VI YOUNG GERMANY (continued 7)

Whatever else modern poets may have neglected, they have not neglected to impress upon all, but more especially upon women, that a poet is a superior being. When Charlotte fell in love with the handsome young Stieglitz, who was fascinated by her, she felt that she had learned what happiness is. The very idea of being the beloved of a poet, a real, living poet, was bliss. And to this poet of hers she consecrated her every feeling, her every thought, from the first time she saw him until, twelve years later, she stabbed herself to the heart for his sake. Even before they were engaged, the desire was ever present with her to be able, all unknown to him, to do something really difficult, really great for him. She had the feminine helpfulness, the motherliness, the housewifely understanding, and the brave cheerfulness which are among a woman's best qualities. The impression she produced was that of gentle high-mindedness.

And this noble woman was unfortunate enough to mistake an effeminate Leipzig student for the ideal man of her day-dreams—a poet of inferior, perfectly mediocre talent, for a great artist. In order to be able to marry, Stieglitz was obliged to find employment. In 1827 he became a teacher in the Berlin Gymnasium and at the same time assistant librarian in the Royal Library, groaning immoderately over the restraint imposed on him by these occupations. He was gloomy, passionate, eager to distinguish himself as a poet, but any artistic gift he had was purely bookish and unrealistic; he had no perseverance or power of resistance in the struggle of life, but was one of those whom adversity prostrates. He had the outward appearance of a genius; in reality he was but a dull fellow.

It was a tragic misunderstanding on Charlotte's part. She believes that he has an untamable, uncontrollable temperament. "You need not deny it," she writes; "you ought to have been a brigand-chief." And she calls him her dark, wild, poniard-wielder with the flashing eyes. During their long engagement they live in different towns. His letters are genial, natural, and affectionate; but one feels in them that he is not unhappy away from her. She, more warmblooded, pines for him, for his personal presence. Hers was the uncontrollable temperament—he was the genuine bookman, as unlike a robber-chief as any librarian on the face of the earth. About the same time as Victor Hugo in France, he feels the poetical attraction of the East, and, sitting in his library, makes as careful a study as he can of Oriental literature and civilisation. From this study result the Bilder des Orients, three volumes produced with much toil and trouble. There is a great deal of pretty and graphic writing in them, and it was unjust that they were so entirely overlooked; but the feeling which animates these Turkish and Persian poems, these Stamboul tragedies and scenes from Ispahan, these more than passable verses on the Greek war of liberation, is too commonplace, too tame; the marked individuality, the savagery which Charlotte saw in Heinrich Stieglitz is exactly what is wanting in them. It is all too literary.

Shortly before their marriage in 1828, Charlotte, at her fiancé's request, bought a poniard for him to wear on their wedding tour, the weapon with which, six years later, she took her own life. It was but a short time of unmixed happiness that she enjoyed after their marriage. But she completely identifies herself with her husband, and is miserable because he, the genius, is compelled to spend so much of his time and energy on his library work and teaching. She devotes much of hers to writing letters to their rich relations in Russia, who are ministers and privy-councillors, and to other patrons and friends, in the hope of improving his position. She encourages him indefatigably; she knows every one of his poems by heart, parodies one of them with affectionate playfulness. A certain scene in his tragedy, Selim III., is costing him much time and trouble. One day when he comes home, she leads him smilingly to his desk, where he finds it lying, completed—the fine scene between the Sultan's mother and the physician in the Third Act.

From time to time there came over her what she calls her champagne-mood; she grieves that this is no longer the case with him. She writes a poem to him, with a present of six quills, exhorting him to be energetic and determined, and not to reflect too long before he begins:

"Giess ein Füllhorn aus mit Früchten, Blüth und Früchte gieb zugleich, Weisheit sei in deinem Dichten, Witz und Jugend mach' es reich. Menschen lass uns drinnen finden, Menschen die gelebt, gedacht, Lass von Lieb' dich warm entzünden Und von Zorns Gewitternacht."[7]

She firmly believes in the existence of mighty Titanic thoughts and imaginations in his soul, which it is difficult for him to persuade his lips to utter. Alas! he is not only uncommunicative, he is barren, and on the verge of insanity, at times possibly over the verge. He listens to her exhortations with indifference. She writes: "O Heinrich, for God's sake let us be inconsistent at times, let us blaze up wildly, despair madly, rise to the bliss of heaven, sink to the depths of hell—anything but be stolidly indifferent!" We feel the spiritual kinswoman, the admirer of Rahel, in these words.

Harassed by the drudgery of his daily life, troubled by the sterility of his overrated talent, he was sometimes irritable, sometimes gloomily stolid. She tries every means to brace him. At one time she fancies that he is too lonely, that he requires the stimulation of more female society—and she is not jealous. She writes (October 1834): "I wish, Heinrich, that you could have more intercourse, either personal or by correspondence, with clever, womanly women. They are the poet's true public. It would be of interest to you to learn, frankly and truthfully, what they think of you and your works. Such intercourse would be both instructive and refreshing, a useful and agreeable diversion for you."

She is determined that they are to travel, to go far afield. He throws up his appointments and they go off to St. Petersburg and Finland. But it is all in vain.

As she and Stieglitz stood looking at the waterfall of Imatra in Finland, in July 1833, she spoke the following memorable words: "Is not this like a great thought which has strayed into these mountain solitudes? Feelings like mighty billows, thunderstorms, a hurricane, would be a suitable accompaniment to this tumbling, foaming water. How poor the song about the little violet would sound here, pretty as it is in itself! Like the mighty waterfall, this foaming, wildly excited time cries for mighty song. You will give what it demands...."

