppressed, he puts off his uniform in despair and shoulders the pedlar's wallet. The Christians repudiate him, the Jews he himself long ago alienated by his alliance with the Christians, his humanity gives him no rights; there is nothing for it but to forget his learning, his philosophy, his scientific and military talent, and to wander from village to village, selling ribbons, as his forefathers did.

This character has a special interest for Danes, as it evidently suggested to Goldschmidt some of the leading characteristics of the hero of his novel, En Jöde ("A Jew"); he, too, becomes a Polish officer during the struggle for liberty, and he too, repulsed everywhere, in the bitterness of despair ends his career as a money-lender, outside the pale of society.

The Third Part of Das junge Europa ("The Citizens") is an inferior production. Its chief interest for us lies in what it tells us of two of the most enthusiastic, indomitable heroes of the First Part, Hippolyt and Constantin. Hippolyt is finally driven to despair by the civilisation of the modern world, which leaves no room for the great exception, but requires all to be alike small. The bold Constantin, who fought in the streets of Paris in the Days of July, makes his appearance not very many years later as a Prussian judge, inflexibly, fanatically severe in his dealings with political revolutionaries. Constantin enters into long explanations of the influences that have wrought the change in his convictions (this character was evidently drawn from the life); but the author is still so possessed by the ideals of his own youth, that he makes this man commit suicide in despair at having been unfaithful to these ideals.

From the year 1849 till his death in the Eighties, Laube, as is well known, devoted all his powers to the theatre. He speedily became the best and most highly esteemed theatrical manager of Germany and Austria. As such he always retained a preference for the French drama. What he himself wrote for the stage is what will keep his name longest in remembrance.

Of the many historical dramas which he produced, the most important—Monaldeschi (1834), Struensee (1844), and Die Karlsschüler (1847)—are suggestive of the ideals of Young Germany as they took shape in Laube's mind. The last-mentioned play became popular and is still often put on the stage; the others are effective pieces in a style that is now obsolete.

The character of Monaldeschi is a vigorous conception. He is the bold, unscrupulous adventurer, who has no higher aim than to make his way and to enjoy life to the full, but who understands the meaning of power, and desires to use his power worthily—the Hippolyt of Das junge Europa in historic costume. With Queen Christina's more complex feminine character, Laube has not been so successful, though his representation of her has elements out of which a good actress could make a telling part. But the play as a whole is overweighted by the intolerable sentimentality of the love scenes (Monaldeschi has a romantic attachment to a certain Sylva Brahe), and it suffers as a work of art from its author's dread of offending a Philistine public's sense of propriety. The real relations between Christina and Monaldeschi are smoothed down into indistinctness. The sharp edges of historic fact are filed away to make the subject fit into the mould of theatrical Romanticism.

In Struensee, the second of Laube's dramas in which the action passes at a Scandinavian court, still greater liberties have been taken with history and historical characters. Laube makes Struensee the noble, liberty-loving reformer, whose only fault is an excessive German humanity, which shrinks from shedding blood. Had he only been a trifle less high-minded and scrupulous, he might easily have remained in power. The weakness that is his ruin is his chivalrous, platonic devotion to Caroline Mathilde, who returns the sentiment in an equally innocent manner. Christian VII. is represented as an estimable, somewhat taciturn monarch, subject to attacks of melancholy. Struensee's fall is brought about entirely by Germans, who are partly envious of him, partly enraged because he will not comply with their unreasonable wishes; and the bitter moral of the play is, that the worst enemies of a German intellectual hero are his own countrymen—Germans have always had to suffer most from Germans, who show their want of patriotism even in their relations with foreigners.

Quite apart from the historic inaccuracy of the character, the sentimentally erotic Struensee, with "his enthusiasm for all that is noble and beautiful," is a very impossible parvenu minister of state. Laube has tampered with facts to the extent of representing Struensee's death as the result of a shot fired, by order of Guldberg, at the moment of his arrest in the castle on the 17th of January 1772. The chief reason, and at the same time excuse, for all this perversion of facts lay in the necessity for presenting them in such a shape that the censorship might not forbid the play on account of the possibility of its giving offence to a friendly power. We get some idea of how severe this censorship was, when we read that, in spite of Laube's precautions, the performance of Struensee was for many years prohibited in Prussia, out of consideration for the feelings of the Danish royal family.

It is, nevertheless, impossible to understand why such a perfectly harmless and studiously, punctiliously, inoffensive play as Die Karlsschüler should, immediately after its appearance in 1846, have been prohibited throughout Austria, Prussia, Hanover, Würtemberg, Hesse-Cassel, all the Grand Duchies and several of the Duchies. It is in reality nothing whatever but a panegyric on the youthful Schiller, in a representation of the well-known difficulties he got into as a young regimental surgeon in the service of Duke Karl of Würtemberg, ending with his flight from Stuttgart to Mannheim. It forms a parallel to Gutzkow's Goethe comedy, Der Königslieutenant, which it surpasses in dramatic vigour. In this case, too, Laube has sacrificed strict historic truth. Duke Karl's character is softened and toned down exactly as King Frederick William's was in Gutzkow's Zopf und Schwert. This is not only art which is compelled to be cautious, but art which has come into being under the oppression of a tradition which has insinuated itself into the very disposition of the artist. But the disposition was a cheerful, buoyant one, and the hand that wrote these scenes was light and skilful. Something of the lustre that surrounds its hero's name is shed upon the play. It is probable that as long as Schiller retains his great popularity in Germany, Germans will enjoy seeing this transcription of his youthful history—though they know many facts concerning that history now that were not known at the time Die Karlsschüler was written. Such a play is not calculated to produce much effect out of Germany.

After Gutzkow's and Laube's, Mundt's is the name that occurs most frequently when mention is made of the leaders of Young Germany. It is about the year 1835 that Mundt is most distinctly the mouthpiece of the feelings and ideas of that school. In 1835 he published Charlotte Stieglitz, ein Denkmal, the only one of his historical delineations which had any real influence on the minds of the youth of the day. This work, no doubt chiefly owing to its subject, but also to its pathetic, affectionately reverent treatment of that subject, took thousands of hearts by storm. In the same year appeared his Madonna, Unterhaltungen mit einer Heiligen ("Converse with a Saint"), which, more than any other of his works, gives expression to the sentiments of Young Germany, and a clue to the character of its author.