In October 1835, when he was making perpetual complaint of the small pin-pricks of life, she said to him (as he himself has noted): "My careful observation of you has led me to the conclusion that whoever wishes to do you real service must provide a real, great sorrow for you. Nothing would do you so much good as that; nothing would so surely bring out your powers."

Like most people whose minds are affected, Stieglitz had periods of violent excitement, after which he relapsed into his ordinary state of silent, almost animal-like brooding. Once when they were on a walking tour, he was so lost in his own thoughts, so indifferent to all else, that she left him and went off by herself, hoping that this would rouse him; but he did not even notice it. It was a kind of warning that her final desertion of him would be of no avail; but it was a warning that she did not understand.

Entirely possessed by the latest ideas of the day, persuaded that a poet ought to live in the world, to influence and be influenced by it, it was her constant desire to drive him to action. She said to him one day: "I long for your spiritual regeneration. You will be born again! I know you will! Would that I could hasten that birth—even if it were by artificial means! But how if my surgical operation miscarried!" And in December 1834 she writes in her diary that Goethe's life becomes fuller from the moment that Schiller enters into it, but that Goethe ought to have profited more by his friend's death, and would have done so, if he had not, according to his custom, determinedly refused to sorrow; if he had allowed the sorrow to enter into him, to become part of himself, the result would have been a renewal of youth as far as his poetical productivity was concerned.

It was in this same month of December, 1834, that Stieglitz's disgust with life reached a sort of climax. His malady took the form of intellectual stagnation, of absolute incapacity to express himself. Charlotte begged him, as if he had been a child, rather to rave and storm as of old than to collapse in this terrible manner; but she begged in vain. It was then that she determined to employ the last means in her power, to take that step which she, with her innocent, high-flown ideas, felt it obligatory to take, in order that a great, simple sorrow might enter into his life, reawaken his genius, and give his poetry new themes.

On the evening of the 29th she came home, knowing that she would have two hours to herself, threw her short fur cape and boa on the hall floor, hurried into her bedroom, locked the door of communication with the kitchen, undressed, washed herself, put on a clean night-dress, wrote a few lines to Heinrich expressing her belief that new life for him would arise out of this misfortune, and exhorting him no longer to be weak, but calm and strong and great. Then she lay down on the bed and with a firm hand plunged the dagger of their wedding tour into her heart.

One's first impression is that these women, Rahel, Bettina, and Charlotte, who all three became famous in the year 1835, have nothing in common. Rahel dies in 1833 at the age of sixty-one, and her real life-work, the first energetic vindication of Goethe's pre-eminence, belongs quite as much to the eighteenth as to the nineteenth century. Bettina, who is fourteen years younger, does not come before the public till a year after Rahel's death; she combines the exalted enthusiasm and the unreality of Romanticism with the reforming tendencies of Young Germany. Charlotte's only achievement was to kill herself, a thing which has been done by women times without number, though probably never for the same reason.

But when we look a little deeper, we find that they have many traits in common. They are all restless, with the restlessness distinctive of their day, which manifests itself, not in outward hurry and strain, but in strong emotions, not in the nervousness prevalent in our own day, but in perpetual introspection. Then there is the peculiarity that none of them transgress the laws of society, though none of them have any respect for these laws. And there is the wonderful, ideal fidelity which they all display. Rahel is Goethe's, from the first breath she draws as a grown-up woman to her last. Bettina is Goethe's, with such absorbing devotion that the scheme of erecting a colossal monument to him which she advocated in her first published work (a monument which she herself planned and had executed in miniature), becomes in her old age an idée fixe. Charlotte so entirely belongs to the man on whom her choice falls when she is sixteen, that she not only lives for him, but dies for him.

Another thing they have in common is enthusiasm. Rahel's burns like a steady, sacred flame; Bettina's breaks out in a pyrotechnic display of ideas and visions; Charlotte's manifests itself in the resolute, uncomplaining sacrifice of her life. It is genius that they all worship; they have the enthusiastic German appreciation of poetic genius; their great desire is to do what in them lies to promote its recognition and glorification, or its development and emancipation; to this task they devote their lives, regardless of the worthiness or unworthiness of the object of their choice. Lastly, the thoughts and feelings of all three are remarkably original. These women resemble no other women. Never, to our knowledge, has there been such another reflective emotionalist as Rahel, such another sylph-like enthusiast as Bettina, such another suicide as Charlotte's, a suicide inspired by a lofty though false æsthetic principle.

Those who look deeper into the matter and view these characters in the light of history, see in Rahel's introspection and self-reflection, the first form which woman's self-emancipation necessarily took in the Germany of this century; this height of intellectual independence had to be attained before the women in a country where they for centuries had been relegated to simple domesticity could rise to anything above it. In Bettina's triple enthusiasm, for Goethe, for the ideas of political liberalism, and for social reform, the student of history descries the transition stage between the era of art and the era of liberalism and socialism. And in Charlotte's suicide he sees an expression of the desire of the women of her day to snatch the men from their literary quietism and place them face to face with the seriousness, the tragedy of life. The whole era speaks when she says to Stieglitz that the song of the violet cannot be sung to the accompaniment of a great waterfall. None of these women could have developed as they did at any other period, and at no other period would they have been understood and appreciated as they were. To-day, already, we find it difficult to understand them.

It is characteristic that the word work finds no place in the description of their lives. They never learned anything methodically, and in their fear of being unfeminine are proud of this—as we observed in the case of Rahel. Even that accomplished linguist, Henriette Herz, is deeply offended because Jean Paul in one of his letters used the expression, "M. Herz and his learned wife." Charlotte Stieglitz has not the faintest idea that talent is developed by work, by obstinate industry, and not by bereavements. And Bettina, the bayadere, who imitates Mignon's egg-dance, has nothing whatever to do with work. This fact impresses itself on us when we are annoyed by the slovenly composition and the want of any real understanding of politics in her book for the king.