Theodor Mundt, born at Potsdam in 1808, was a man capable of enthusiastic, yet clear-sighted devotion to causes and to persons. He had Wienbarg's enthusiastic temperament (though not his bravery), with a much more highly gifted, many-sided mind. And yet there was no edge or pungency in his wit, no grace in his whimsicality, no method in his works, no conciseness in his style. His book on Charlotte Stieglitz is the only one of his works that has survived him, and it has done so thanks to its subject. He could be caustic and biting and unjust, as weak natures are apt to be, but even his most caustic tirades are not the expression of any warlike inclination; they are only penned in self-defence and self-assertion, are called forth by some misunderstanding on the part of an opponent, and are no more dangerous than the thrusts of an angry wether.

It is surprising to the modern reader that a work like Mundt's Madonna can ever have been considered a dangerous book. To understand how this could be, we must keep in mind that those in power at the time of its publication stood in terror of shadows. It is, however, a book which must not be overlooked by any one who is making a study of the period, for there is something typical in its expression of the thoughts and enthusiasms of the youth of the day.

In its very formlessness, Madonna is characteristic of Mundt, and of those whose literary taste was identical with his. It contains prose lyric effusions, descriptions of travel, personal confessions, world-revolutionising theories of the rehabilitation of the flesh by means of a hitherto unknown mystic creed—all this grouped round a central female figure and interwoven with her story.

The book opens with a "post-horn symphony," well written in the old Romantic style, but not Romantic in tendency. It is a glorification of "movement," the shibboleth which Mundt invented and fell in love with. Movement is to him what progress and the struggle for freedom were to others—the watchword of the new era. He talks of the party of movement; the new literature is to him the literature of movement (Bewegungslitteratur); in a postscript to Madonna he calls that book ein Bewegungsbuch. We perceive that the expression is perfectly neutral and innocent.

The only readable part of Madonna nowadays is the heroine's narrative of her life experiences. The author meets her in a little Bohemian village; when he first sees her, walking in a Roman Catholic procession, he is tremendously impressed by her extraordinary beauty. Later in the same day he accidently makes his way into her father's cottage, wins the narrow-minded, bigoted old man's heart (in a very improbable manner) by the unction with which he tells him the story of Casanova, who had at one time lived in that neighbourhood in the castle of Dux, receives an invitation to supper, and spends part of the night in a sentimental conversation with the daughter, whom he discovers to be a woman deserving, in his estimation, the name of saint—a secular or worldly saint (eine Weltheilige)—and who, in that capacity, embraces and kisses him, weeping hot tears. He is obliged to leave the neighbourhood next morning, but soon afterwards receives from her an immoderately lengthy letter—Die Bekenntnisse einer weltlichen Seele ("The Confessions of a Worldly Soul")—in which she makes a frank revelation of herself and all her experiences.

This beautiful girl is an unfortunate victim. She has been enticed by a relative, a depraved woman, to leave Teplitz, her native town, where she lived in poverty with her parents, and come to Dresden. There, under the pretext of providing for her future, this woman educated her for a rich debauchee, a man of high position, whose prey she was to become as soon as she was grown up. The time comes; all preparations are made; at night she is locked into a room with her benefactor and pursuer, whom she loathes. She forcibly breaks away from him, manages to get out, and, in her despair, seeing a light in the room of a young theological student who lives in the same house, takes refuge with him. She has long loved this young man and he her. Now with chaste passion she gives herself to him, and he cannot find it in his heart to repulse her. But on the following day, repenting as a Christian of his sin, he commits suicide. The young girl has to make her way on foot from Dresden to her native village in Bohemia, where, after her experience of the life and variety of a great town, she pines in sadness and loneliness. Her old father, with whom she lives, is a cripple and a fanatically bigoted Roman Catholic.

The point in this story evidently lies in the innocence of the young girl's self-abandonment, innocence which the world calls guilt. To the author his heroine is a saint, a Madonna, the type of lovable womanliness. She is a carnal saint, undoubtedly; but it is his creed that we can conceive of nothing more holy, that there exists nothing more spiritual, than the carnal. And he propounds a neither new nor remarkable, but somewhat peculiarly formulated theory of the necessity for a fusion of flesh and spirit, for the abolition of the distinction between spiritual and carnal. "The world and the flesh must be reinstated in their rights, in order that the spirit may no longer have to live in the sixth storey, as it does in Germany." And he brings the narration of a very lengthy Bohemian legend of Libussa to a close with the jubilant cry: "The free woman is sovereign; let her decide, let her speak, for she has the right to speak! And sweet is the happiness of free love!"

Mundt began as a Hegelian, but his Hegelianism has, as we see, turned into a sort of fantastic mysticism. Christ declared that his kingdom is not of this world, and yet he came to us and himself became world. God, out of love, entered into the flesh, and the world's flesh has become holy since it became God. Hence the kingdom of God flourishes over the wide earth, and yet it is, as Christ declared, not of this world, that is, not of the world which is flesh only, and which sets its face against the free "movement" of thought. Like an insufficiently trained pedant, Mundt involves himself in lengthy and confused polemics against "the beyond" which is without "the here," and against "the here" which refuses to know anything of "the beyond." He ends by enthusiastically proclaiming the praises of what he calls "the image" (as distinct from both spiritless matter and immaterial spirit): "O ye philosophers! what you want is the image.... I contend for the rehabilitation of the image."[4]

If there ever was a man unsuited to be a leader and teacher of other men, it was this unctuous proclaimer of self-evident truths. Madonna was followed by a long series of historical novels (a still longer series came from the pen of Mundt's wife, who wrote under the pseudonym of Louise Mühlbach), and a considerable number of critical and historical writings. Amongst these latter one of the best is his Geschichte der Litteratur der Gegenwart ("History of Present Day Literature"), 1842, because in it he treats a subject with which he has a thorough acquaintance; but it, too, like all his other works, is formless, full of undigested material, and spoiled by would-be profundity. He reads, for instance, a special meaning into the fact that Hegel died of cholera. Hegel's system, he writes, was, like Casimir Périer's, a universally levelling juste-milieu system: hence he, like Casimir Périer, was fated to die of this universally levelling malady. It was a malady which must be regarded as the physical expression of the general anguish of the times. Troubled and restless, the body had attacked its own intestines, and was at last obliged to pay the penalty of its craving to know and understand itself, by performing the last possible process of self-examination, that of vomiting itself up.[5]

In a work entitled Das junge Deutschland, consisting for the most part of letters to the publisher, Feodor Wehl, the well-known theatrical manager, has endeavoured to give the reading world a more favourable idea of Mundt than that prevalent in our days; and he has succeeded in producing the impression that Mundt was a man with excellent intentions, many acquirements, and no small degree of enthusiasm in the causes that were sympathetic to him. He is not, and never will be considered, a great writer.