About the year 1848 it began to be recognised that all this intellectuality would have been more solid, more real, more lasting, if these women had known something, had followed some course of study, taken up one or other branch of science. All this soaring thought would have been doubly valuable if it had in the first place been subjected to regular discipline. To soar without previous training is often mere waste of power. If Rahel had had a solid foundation of knowledge to build upon, she would have had a very different influence upon posterity. As it is, her ideas, obscure and lucid, chaff and seed-corn, are scattered to the winds.

In the Thirties men still believed in an inspiration that could dispense with knowledge, in a morality of the heart which rendered any reform of the old social morality unnecessary, in a defiance of law which allowed all laws to hold good, but kept clear of them all. This state of matters Young Germany was bent upon altering.

During the Forties men had arrived at the persuasion that there was something of greater value than sudden inspiration and a life of pure intellectuality. There was humble and daring work to be done in science and in politics. We see German philosophy develop in the direction of radicalism, and we come upon poets whose aim it is to prepare the way for political liberty.

XXIV

FREDERICK WILLIAM OF PRUSSIA

With the year 1840 the literary movement enters upon a new, more philosophic, and more political phase. Yet another generation had arisen, a generation which owed its profoundest culture to Hegel, and which, strangely enough, he had influenced chiefly in the direction of politics. Schelling in his day had declared art to be the highest manifestation of intellect. His principle, and that of the Romanticists, was that the artist is the true man. What art had been to Schelling, history was to Hegel—history, that eternal progress of the idea of liberty, that great liberty-epic. And what the work of art had been to Schelling, the State was to Hegel. To him the true, the perfect human being is not the artist, but the citizen of a constitutional State.

This youngest generation was inspired by the Hegelian philosophy to make the reform of the State its aim. It held the adherents of the Young German school in light esteem, being of opinion that they had not stood bravely by their colours, either in philosophy or politics, that they were too belletristic, too epicurean. It would not join in the old cry for the rehabilitation of the flesh, would not even listen to it. Heine, in Atta Troll, had told the young generation that a man of character without talent was no better than a bear; the young men retorted that a man of talent without character was nothing but a monkey—possibly a very amusing monkey, but nothing more.

That the Hegelian philosophy had again become a guiding principle was made plain when the periodical known as the Hallische Jahrbücher was brought out by Ruge and Echtermeyer in 1838. This organ of the Hegelians of the Left disseminated the ideas which moulded not only the politicians but also the poets of the day. In all essentials the principles were the same as those in whose name Young Germany had taken the field, but they were now proclaimed with more scientific precision and more resoluteness. The elder men had to choose between joining the Young Hegelians and reprobating the principles of their own youth, as now proclaimed by others. As was only natural, they did not recognise their own opinions as propounded by these bellicose youths, and there was many a collision between the youngest generation and Gutzkow, Laube, and Mundt.

The idea of the State now became the central idea of the day, the idea of the State as a living organism, realised in the consciousness of all its citizens. In the many philosophical, theological, æsthetic feuds waged by this new generation, the State and the necessity for its reform is always the burden of their cry. This was the season of preparation for that absorption in the idea of the State which is so characteristic of the Germany of later days, and which caused even a revolutionary (but a Hegelian revolutionary) like Lassalle to exclaim: "Do not malign the State! The State is God!" It is a sign of the nature of the literary development that the Hallische Jahrbücher began as a philosophical, but was suppressed as a political periodical.[1]

The new political ideas with which the nation was impregnated presently broke forth in poetry and song. The first political poetry appears in the same year as the Jahrbücher, and spreads political free-thought in far wider circles. At first it was for the most part rhetorical, and devoid of artistic value, but the common national feeling of the German countries had slumbered so long that the mere watch-words "liberty" and "fatherland" produced an electrical effect.

On the 7th of June 1840, Frederick William IV. ascended the throne of Prussia. The new king presented in every respect a marked contrast to the man who, succeeding in 1797, had wielded the Prussian scepter for forty-two years. Frederick William III. had been the born soldier; his son was an artist by nature, with mediocre half-suppressed talents, a dilettante in art and science. The father had been a sober, modest, steadfast character; the son was a fanciful enthusiast, as impressionable as a woman. The father had been the devotee of duty, an upright, dry, narrow-minded man, the son was full of romantic ideas, clever, famous for his witty sallies. The father had been tall, slender, soldierlike, in his bearing and dress; the son had soft, rounded features, not unlike Queen Louisa's, was fat rather than muscular, quick and jerky in his movements, communicative, sociable, very talkative. The father had been a reliable man, the son was an interesting one.

Though Frederick William IV., as Crown Prince, had had the best of instructors in all the branches of a military education, he did not take the lead in military matters. He was fond of calling himself a Prussian officer, but the strict, pedantic discipline inseparable from military service in time of peace, was wearisome to him, and at times he, a Hohenzollern, was even known to jeer at State parades. Now and again, however, it happened that he grew wildly enthusiastic. At a review, the music, the clash of weapons, the loud commands, the firing, produced in him a sort of poetic excitement. Carried away by military enthusiasm, he once, on the occasion of a big sham-fight, led the troops right into Berlin, regardless of the confusion thereby produced, and of the hundreds of window-panes shattered by the volleys fired in the streets.[2]

But for the most part it was with men of science and artists that the Crown Prince consorted—scholars such as Humboldt, historians like Ranke, painters like Cornelius, sculptors like Rauch. He was much interested in architecture, made a study of the antique styles in their application to ecclesiastical architecture of the Byzantine type, sketched plans, tried to produce imposing effects by means of colonnades and halls. He projected ideal landscapes, resembling scenes on the Italian shores of the Mediterranean. He criticised music and poetry. He specially encouraged and patronised the study of ancient German customs and of all ancient art which had devoted itself to the service of religion; and all this occupation with the past increased his distaste for the time in which he lived, and developed his inclination to restore the old order of things, or at any rate to oppose reforms inspired by the modern spirit.