The authors of the second rank, the rearguard of Young Germany, men like Gustav Kühne, Hermann Marggraff, and Alexander Jung, are in reality his equals. Their gifts lie, like his, partly in the direction of journalism, partly in that of creative authorship. They are men of character, cultivation, and distinct literary ability, animated by the same fundamental ideas as the men in the front ranks.

The reader who takes up Kühne's Weibliche und männliche Charaktere (1838) will be agreeably surprised by the vigour and brilliancy of his delineations, and by his accurate appreciations of public personages. His heroines are those of his school—Rahel, Bettina, Charlotte Stieglitz; but he sees them with his own eyes and describes them with unpretentious enthusiasm. Among the poets, who are the subjects of his laudatory criticism, are not only the great Radicals of a former generation like Shelley, not only all the singers of freedom of his own day, from Anastasius Grün to Karl Beck, but tranquil spirits like Rückert and Chamisso. He is not remarkably original, but he is impartial and unprejudiced.

The same can be said of Hermann Marggraff. Though his book Deutschlands jüngste Litteratur- und Culturepoche (1839), is written in the spirit of Young Germany, its author always reserves his right to perfectly independent judgment. He is a thoughtful, earnest critic and a good writer, always natural, at times brilliant. His errors are much more due to Conservative tendencies than to excessive modernity.

Unless we single out the enfants perdus of this new school—and there are such in every school—it cannot be said that its members gave any real occasion for the violent attacks made upon it. It is not Young Germany, but its assailants, who uniformly show the worst taste and exaggerate most grossly.

Such an assailant was Tieck, now an elderly man. Several of his tales contain thrusts at Young Germany; that in which it is satirised most directly is Der Wassermensch; but the caricature is so overdone that it loses all effect.

Florheim, the representative of Young Germany, is half crazy with enthusiasm for Frenchmen and Jews. He poses as the democrat and friend of freedom in a manner which we should consider foolish in an ordinary schoolboy. He maintains that in every concert programme the Marseillaise ought to have a place, to keep people from forgetting what is the one thing above all others. He would have portraits of the great heroes of liberty, Mirabeau, Washington, Franklin, Kosciuszko, &c., inserted in every printed book, even in cookery books. In every almanac, if he could have his will, July should be printed in red letters, to keep the glorious Revolution of July in ever fresh remembrance. And he hopes that all the truly noble will unite in insisting that the nouns, prince, lord, king, count, squire, &c., shall be written without capital letters, in order to show contempt for their signification.

When the Privy Councillor (Geheimrath), the representative of intelligent Conservatism, asks Florheim how he and his ("Sie, die Sie sich das junge Deutschland nennen"—you who call yourselves Young Germany) hope to carry out their plans and plots against the existing order of things, he answers naïvely: "By perpetual abuse of all that stands in our way." And he goes on to show how it was thus they treated Goethe in the last years of his age—an assertion which is quite contrary to fact—and how, now that they are the "party of movement" and already in possession of the most important newspapers, they are in a position to form an invisible and yet open league spread over the whole of Germany, which shall ruin every author who is not of their way of thinking, and make the reputation of its own members by means of unscrupulous mutual laudations.[6]

The reality was very different from this. The caricature has the double fault of not being like and not being amusing. Mundt took an ingenious revenge some years later by suggesting the performance of Tieck's fairy-tale comedies in Berlin.

XXIII

RAHEL, BETTINA, CHARLOTTE STIEGLITZ

The representation of the relation between literature and politics, the history of literary events, and the delineation of the characters and work of the most eminent of the men who constituted Young Germany, do not sufficiently reveal to us the spirit, the psychical condition of the time.

What is done, and what happens, is its outward manifestation. In books, effect is a first consideration; what is represented in them must be to a certain extent exaggerated, thrown into relief, if only for the sake of distinctness. To find the clue to the intellectual life lived at any given period, we must get as close as possible to the living, feeling, individual, and we must not neglect to supplement the impression received from an observation of the leading men of the time by a study of its typical women.

It is where there is more feeling than action, where, in spite of great originality, the formative, the fashioning power is too slight entirely to separate the production from the personality, that the student comes into closest contact with the life-springs of a period. A letter from a highly gifted woman tells us more of the living human being and its real emotions than a political speech or a tragedy.

Not one of the few great women who ruled men's minds during the period under consideration produced a work of art; not one of them even attempted to. They neither wrote novels nor essays. Their literary influence was a directly personal influence, and their power of stirring men's minds was evidently due to the fact that something of the inmost essence of the period was expressed in their personalities. Their natures are unplastic, evasive; the contours of their spiritual lives are blurred and indistinct; this makes it difficult to delineate their characters, but makes it all the easier to feel the pulse of the time in their utterances.

They help us to arrive at the result that the idea which shapes the lives of the most noble characters of this period, and which makes itself felt in the resistance they offered to the worship of rule and the tyranny of custom, is the idea that the one course worthy of a thinking, feeling, human being is independently and unconventionally to interpret human life, human relations, for himself, and to base his conduct on his own interpretation. This is not a new idea; it originated in Germany with Herder, descended from him to all the preachers of the gospel of Nature, including that Heinse who had such a strong influence upon some of the leaders of Young Germany, but was more especially developed and applied in all the relations of life by Goethe. A careful study of the characters of the most remarkable women of the time shows that the subterranean, hidden secret of the period between 1810 and 1838, what had happened deepest down, was that Goethe's theory of life had, point by point, displaced the Church theory and taken possession of all the men of great instincts, of all the really gifted minds of the day.

Rahel Varnhagen von Ense is, beyond all comparison, the greatest of the women who occupied the attention of intellectual Germany in the Thirties and Forties. She died in March 1833, and in 1835 her husband published the three volumes of selections from her letters and journals which revealed to the great reading public what manner of woman she had been. This publication was followed by many others, of which she was the main theme.