This inclination could not but be strengthened by the young prince's intercourse with clergymen, and with the small circle of romantically disposed aristocrats who were his familiar associates. From his childhood he had been religious. As a boy he had, during the war with Napoleon, learnt to believe in the sacredness of the old system of government, in the divine right of kings, and in the mission of Austria as heir of the Holy Roman Empire. He adopted the whole system of ideas and enthusiasms of which Joseph de Maistre was the first and ablest exponent. He studied Haller's Restauration der Staatswissenschaft. Ere long he came to look upon the crown as a mystic jewel, a combination of the priestly fillet of old with the dictator's golden wreath; the kingly office became in his eyes a sacred calling, the king himself a divinely inspired being. His ideal was a patriarchal relation between the king and his people, much the same ideal as that which was aimed at during the same period by the so-called Young England, the followers of Disraeli.

Frederick William IV. was received by his people with all the confident expectation with which a nation that is still in its political childhood welcomes a new king. They believed of him what is believed of all crown princes, that his principles were more liberal than his father's. The hopes and expectations of the nation surrounded him with a sort of halo. He began, as kings are wont to do, with an act which appeared to justify the popular estimate of his character; he proclaimed a general amnesty for political offences. This led all to hope that he would fulfil the political desire of the country, that he would confer on Prussia that benefit which was regarded as a necessary condition of all progress, constitutional government.

As already stated, the Prussian people were in possession of a distinct, definite, royal promise of a constitution, a promise the fulfilment of which had been dishonestly delayed. This made their hope all the stronger; they felt sure that this promise would now be redeemed.

Soon after the new king's accession, the Estates of the Provinces of Posen and East and West Prussia were summoned to meet at Königsberg, for the purpose of paying homage to him. The Estates of East and West Prussia replied to the announcement of this meeting by sending in a most humble petition to the king, in which they besought him to maintain and to complete the system of representative government inaugurated by his glorious father, who, in this as in all else faithful to his promise, had introduced representative government in the provinces, but had left the completion of the work to his royal successor "whom the nation loves with the truest devotion, and on whom its dearest hopes are set" (in welchem die treueste Liebe und die innigsten Wünsche des Landes sich begegnen).

The lower classes of citizens, all those who hoped that their trades and industries would profit by the approaching festivities at Königsberg, were highly incensed by this proceeding, which they considered calculated to offend the king. The higher classes, on the contrary, imagined that their gifted monarch would at once gladly accede to the legitimate desire of his people; no one was in a better position than he to understand the defects of the old system of representation. But neither those who dreaded an outburst of royal indignation nor those who expected a manifestation of royal liberal-mindedness proved to be right.

Frederick William's vague answer was to the effect that the constitution of the Estates rested upon a national, historic foundation, that the king took a deep interest in the said institution, that he was firmly determined to pursue the path entered on by his predecessors, and that his faithful Estates might "place absolute confidence in his intentions" with regard to the institution of the Landtag (Parliament).

Little of positive assurance as there was in this message, it was received with joy; it relieved one party from the dread of a stern rebuff, and encouraged the sanguine hopes of the other. The festival at Königsberg went off successfully, and was marked by general enthusiasm. Its most imposing incident occurred immediately after the deputies had repeated, word for word, the oath of allegiance read out to them. Hardly had the echo of the loud Amen pronounced by the four hundred voices died away, when the king was seen to rise from the throne, which stood upon an open balcony, come forward to the rails, raise his arm as if he were taking an oath, and begin to address the assembly. Every word of his speech was clearly audible. He promised to be a just judge, a faithful, painstaking, and merciful ruler, a Christian king like his ever-to-be-remembered father. The concluding sentence bears witness to his literary gift: "May God preserve our Prussian fatherland, for its own sake, for Germany's, and for the world's—our fatherland, which is made up of many parts, and yet is one whole, like that noble metal, a mixture of many others, but itself one metal, liable to no rust but the beautifying rust of centuries!"

Astonishment that a King of Prussia should thus of his own free will give a promise to his people in return for theirs to him, combined with the impression produced by this ostensibly improvised address from such an animated and winning royal personage, to create a feeling of excited jubilation. Above on the balcony the queen burst into tears, down below the people wept, smiled through their tears, and pressed each other's hands. In the transport of the moment it was not observed that there was no definite political promise in the speech, nothing but liberal generalities and romantic phraseology.

But the Königsberg festival was only a prelude to the great one held in Berlin. In the minds of the inhabitants of his capital a halo of golden promises still surrounded the person of the king. They were determined to do everything in their power to show their devotion, and to give the festival a character that was likely to be agreeable to him. The military element was not allowed to preponderate; something in the style of a medieval German municipal pageant was aimed at. The different guilds, numbering in all about 10,000 men, marched in procession, carrying their banners and emblems. As an agreeable little surprise for the king, a great projecting piece of masonry at the Rathaus (town hall) with which his carriage had come into collision one day when he was Crown Prince, was altogether removed.

In the interval between the two festivals an incident occurred which could not but awaken in the mind of the nation a suspicion of the king's fickleness. On the 4th of October 1840, a royal order in council was published which intimated, to prevent any misunderstanding, that the king, in expressing his appreciation of the loyalty of the Estates, had by no means declared himself to be in favour of a representative constitution as formulated in the ordinance of the 22nd of May.

The princes and nobles were to take the oath of allegiance in the palace, the citizens were to pay homage in the great square outside the so-called Lustgarten. But from early morning rain fell in torrents. For two whole hours the citizens stood outside the square, getting soaked through, whilst the king listened, indoors, to the speeches of princes, nobles, and clergy, and gave the rein to his own eloquence.