A less innately great, but much more talented woman than Rahel was Bettina von Arnim, who, in 1835, published Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Goethe's Correspondence with a Child), a work which created a great sensation and was most favourably received.

Rahel's name is remembered by the quiet, powerful influence she steadily exercised for so many years; Bettina's shines with the lustre of her brilliant talent and sparkling wit; the third woman who made a deep impression on the men and women of that day is remembered by one action, her suicide. This was Charlotte Stieglitz, who committed suicide in December 1834, and whose biography, diaries, and letters were published by Theodor Mundt in 1835. She was at once made the subject of studies and panegyrics by the new school. Gustav Kühne, in particular, wrote an admirable notice of her. It was her death which, as has been already mentioned, suggested Gutzkows Wally.

Rahel Antonie Friederike Varnhagen (family name originally Levin, afterwards Robert) was born in Berlin in 1771. She would thus seem to belong to quite another epoch than that of the Revolution of July; but it was not until after her death that she became a public personage, and entered, by means of her written words, into relations with the literary public. She was one of those rare beings whose inexhaustible vigour and freshness of mind enable them to understand everything and every one, to sympathise with the most dissimilar individuals and tendencies, to penetrate to the core of things; and whose wide and untiring sympathy wins for them all their life long the affection and admiration of the élite of their time, young and old. Rahel received the same homage from Karl Gutzkow that she had received from Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel, from Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt. She had shown herself a fervid patriot during the war of liberation, superintending hospitals in Berlin and Prague; and she was admired by Heinrich Heine, who dedicated the Lyric Intermezzo in the Buch der Lieder to her when she was fifty. She, who had been the intimate of the famous men of the beginning of the century, the Prince de Ligne, Fichte, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Fouqué, and many others, surprised every one by her enthusiastic appreciation of Victor Hugo's Les Orientales, and the writings of the Saint-Simonists. There is something great about such a life, undramatic though it be.

It gives us a feeling of the many-sidedness of her character to remember the long list of persons, differing from each other in every possible way, with whom she was on intimate terms. There are depths in her nature which still surprise us, and vaguenesses quite incomprehensible to the modern mind. The magic of her nature lay in the spoken word, the momentary impression, the opportune utterance: so it is not easy to reconstruct. A strong influence emanated from her, yet her real life was introspective; she was a woman of distinctly aristocratic instincts and sentiments, and yet so tender hearted that her sympathies extended far and wide.

The daughter of a rich Jewish merchant, as a girl plain-looking and without talent of any description, she grows up in her father's house in Berlin at a time when as yet the Jews had none of the rights of citizens. At the age of twenty-five she has already become an influential member of the best society of the capital, and from the age of thirty till her death her house is the intellectual centre of Berlin, and one of the intellectual centres of Germany. Her great attraction was her perfect originality and unconventionality. All human beings desire and love to see themselves mirrored in the mind of a greater human being, all crave for sympathy, all would fain be understood. And those who approached Rahel—princes and nobles, diplomats and philosophers, poets and scientists—felt instinctively that this young girl with the slight, graceful figure, the beautifully formed limbs, the thick, waving hair surrounding a face with an expression of suffering, but with a deep, steadfast look in its dark eyes, was worthy of their confidence, and this for the one and sufficient reason, that she was innocent of all prejudices.

She gladly associates with a charming hetæra like Pauline Wiese, Prince Louis Fredinand's friend; is her and her cynical husband's and her princely lover's confidante. She has a sincere regard for a reactionary sensualist like Friedrich Gentz, warmly congratulates him when he, at the age of sixty, wins the affections of Fanny Elsler, sees in him the distinguished prose writer and the politician who had been of national importance at a critical moment. Human beings are to her, in Goethe's sense, natural products.

That she, with her strict personal morality and Liberal tendencies, should have been able to rise to such a height of freedom from prejudice and gain such a wide horizon, was primarily due to her having been born in a sort of sanctuary outside the pale of society, that is to say in the house of a wealthy Berlin Jew.

In intolerant, stiff old Prussia, the alien, despised, hooknosed money-lenders had sat behind their counters for some centuries, with no thought for anything but money—piling thaler upon thaler, buying bills, and lending money even to princes. With all their wealth they were ignorant, orthodox, superstitious. But during the period of enlightenment the influence of Moses Mendelssohn thoroughly aroused them. Their piety became a noble rationalism, and they comprehended the meaning of knowledge and culture. By the close of the eighteenth century they were giving their sons a perfectly new training, and society was also beginning to look upon these sons as men to whom reparation for a wrong was due.

It was in the generation of these sons that the Jewish houses all at once opened their long closed doors, revealing interiors which in no way resembled the cramped middle-class German houses—spacious rooms with rich Oriental carpets and hangings; here and there a valuable painting, made over to father or grandfather by some prince in pecuniary difficulties; on the dinner tables gold and silver plate, the finest crystal sparkling upon lace-edged linen, choice viands, and the rarest wines. The mistress of the house and her daughters had received a higher and more refined education than others in their rank of life; they were deeply interested in theology, philosophy, and music; they had developed quickly under the influence of the mixed society which now frequented their house.[1]

For here, as upon neutral ground, met all those whom society usually separated, members of all its different ranks and castes, and many whom it altogether excluded; German and foreign actresses had the entrance of no other middle-class houses in Berlin; here they were received on the same footing as the other guests. The princes frequented no other middle-class houses, if it were for no other reason than that the company they met there bored them. To these houses they came, attracted by the easy tone and by the wit of the women. It was a refined Bohemia. It was the first development of the cosmopolitan spirit in the Berlin of old Prussia.

It is in these circles that Rahel grows up, early distinguished by her friendship with Prince Louis Ferdinand, the hero of the young generation of that day, son of Frederick the Great's youngest brother. He was about Rahel's own age, chivalrous, artistic, loose in his morals, brave to foolhardiness, a first-rate musician, and a first-rate cavalry general. Goethe describes him in his book on the campaign of 1793. Like all the princes of that day, he had been educated like a Frenchman, to the extent (as we know from some of his published letters) of not being able to spell German correctly; nevertheless he was an ardent enemy of Napoleon, and burned to match his troops against the great Emperor's. Like the Prince of Homburg in his day, he disobeyed an order to retreat, and, infuriated by the defeat at Saalfeld, refusing to flee, refusing to yield, was cut down by the French hussars. He confided his wild love adventures to Rahel, and found comfort, when suffering from the treachery of a faithless lady love, in tranquil, serious conversation with his sisterly friend.