At last he stepped out on the balcony. But on this occasion people were prepared to hear him speak; there was no question of improvisation. Berlin would have felt itself insulted if the king, who had made a speech at Königsberg, had received its homage in silence. And speak he did. Every one could see the motion of his hands, but the size of the square and the sound of the wind and the rain prevented his words being heard. Every time he stopped speaking, the attentive crowd, imagining that the speech was concluded, broke forth in loud acclamation; but the king waved his hand, and proceeded. The rain poured, but still he spoke. All watched his gesticulations. Four times the multitude shouted "Hurrah!" in the belief that he had done, and four times he began again. He promised to rule as one who feared God and loved man, with his eyes open when attending to the needs of the people and of the times, closed when called on to do justice—but the antithesis was lost in the whistle of the wind and the rush of the rain. He shouted: "Will you promise, while I am striving so to do, to stand by me, in prosperity and in adversity? If so, give an answer in that plainest, finest word of our mother-tongue, an honest 'Ja!'" Shouts of "Bravo! bravo!" from the square. They thought he had finished. But the king waved his hand and continued. At last he concluded by turning the downpour of rain to account in his peroration, by taking it as a favourable omen—though this also was lost on the audience. "So help me God, I will keep the promises which I have made here and at Königsberg! In sign hereof I raise my right hand to heaven. Proceed we now with our high festival, and may God's blessing fall like his fertilising rain upon us this day!"

But God's fertilising rain completely extinguished the festive spirit, poured its chilling prose over both audience and orator.

No one could observe that any promises were kept, but neither could any one name any particular promises that had been made by his Majesty. The new king and his government soon showed themselves in their true light.

Eichhorn was nominated Minister of Public Worship (Kultusminister) in place of the late Count Altenstein, the patron of Hegel and the Hegelians. Eichhorn had already shown Pietistic leanings; it was reported that he intended to introduce strict regulations regarding the observation of holy-days, and possibly also rules of church discipline binding on all Government officials. The indignation roused by this report was so great that advantage was taken of the first possible opportunity to display it. Racine's Athalie was put on the stage by the king's special request. There was no fault to be found with the play itself, but it had a religious subject and had been originally written for the inmates of a convent. On the occasion of its first performance, January 4th, 1841, it was hissed by the audience, a demonstration the meaning of which every one understood. People were much more exasperated with the minister than with the king; for no one doubted that the king was a sincerely religious man, whereas the life Eichhorn had lived and the company he had kept led them to conclude the opposite of him. And when it came to his making public use of the expression, "the Christian state," that is the state of which the unorthodox cannot be reckoned true citizens, war was waged against this "square circle," as the expression was called, with all the weapons of sober earnest and of mockery. Unfortunately the king had, a few months before this, in one of his fits of political liberalism, possibly influenced by his appreciation of wit, abolished the censorship of caricature-drawing. So now Eichhorn was to be seen everywhere, in the shape of a squirrel (Eichhorn = squirrel) gnawing leaves, cracking the empty nut of the Christian Church, &c., &c. The ungrateful caricaturists did not even respect the king; and Heine, the greatest caricaturist of the age, ridiculed royal indecision in the following lines of Der neue Alexander:

"Ich ward ein Zwitter, ein Mittelding, das weder Fleisch noch Fisch ist, Das von den Extremen unserer Zeit ein närrisches Gemisch ist. Ich bin nicht schlecht, ich bin nicht gut, nicht dumm und nicht gescheute, Und wenn ich gestern vorwärts ging, so geh ich rückwärts heute."[3]

But Eichhorn was not content with Christianising the State, he aimed at Christianising science. He was particularly desirous to oust known Hegelians from all good and influential appointments, the Hegelian philosophy being distasteful to the king, because it left no play for his imagination.

It was by the king's wish that Schelling was brought from Munich to Berlin to fill the professorial chair left vacant by the death of Hegel, that from that vantage ground he might propound his new philosophy, that Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation) which, like some quack remedy, had been kept secret for years, and yet puffed as if it were to introduce a new era. He received a larger salary than had ever before been given to a Prussian university professor (it was declared that he was almost as well paid as a premiere danseuse); and it was certainly not the king's fault that, in spite of all Schelling's endeavours, there seemed no possibility of eradicating Hegelian unorthodoxy. As a matter of fact, Schelling was a failure. He could not but feel that he was regarded with contempt by the whole youth of a nation. Ch. Kapp wrote a clever description of the court thinker's various metamorphoses since the days of his youth, his apostasy from himself, the humbug in his reconciliation of faith and thought; and Ludwig Feuerbach, in his energetic language, styled him the philosophical Cagliostro of the nineteenth century, and his philosophy a theosophic farce.

Eichhorn proceeded to take a variety of measures to counteract the progress of science. He set a fixed limit to the number of teachers at all the different Prussian universities, thereby reducing the number of private lecturers and increasing the influence of the Government. Professor Hoffman (von Fallersleben) was dismissed from the University of Breslau, because of some harmless jests at politics in his Unpolitical Songs—jovial, catching verses, which so exactly chimed in with the Liberal ideas of the middle-class citizen that they alarmed the authorities. The Biblical critic, Bruno Bauer's, two books on the authenticity of the Four Gospels cost him his post of lecturer at the University of Bonn. The servile Faculties carried out the wishes of the Government: they approved of free scientific inquiry, but could not approve of Bruno Bauer as a lecturer on theology. The Hegelian theologian, Marheineke of Berlin, undauntedly declared that he, too, was desirous that Bruno Bauer should be relieved from his post as lecturer, because he considered that such an eminent critic, a man of such thorough scientific training, should be promoted to a really influential appointment. But Bauer's fate was sealed. The Halle students petitioned that David Strauss might be appointed professor at their university. The answer to their petition was a reprimand, and the three students whose names headed the list of petitioners were expelled. After Gans's death, the noted reactionary Stahl (author of Umkehr der Wissenschaft) was appointed to his professorship in Berlin. It was somewhat humiliating for the Government that the students refused to listen to Stahl's first lecture; they drummed him out of the lecture-room.

In the summer of 1841 there appeared in Switzerland a little book, entitled Gedichte eines Lebendigen ("Poems of a Living Man"). It contained many an astounding verse; among others:

"Reisst die Kreuze aus der Erden! Alle sollen Schwerter werden! Gott im Himmel wird's verzeihn. Lasst, o lasst das Verseschweissen, Auf den Amboss legt das Eisen, Heiland soll das Eisen sein."[4]

And:

"Brause, Gott, mit Sturmesodem durch die fürchterliche Stille, Gieb ein Trauerspiel der Freiheit für der Sklaverei Idylle! Lass das Herz doch wieder schlagen in der Brust der kalten Welt Und erweck ihr einen Rächer und erweck ihr einen Held!"[5]

The collection was prefaced by a poetical challenge "To the Dead Man," namely Prince Pückler, who had written under this pseudonym. He was chosen as the representative of the careless pleasure-lovers who seek distraction in travel. The attack was unjust, but how fine it sounded!

The anonymous author, whose name soon became public property, was a young man of twenty-four, Georg Herwegh, born in Würtemberg in 1817, and educated at the well-known Tübingen Institution. While serving his time in the army, Herwegh quarrelled with an officer, and was obliged to take refuge in Switzerland, where he lived for several years, associating with other refugees and other youthful Radicals. His poems, with their fresh, energetic, and yet vague Radicalism, at once made their mark, and attained an immense circulation in the course of a few months. The sentiment of these poems is somewhat mixed. Now it is with tyrants, now with Philistines, that their author is at war; at one time he discovers the enemies of the good cause in Germany itself, at another abroad; now he writes as a staunch Republican; again, following the example of Platen, he appeals earnestly, imploringly to the King of Prussia, warning him, but at the same time assuring him that it is not too late:

"Du bist der Stern, auf den man schaut, Der letzte Fürst, auf den man baut."[6]

The public of that day overlooked the young poet's want of consistency; his enthusiasm was infectious, his melodious lyrical rhetoric irresistible. He was the first lyric poet who had taken men's hearts by storm since the days of Goethe and Schiller. From the Alps to the Baltic the young men sang: Reisst die Kreuze aus der Erden!

In the autumn of 1842 Herwegh took a tour through Germany, with a practical aim in view. The work which he had begun as a poet, he desired to carry on as a journalist, a political writer; his journey was undertaken for the purpose of securing contributors to a monthly magazine to be entitled Der deutsche Bote aus der Schweiz ("The German Messenger from Switzerland"); but it became a sort of triumphal progress; he was entertained at banquets in Cologne and Leipzig, and serenaded by the students of Jena; never before had such homage been paid to a German poet.

Towards the end of October he arrived in Berlin, where he could not expect to make as great a sensation, especially as he had followed the advice of his companion, Ruge, and refused the advances of a very unprosperous Radical association. But something happened which made far more impression on the public mind than any popular demonstration could have done—the king expressed a wish to make Herwegh's personal acquaintance.

So far the only public manifestation of Frederick William's æsthetic sympathies had been his patronage of Tieck and Rückert, both of whom he had invited to Berlin. Ludwig Tieck, now an old man, crippled with rheumatism, occasionally read aloud at Court and put plays on the stage; Friedrich Rückert was expected to assist in reorganising the study of Oriental languages at the University, but proved unfit for the task. Unprejudiced judgment in literary matters was certainly not traditional in the Hohenzollern family. There was only one possible precedent for the audience granted to Herwegh, and that was to be found in the present king's own private reply to the ode in which Platen conjured him to embrace the cause of unhappy Poland. In a cordial letter to the poet, Frederick William, then Crown Prince, expressed his hearty sympathy with the Poles and bewailed his inability to help. The ode addressed by Herwegh to the king implored him to put down clericalism; it was an agreeable surprise to find that this had given no offence.

The audience took place on the 19th of November 1842. Herwegh was very silent, depressed by the situation. The king was, as usual, eloquent and communicative. He is reported to have said: "You are the second enemy whom I have received this year; the first was M. Thiers (who had threatened war in 1840, because of the support given by the great powers to the Sultan in his quarrel with the Egyptian Pacha); but it gives me greater pleasure to see you. We have our vocations, you and I; mine is to be a king, yours to be a poet. I shall be faithful to mine, as I trust you will be to yours. Nothing is more abhorrent to me than vacillation; I esteem an Opposition which is actuated by real conviction (wenn sie nur gesinnungsvoll ist)." Referring to Herwegh's youth, he prophesied "a Damascus day" for him, concluding with the words: "Until then, let us be honourable enemies."

Such particulars of this meeting of king and poet as reached the ears of the public awakened feelings either of childish envy or childish indignation among the oppositionist writers of the day. It was considered that Herwegh ought (à la Marquis Posa) to have taken advantage of the opportunity to demand political liberty for Prussia.

A few days after the audience, Herwegh left Berlin. At Königsberg, where he was again entertained at a banquet, he was surprised to receive the news that his projected periodical, before its appearance, had been declared contraband in Prussia. It was a prohibition for which he might well have been prepared, for all books published abroad (his own poems included) were contraband, except those for which special licence had been granted. But already irritated by accusations of treason brought against him in one and another Radical newspaper, he was completely upset by this rebuff, and at once addressed an awkward, unmanly, would-be pathetic letter to the king.