But Rahel was not always in a position to comfort others. In her young days she stood sorely in need of comfort herself. By nature she was of such an irritably nervous temperament that as a child she was with difficulty kept in life: "Let the air be too dense or too rare, too warm or too cold, and I am ill at once. And the slightest excitement has a still worse effect. I cannot imagine any one more sensitive." In nearly all her letters, immediately after the date, we find a detailed description of the weather and temperature: "Friday, 14th March, 1828.—A grey day, with south-west wind, damp and yet spring-like, though not inviting for a walk. Pigeons are flying. Every now and then a blue window appears in the sky; at this moment sunlight is coming through one of them." "23rd March, 1829.—The sun has broken through the clouds and is shining brightly; a cold, sharp, unmistakable north-east wind; impossible to go to the Thiergarten, where there is still ice and it is as cold as in a cellar." "17th April,—Noon; spring weather after rain; the trees turning green. To me the best time of the whole year—no flies or mosquitoes, no heat. Spring is approaching, wafting to us a thousand memories, and a thousand hopes which can never be fulfilled, but which are a necessity to us."

Such natures deserve and arouse as much compassion as admiration. Her friend, W. von Burgsdorf, writes to her: "When I saw you for the first time, it struck me at once that you must have been educated by long suffering." It was true; she had had an infirm body, a melancholy youth, a severe father, and had early suffered humiliation. Her Jewish birth was the cause of great unhappiness to her—an unhappiness almost unworthy of her; she calls it a sword thrust into her heart by a supernatural being at the moment of her birth. Not one fibre in her nature attached her to the religious community to which by birth she belonged. The memory of its fanaticism and of the fanatical enmity displayed towards it was still fresh. As lately as 1756 the Jewish community in Berlin had expelled a child from the town for having carried a book for a Christian. And on the other side, even Moses Mendelssohn could not go out with his children without having stones thrown at them.

With all the power of his intellect and will, Rahel's father had striven to overcome the sickly child's independence of character, and only her unusual elasticity and strength of mind enabled her to preserve her originality. When young she felt as if she had suffered so much there could not possibly be anything left in her to be bent or broken.

It was inevitable that a woman with this passionate nature should love passionately and should suffer agony through her love. And she did not escape her fate. Twice, when she loved most ardently, she experienced as it were the feeling of being struck down with an assassin's knife and of living for years with the knife in the wound.

At the age of twenty-four she formed a very strong attachment to Count Karl von Finckenstein, the son of a Prussian minister, a man a year younger than herself. They became engaged, and Rahel lived for some years solely for this love. Finckenstein was good-hearted, very much in love, and sincerely devoted to her, but his character was weak. He told her what he had to bear from his family, whose pride revolted against an alliance with a person of inferior position, and who were endeavouring to make him give her up. Rahel's pride was deeply wounded, and she gave him back his word. In character and intellect his superior, she could easily have vanquished his scruples if she had made up her mind to do so, but instead of this she set him free at once, and he was weak enough, attached though he was to her, to take the liberty she offered. She never overcame this first great humiliation.

Three years passed, and she fell in love again, this time passionately, soul and senses, and the feeling was returned. Her second engagement was to Don Raphael Urquijo, a particularly attractive young attaché of the Spanish embassy in Berlin. The engagement lasted for a year. They were passionately attached to each other, but their characters were too unlike, he was too decidedly her inferior. He tormented and insulted her with his jealousy to such an extent that to preserve her self-respect she parted from him; but she did it with a feeling of crushing, maddening grief, a feeling of loneliness, of being left exposed to all the coldness of life without that shelter from it which she, with her woman's heart, could so ill dispense with.

After Finckenstein's desertion, it had been proposed that she should make a mariage de convenance. Her answer was: "I cannot marry, for I cannot lie. Do not imagine that I am proud of myself for this; I cannot do it, just as I cannot play the flute.... He must have no prejudices, otherwise I could not stand it.... And he must not be stupid and compel me to lie and pretend that I admire him. I must be able to say exactly what I choose."

For long the needs of her heart were only incompletely satisfied, and she applied herself all the more ardently to intellectual pursuits. It was a great hindrance to her that she had acquired so little knowledge. She herself talked about her dense ignorance. She was, of course, very far from being ignorant, but so much is certain, that she never acquired any real insight into what science is, and never thought a scientific thought.

She had been taught as little Jewish dogma as history and geography. She says that she grew up like a tree in the forest, and that it was as impossible for her to learn religion as anything else. So she evolved a religion of her own, which, as Karl Hillebrand correctly observes, has something akin with Schopenhauer's doctrine; her ideas of a will in nature, of the misery of the world, of compassion as the only source of morality, are akin to his. She was a great admirer of Angelus Silesius and Saint-Martin; like Goethe she was an ardent Pantheist, She copies the German mystic's lines:

"Alle Tugenden sind eine Tugend. Schau, alle Tugenden sind ein ohn' Unterschied. Willst du den Namen hör'n? Sie heisst Gerechtigkeit,"[2]

and writes beneath them:

"Weil sie Wahrheit ist Einfachheit, Unparteilichkeit, Selbstlosigkeit, Austheilung für Alle."[3]

She saw everything in its unity, its entirety. There was something of the Delphic priestess in her nature. It is a pity that her words, disconnected from her personality as we have them, are so often dark oracular sayings.

She was, says Karl Hillebrand, full of leniency towards the culpable, of sympathy with the slighted and humble, of compassion for the poor; the one thing she despised was correct mediocrity, and her contempt for this she displayed openly, even when by so doing she made enemies.

Time passed, and she grew into the old maid; but years made no change in her appearance and did not diminish her wonderful power. For ten years she carried on a tender correspondence with her future husband, Varnhagen von Ense. He was fourteen years younger than herself, was first a brave officer, then a clever diplomatist, and finally an excellent, very aggressive writer; he had to distinguish himself in both war and peace before he could appear in the character of her fiancé without being entirely overlooked. She married him when she was forty-two, and had a perfectly happy married life for nineteen years.

Rahel owes her literary distinction to the fact that she was the first in the literary circles of Berlin to comprehend and to proclaim Goethe's real greatness. Long before any decisive opinion on this vital question in German culture had been arrived at, Rahel, fully persuaded of Goethe's genius, completely under the spell of its power, proclaimed to all with whom she came into contact that this man was not to be compared with other men; that he stood alone—the loftiest intellect, the wisest counsellor and judge in all the affairs of life. This was at a time when Goethe as an author was only one among the crowd, and when others were ranked high above him. Long before the criticism of the brothers Schlegel established his position beyond dispute, Rahel had introduced the cult of the great, uncomprehended, misjudged genius in her circle in Berlin, had everywhere proclaimed the praises of his illuminating word, and declared his name to be a holy, a consecrated name.

In 1795, when she is only twenty-four, she is so fortunate as to meet him at Teplitz. We learn from a letter from David Veit to Rahel, what Goethe said about her: "Yes, that now is a girl of remarkable intellect, a girl who is always thinking—and as to feeling—where is the like of her to be found? We were constantly together, and were on the most friendly, intimate terms." To Franz Horn, Goethe said: "She is a girl with a loving heart; she feels everything very strongly, and yet expresses herself very gently—we admire the originality and are charmed by the amiability."

When Rahel is told this, she writes: "How can he know that I have feeling? Never in my life was it so difficult for me to show myself as I am. But why write thus? He is Goethe. And what he feels and says is true. I believe what he says of me. ... When you see him, Horn, greet him from one who has always worshipped him, idolised him, even when no one else praised, understood, admired him. And if he wonders at a staid young woman sending him such a greeting, make him understand that her excessive reverence for him prevented her telling him how she reveres him. Tell him that this is not affectation, but true, tender feeling (Pflaumenweichheit). It is not my fault that others affect what in my case is serious earnest. Am I not right? Yes, yes! I worship him."

Nothing further happens; there is not the slightest attempt on Rahel's part to keep up the acquaintance with Goethe, by correspondence, or any other means. She never mentions his person, only his genius. Twenty years pass, during which she sees nothing of him. Once, in 1811, Varnhagen sends Goethe some appreciations of his poetry written by Rahel. Goethe is much struck by them, pronounces the author to have a remarkable gift of instantaneously grasping, comprehending, connecting, helping, completing; but he never learns—Rahel having forbidden Varnhagen to tell—who the author of the manuscript is. In 1815, in the neighbourhood of Frankfort, Rahel sees Goethe again. There is something touching about this meeting. Goethe is now sixty-six. He is visiting his friend, Marianne von Willemer (the Suleika of the Diwan) at Willemer's country house "die Gerbermühle." Rahel, who is in Frankfort, accidentally sees him driving with his hosts, and in her sudden joyful surprise calls loudly: "There is Goethe."

Twenty years, as already mentioned, have passed. It is a quarter past nine on the morning of the 8th of September. Rahel, who had been suffering from an affection of the eyes, has got up later than usual, and is standing half-dressed, brushing her teeth, when the landlord comes to say that a gentleman wishes to see her. Her maid hands her his card. It is Goethe. And out of pure respect, that he may not have to wait, she does not take time to dress herself properly, to make herself look presentable: "I told them to ask him to walk into the sitting-room, and only kept him waiting the time that it took me to put on a dressing-gown (Unterrock). It was a black quilted dressing-gown. I sacrificed myself so as not to keep him waiting one minute. It was my one thought. I did not even excuse my dress; I did nothing but thank him. I did not excuse myself, for it seemed to me that he must know that I obliterated myself, that he was my one consideration. Such was—alas!—the first impulse of my heart. Now, with the most passionate, most comical, most torturing remorse, I think otherwise."

The feeling of being unsuitably, unbecomingly dressed, depressed her; she said nothing that was worthy of her. After all these years of love for him, of living in him, and longing for him, she saw him once and once only in private for a few minutes, and this was the turn things took. "But you must hear to the end how ridiculous I was," she writes to Varnhagen. "When he had gone I dressed most carefully and beautifully. I wanted to make up for everything. I put on a lovely white dress with a high collar, a lace veil, my Moscow shawl.... Now I can say as Prince Louis wrote: 'My market value has risen ten thousand thalers. Goethe has visited me.'"

Rahel, after twenty years of waiting, after the worship of a lifetime, receiving Goethe in a quilted dressing-gown rather than keep him waiting ten minutes—this every one will confess to be a supreme expression of feminine heroism. After the perusal of many volumes of Rahel literature, this scene is what remains in one's mind as definitely characterising her. It gives the measure of her reverence, her understanding, and her capability of overcoming even the most justifiable vanity of her sex.

It is to be regretted that a being with such rare attributes should have been entirely destitute of talent, of all creative, plastic power. Her ingenious and profound thoughts are scattered, as mere observations, throughout private letters and records which otherwise are of little interest to us nowadays. Probably none but enthusiastic devotees of the women's rights theories are capable of reading much of her at a time.

Her nature was not the artistic nature. Its essence was truthfulness. She herself says: "In the great universal misery of this world, I have consecrated myself to one God, truth; and every time I have been saved, it has been by him." She was a staunch, reliable friend, yet, even at the risk of sinking in the estimation of others, she frankly and without shame confessed when the feeling of friendship had ceased to exist. Closely connected with her truthfulness was her simplicity; she made no pretence of being above common weaknesses, no secret of her love of sweets and her keen interest in the latest Paris fashions. And she was fortunate enough to feel what she deserved to feel, an undisturbed inward harmony, partly innate, partly acquired, a perfect consistency of her spiritual life with her convictions. This was what gave her her great and justifiable self-confidence. "Pedantry cannot exist within thirty miles of where I am," she used to say.

We have seen how great her moral tolerance was; in intellectual matters she was equally forbearing. She neither demanded moral purity nor marked ability in those she esteemed; what she did demand was unaffectedness. She was unique in her keen recognition and appreciation of whatever was natural and original, however unassuming; and she herself, in spite of her searching intellect, was as naïve and fresh in perception and expression as a gifted child.

When she was at the zenith of her reputation she was obliged to make herself unapproachable, to surround herself with all sorts of social barricades, that she might be free to choose her associates. She invariably chose individuals of markedly original character.

One of her intimates, Count Tilly, writes to her: "I have a thousand polite messages to give you before I close. One person admires you; a second is devoted to you; a third is astonished by your words of wisdom; a fourth is grieved to say farewell to you, even when it is only a letter that must be brought to a close. It is I, myself, who am all these different persons." This little pleasantry serves to give us an idea of the varied impressions she produced.