He pleaded the king's promise of honourable enmity, a promise which he declared to be broken by this prohibition; he would not ask the king to revoke this edict, though it was hard for him to see the child of his Muse menaced while yet in its mother's womb, and hard to have to live in a state of constant warfare with the law of the country; not that the prohibition did him any harm, for he was fortunate enough to be at that moment preparing the fifth edition of his poems, also a prohibited book; but he felt impelled to address a last, honest, impassioned appeal to the king; an appeal which, though private, was not merely his own, but that of thousands, &c., &c.

The letter itself was stupid and indiscreet; its publication in a Leipzig newspaper a few weeks later was a piece of folly that avenged itself. In Stettin, Herwegh received orders to leave the country; policemen escorted him to the stage-coach, from which he was forbidden to alight in Halle. He had received a festive welcome in Prussia, but his leave-taking was of the coldest.

The arch-scoffer Heine, in his poem, Der Ex-lebendige, has the following lines:

"Aranchuez! in deinem Sand' Wie schnell die schönen Tage schwanden, Als ich vor König Philip stand Und seinen uckermarkschen Granden. Er hat mir Beifall zugenickt, Als ich gespielt den Marquis Posa, In Versen hab' ich ihn entzückt Doch ihm gefiel nicht meine Prosa."[7]

And in Die Audienz he jeers more mercilessly still at the Swabian suckling:

"'Ich will, wie einst mein Heiland that, Am Anblick der Kinder mich laben. Lass zu mir kommen die Kindlein, zumal Das grosse Kind aus Schwaben.' So sprach der König, der Kämmerer lief Und kam zurück und brachte Herein das grosse Schwabenkind Das seinen Diener machte. Der König sprach: 'Du bist wohl ein Schwab? Das ist just keine Schande.' 'Gerathen! erwidert der Schwab, ich bin Geboren im Schwabenlande.' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 'Erbitte dir eine Gnade,' sprach Der König. Da kniete nieder Der Schwabe und rief: 'O geben Sie, Sire! Dem Volke die Freiheit wieder.' Der König stand erschüttert tief; Es war eine schöne Scene. Mit seinem Rockärmel wischte sich Der Schwab' aus dem Auge die Thräne. Der König sprach endlich: 'Ein schöner Traum! Leb' wohl und werde gescheidter! Und da du ein Somnambülericht bist, So geb' ich dir zwei Begleiter. Zwei sichre Gendarm', die sollen dich Bis an die Grenze führen. Leb' wohl, ich muss zur Parade geh'n, Schon hör ich die Trommel rühren.'"[8]

It was not only humour that laughed, but envy and vindictiveness as well. Men wreaked vengeance on their own former enthusiasm. The Herwegh catastrophe was, moreover, attended by disastrous practical results. The Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, the Opposition newspaper most widely read in Prussia, was suppressed the day after it published the letter to the king. The Rheinische Zeitung, the principal Liberal paper published in Prussia, itself very soon received its death-blow. And in Saxony, at the request of Prussia, Arnold Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbücher (first known as the Hallische Jahrbücher), the leading periodical expressing the opinions of the reflective youth of the day, was also suppressed.

One lesson the young generation learned from what had happened. It was no momentous matter that a young poet should have shown himself embarrassed and then unmanly in his relations with a king. But the men of this day had imagined themselves to have taken a great step in advance of the men of the Thirties; they believed that they possessed strength of character, whereas their elders had only been gifted with talent. Now it was borne in upon them, not only that poets are little calculated to make good political leaders, but also that the whole generation must discipline itself severely if it were to stand any firmer in the day of trial than its predecessors had done.

So now thinkers and politicians by profession (in almost too many instances professors) took the lead. And the fact that the generation which now revolutionised the mind of Germany failed so miserably in the close of the struggle of 1848, is to be ascribed, not to want of strength of character, but to that idealism which is bred in the minds of men who have never ruled, to their belief in the irresistible powers of ideas and ideals to realise themselves, and to their contempt for that external brute force, which in theory was of minor importance, but which, vanquished in the first brush, calmly allowed itself to be disdained, and awaited the moment when, with renewed vigour, it returned to the attack.

There was considerable difference of opinion as to the advisability of the various measures taken by Frederick William's ministers, but for the most part they were unfavourably criticised. Under every other question smouldered the question of the Prussian Constitution. The king's attempt to dispose of it by a rebuff had been unsuccessful, and the means which he and his advisers employed to put down the movement were extremely infelicitous. In the Silesian Landtag (Parliament) the chief magistrate and other representatives of the town of Breslau had proposed an address from the Silesian Estates on the subject of a general assembly of the Estates of the whole kingdom—a Reichstag. The king replied by a special announcement of the procedure to be observed on the occasion of his approaching visit to Silesia, intimating that no arrangements need be made for his festive reception and entertainment in Breslau, as he would accept nothing from that town. This in May, in reference to a journey to be taken in October, and festivities of which there had as yet been no offer! And the king entered Breslau in state and was fêted after all, though the festivities were not held specially on his account, but on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of Silesia with Prussia. He contented himself with deploring the absence in the invitation sent him of "expressions which would have given him heart-felt pleasure," and with declining to stay longer than a day or two on account of want of time.