Rahel often reflected on the subject of originality. She writes: "If a person were to say, 'You imagine it is easy to be original—on the contrary, it costs no end of trouble and exertion,' he would be thought crazy. And yet the assertion would be a true one. Every one could be original, if only people did not carelessly cram their heads with half-digested maxims, which they pour forth again as carelessly."

There had been eminent and interesting women in German intellectual society before Rahel. The latest were Caroline, Dorothea, and those others known to fame through the Romanticists. Rahel is the first great modern German woman, and the first to be completely conscious of her originality.[4]

The pursuit of originality in her day was not without its accompanying danger. It is not the danger of affectation that I allude to. In all days and times there have been affected creatures who imagine that they are original when they help themselves to soup with their shoes. But the perpetual self-inspection and self-examination prevalent in Rahel's day produced a dangerous tendency to impute singularity to very ordinary feelings and impressions, a liability to become unaffectedly unnatural, like the beautiful Henriette Herz and many of her friends, whose outpourings have a haunting flavour of lamp-oil and ink. The fire-writing of originality is something very different.

This is to be found in Bettina's Goethe's Correspondence with a Child. Bettina's letters are written in the fiery characters, the "singing flames" of passion.

Bettina von Arnim, a sister of Clemens Brentano, wife of Achim von Arnim, by family and marriage connected with the Romanticists, nevertheless belongs as an authoress to the Young German school. Rahel admired and worshipped Goethe timidly, with a beating heart, a quiet, dignified seriousness. Bettina's admiration showed itself in an insinuating, half-sensuous, half-intellectual devotion, a determined bur-like adhesiveness, and flights of the wildest enthusiasm.

In 1807, when she, as a native of the same town, made Goethe's acquaintance through his mother, she must have been twenty-three, but in her ways she was still a child, or rather a being midway between child and woman. She comes to Weimar, provides herself with a superfluous letter of introduction from Wieland, holds out both her hands to Goethe as soon as she sees him, and forgets herself altogether. He leads her to the sofa, seats himself beside her, talks about the Duchess Amalie's death, asks if she has read about it in the newspaper. "I never read newspapers," said I. "Indeed! I understood that you were interested in all that goes on at Weimar." "No, I am only interested in you, and I'm far too impatient to be a newspaper reader." "You are a kind, friendly girl." A long pause. She jumps up from the sofa and throws her arms round his neck.

This little anecdote suffices to show the difference between her position to Goethe and Rahel's. From her childhood she had been distinguished by a youthful daring more often met with in boys than girls. At Marburg they still show a tower to the top of which she climbed, drawing the ladder up after her, so that she might be alone. Along with the agility of a young acrobat, she had something of Mignon's childlike, innocent devotion. She is Mignon in real life, as charming as ever, and far less serious.

In 1835, when her Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde came out, Bettina was fifty. Arnim had died in 1831, Goethe in 1832. She had got back the letters written by herself to Goethe between 1808 and 1811, when an end was put to their intercourse by an act of discourtesy on her part towards Frau Goethe, and had taken even greater liberties with these letters than Goethe took in Dichtung und Wahrheit with the experience of his past life. She expressed in them not only all that she had felt, but much that she now thought she ought to have felt; she gave to their intercourse a more passionate colouring than really belonged to it, and yet in the profoundest sense she was truthful. The letters were at first accepted as genuine. But strong suspicions were presently awakened by the fact of Bettina's having published poems, which were undoubtedly addressed to other women, as if they had been written to her; and there came a time when her letters lost all credit as historic documents, and everything in them was considered to be fictitious. In 1879, however, Loeper published the genuine letters written by Goethe to Bettina, and it was then seen that in them she had made almost no alteration; a few greetings were omitted and thou was substituted for you—nothing more. In only one of the original letters is she addressed as thou, but that letter is the only one which Goethe did not dictate, but wrote with his own hand, so Bettina's alteration was not altogether unjustifiable. Goethe was in the habit of enclosing in his letters any poem which he had just written. Bettina was conceited enough to imagine that poems addressed to Minna Herzlieb (even those which played upon the name Herzlieb, and were consequently incomprehensible to her) and to Marianne von Willemer, were meant for her. This was an absurd but excusable mistake. It was inexcusable of her to transpose these poems into prose and incorporate them in her earlier letters, thereby producing the impression that Goethe had simply put her thoughts and feelings into verse.

What she tells us of her intercourse with Goethe's mother, of her eagerness to gather from that mothers lips information about Goethe's childhood which might serve as an introduction to Dichtung und Wahrheit, and also what she tells about Beethoven and the relation in which she stood to him, is in all essentials absolutely true.[5]

No one with any feeling for poetic enthusiasm who has read Bettina's book in his youth will ever forget the first impression produced by her style. There is a vitality about it, an animation, a refined wildness, a rhythmic ring and flow, which astound and fascinate. Turning from Rand's dark hieroglyphs, which suggest a thousand secrets to us, but which we seldom really understand, because the living life which was the commentary is no more, it is refreshing to bathe in this clear spring of naïve and charming devotion. Rahel is more profound and more realistic. But talent is such a marvellous thing. The pleasure it gives is great. We can and must excuse much for its sake.

In these letters Bettina is twenty-three to twenty-five years old, Goethe fifty-eight to sixty. Hence her passion is not the ordinary human passion of a young woman for a young man. She has grown up with it; it is an inheritance from her mother, Maxe Brentano, who partly suggested Werther's Charlotte. She loves Goethe's mother, as a young woman always does love the mother of her beloved; she is grateful to her for having borne him—"how else should I have known him!" Her devotion to the son finds expression in letters to the mother, till she meets him; then she writes to himself.

After that first embrace she looks upon him as her own. She writes to his mother: "It is possible to acquire a kind of possession of a man which no one can dispute. This I have done with Wolfgang. And it is what no one ever did before, in spite of all these love affairs you have told me about. Love is the key of the universe; through it the spirit learns to comprehend and to feel everything. How else could it learn!"

These letters have been compared to ships laden with rich cargoes. Goethe is the guiding star on all their voyages.

All her thoughts of him are thoughts of enthusiastic devotion: "I would I were sitting at his door like some poor beggar child, so that he might come out to give me a piece of bread. He would read in my eyes what I am, would take me into his arms and wrap his cloak round me to warm me. I know he would not tell me to go again; I should have my place in his house; years would pass, and no one would know where I was; years would pass and life would pass; I should see the whole world mirrored in his face, and more I should not need to learn."

"Last May, when I saw him for the first time, he picked a young leaf from the vine at his window and held it against my cheek and said: 'Which is softer, the leaf or your cheek?' I was sitting on a stool at his feet. How often I have thought of that leaf, and of how he stroked my forehead and my face with it, and played with my hair, and said: 'I am a simple-minded man; it is easy to deceive me; there would be no glory in doing it.' There was nothing brilliant in these words, but I have lived that scene over again a thousand times in my thoughts; I shall drink it in all my life, as the eye drinks light—it was not intellectual converse, no! but to me it surpasses all the wisdom of the world."

There is poetry in this exaltation and in the way in which she tells of his constant presence with her, of her longing for him, of her dumb jealousy of the famous women who came, as Madame de Staël did, to make his acquaintance; there is poetry in her distress at her inability to be of any use to him, and in her vivid appreciation of her own capacity.

"I must tell you what I dreamt about you last night. I often have the same dream. I am going to dance for you. I have the feeling that my dance will be a success. A crowd has gathered round me. I look for you, and see you sitting alone, straight opposite to me; but you don't seem to see me. With golden shoes on my feet, my shining silver arms hanging listlessly by my side, I step forward in front of you, and wait. You lift your head, your eyes involuntarily rest upon me; with light steps I begin to trace magic circles, and you keep your eyes upon me. You follow me through all my bends and turns; I feel the triumph of success. All that you dimly feel I show you in my dance; you marvel at the wisdom it reveals. Presently I fling aside my airy mantle, and let you see my wings, and away I fly, up to the heights. It rejoices me that your eyes follow me, and I float down again and sink into your open arms."

This symbolic description is both graceful and felicitous. In Bettina's Goethe-worship there is something of the same love of mounting and climbing that she displayed in her childhood. She climbed up on to the shoulder of the great Olympian's statue—a statue she was perpetually modelling—drew the ladder up after her, and sat there alone, revelling in the pleasure of being so near him. But it was not her Goethe-worship merely as such which made Bettina an ideal character, a Valkyrie, in the eyes of Young Germany. What won their hearts was the political liberalism to which she gave expression in her letters, and with which she in vain tried to imbue the sage who sat aloof in Weimar, her ardent admiration for the brave resistance of the Tyrolese to the domination of France, her eager desire for the well-being of humanity, for the extermination of poverty and all the other ills of society. It made a powerful impression when she, a worshipper of Goethe, but a more independent-minded one than Rahel, extolled Beethoven's republicanism as greater, worthier than Goethe's submissive loyalty. She tries to bring Goethe and Beethoven together; she wishes she could send Wilhelm Meister to the Tyrol, to Andreas Hofer, that he might learn to feel greater enthusiasm and to do manly deeds.

In the commencement of Frederick William's reign she was in favour at court. There was a frank, friendly intimacy between her and the king; she had almost as much influence upon him as Humboldt, when there was any question of assisting talent or alleviating misery. But before long her feelings led her openly to declare socialistic principles. In 1843 she published Dies Buch gehört dem König ("This Book belongs to the King"), a work in which she calls upon Frederick William to relieve the distress of his subjects. From her youth she had looked upon herself as the natural champion and advocate of the distressed. "The forsaken and unhappy possessed a magnetic attraction for her," says Hermann Grimm, who, as her son-in-law, knew her intimately. Her natural inclination to help others, arid the early impressions made on her mind by the French Revolution, produced those political sympathies to which she unhesitatingly gave utterance, in the naïve expectation of receiving support from royalty.

In 1831, when the cholera raged in Berlin, she went fearlessly among the sick and suffering. Judging from the hard lot of the Berlin working classes, she came to the conclusion that the whole nation was in a bad way and in need of help. To her, liberty had always been a magic word. She believed that whenever the words "Let there be light!" resounded from the right quarter, liberty would manifest itself, and all the feelings and dreams of humanity would take shape in harmonious music, to the strains of which the peoples would march joyfully onwards.

Her book, which in a little introductory parable she dedicates to the king, is written in the form of conversations. Goethe's mother is the chief speaker. There is much warm feeling in the book, and a considerable amount of information on the subject of the distress among the lower classes, but too little political insight to make it readable nowadays.

The authoress reaches a climax with the words: "Our sign is the banner of liberty; its brightness lights up the black darkness of the times; its brilliancy dazzles and terrifies those who are on the shore, but we are glad and rejoice. ... Dangers? Liberty knows no dangers! To it everything is possible. The storm itself, the wildest of all storms, is the captain of our ship."[6]

Such sentiments were not likely to meet with a favourable reception at the Prussian court of that day. The book created a sensation, but put an end to the good understanding between Bettina and the king. It naturally only increased the political discontent of the masses, and a pretext was found for seizing her next book (on Clemens Brentano), because a repetition of the same sort of thing was feared.

Long before this, however, Bettina had received the unanimous homage of the younger generation. Those interested should read Gutzkow's account of his first visit to her, Mundt's description of her, Kühne's poetical appreciation. Even Robert Prutz, severe as he is on all the representatives and models of Young Germany, numbers himself among her admirers. "Bettina's letters are," he says, "the last bright blaze of Romanticism, the sparkling, crackling fireworks with which it closes its great festival; but they are at the same time the funeral pile upon which it consumes itself, the pillar of fire which rises from its ashes—and shows us the way."

The third woman whose life and character made a deep impression on the generation of 1830 was Charlotte Stieglitz, the daughter of a Leipzig merchant named Willhöft. As a child Charlotte was quiet and thoughtful, as a young girl there was something nun-like about her. In 1822 Heinrich Stieglitz, then in his twenty-first year, came to Leipzig to study philology. From no fault of his own he had been mixed up in the prosecution of the demagogues in Göttingen. He was a handsome young fellow, audacious, and, to judge by his looks, passionate; and he was a poet. Charlotte was then a beautiful girl of sixteen, whose appearance suggested the possession of that supernatural quality which the Germans in olden days ascribed to those women whom they believed to possess the gift of prophecy. She had a high, open, intellectual forehead, curly brown hair piled up in a tower-like coiffure, a thin, aquiline nose, a beautiful mouth, large, star-like brown eyes that looked brightly and bravely out into the world. She spoke low, but sang with a full, clear voice.