Yet the king stood in need of the consent of the Estates of the realm to the carrying out of a project of the utmost importance for the whole country. The time of railways had come, and two matters had to be arranged, a loan of the money needed for the construction of State railways, and a State guarantee to the constructors of private lines. According to a law passed by Hardenberg in 1820, the consent of the Estates of the realm was imperative in both cases. The king evolved an impossible plan; he proposed to convoke an assembly of six hundred representatives chosen from the different provincial Landtage, and to let this assembly play the part of Reichstände (Estates of the realm). Metternich was obliged to interfere, and prove the utter impracticability of the scheme.[9]

It was at this juncture that a small pamphlet, Vier Fragen eines Ostpreussen ("Four Questions by an East-Prussian"), made a sensation throughout the whole of Germany. The little book appeared on the spiritual horizon like the first distant flash of lightning that preludes the storm. Purporting to be printed in Mannheim, it was scattered abroad everywhere in the end of February 1841. Such careful arrangements had been made that it found its way into the booksellers' windows of every town in Prussia on the same day—every town except Berlin, where it appeared a little later, a precaution taken to prevent confiscation before the general distribution.

The Four Questions which it contained foreboded the downfall of absolute monarchy. They were: What did the Estates ask? What right had they to make such a request? What answer did they receive? What remains for them to do?

The book's answer to the first question was that, as things now stood, the people had almost no share in their own government, although the general high level of education made it natural that they should wish it. And their desire for a representative constitution, for a national parliament, was made more ardent by the fact that they possessed no other means, such, for instance, as a free press, of expressing their opinions, and that they thoroughly distrusted the king's ministers because of their arbitrariness, servility, and pietistic tendencies. To the question: What right had the Estates to make such a demand? the author replied: The right of authority, an authority declared and recognised on the 22nd of May 1815. To the third question: What answer did they receive? the reply was: A recognition of their loyalty, a rejection of their proposal, and comforting promises of some vague future indemnification. The answer to the fourth question: What remains for the Estates to do? only occupied a line and a half. It was: To demand now as a demonstrable right what they had previously solicited as an act of grace.

The earnest, impressive tone of the pamphlet, its appeal to the people's sense of justice and self-respect, aroused a keen desire to know the name of the anonymous author. He himself had sent his book to the king, with his name written on the title page: Dr. Johann Jacoby, physician in Königsberg. The king at once ordered criminal proceedings to be instituted against him. It appeared that he was a man of means, and a very highly esteemed physician. In 1831, during the first and most violent epidemic of cholera in Poland, he had gone there to study the disease. At a later period he had had a protracted quarrel with a Warsaw doctor, a regular quack, who, when the cholera broke out again in 1837, advertised his discovery of an infallible remedy for "this trivial, easily curable disease." Jacoby wrote a short scientific article in disparagement of this man. The quack wrote an answer full of insulting imputations, which he published in the Berlin newspapers. By the help of influential friends he not only managed to secure the prohibition of the publication of Jacoby's retort, but also to defeat the latter's successive appeals to the Berlin censor's superior, to the highest council of censorship, to Rochow, the Secretary of State, and to the king himself. The publishers in Hamburg, Leipzig, Grimma, Basle, and Berne, one and all refused to print the documents throwing light on this affair. Any other man would now have given up the attempt to get his reply to an attack in a contemptible newspaper article published. Not so Jacoby. Month followed upon month. The manuscript travelled thousands of miles, and was published at last in Paris, under the title of Contribution to a Future Historical Account of the Censorship of the Press in Prussia.

Such was Jacoby's character. Here at last was found what Young Germany so sorely needed, what even Youngest Germany with its Herwegh had not produced, that first essential in public life—a man. At last the Germany of the Forties had found a strong political leader—not a statesman in the proper sense of the word, for time showed that he was incapable of accommodating himself to circumstances, that he could not be satisfied with aiming at the attainable; but a man of inflexible will, of absolute integrity, who with indomitable courage pressed onwards to his goal.

The Government organs, the libellous press, began a systematic attack upon him. There was nothing to lay hold of in his blameless personality, but he was of Jewish descent. In a little pamphlet published by the local magnates of a small town in the neighbourhood of Königsberg under the title of Stimme treuer Unterthanen seiner Majestät des Königs von Preussen ("Voice of a Few Faithful Subjects of his Majesty the King of Prussia"), we read: "Not from German, not from Christian lips did these words proceed.... East-Prussia would be disgraced if her sons had expressed such sentiments.... The seed of Jacob did not hearken to the voice of God, did not acknowledge his only begotten son, but put him to death; therefore they were cast off for ever, and scattered abroad among the nations of the earth." Presently, however, in all the booksellers' windows the portrait of Jacoby was to be seen; his face, with its clear-cut features, was surrounded by four marks of interrogation; he held his pen like a lance poised for attack.

The significance of the man who thus made his appearance was felt by the poets, even by those with least strength of character, even by Dingelstedt, who was then preparing to barter his oppositionist principles for the title of Hofrath (Privy Councillor). In Dingelstedt's fine collection of poems, Nachtwächters Weltgang, we find one with the heading: ????, evidently addressed to the King of Prussia:

"Du weisst, was das bedeuten will? Du wirst sie mir nicht streichen? Es sind ja nur unschuldige—vier kleine Fragezeichen. Die wurzeln tief, die ragen hoch; wie die gerühmten Eichen Des freien deutschen Volkes stehn vier kleine Fragezeichen. Du wolltest sie zwar nimmer sehn in deinen weiten Reichen, Doch drängen sie sich immer auf, vier kleine Fragezeichen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Und einst, wenn du gestorben bist, als Stempel dann und Aichen Stehn gross an deinem Monument—vier kleine Fragezeichen."[10]

Herwegh, too, sang Jacoby's praises, as if he had a prevision that this was a man who, placed face to face with the King of Prussia, would play a more manly part than he himself had done. And the prevision was correct In November 1848, when the king replied to the deputation that waited on him to demand a change of ministers: "I will not listen to any communication on this subject," it was Jacoby who stepped forward and said: "It is the great misfortune of kings, that they will not listen to the truth." Herwegh's poem, which has a J. as headings, begins:

"Und wieder ob den Landen Lag jüngst ein schwerer Bann: Da ist ein Mann erstanden, Ein ganzer, deutscher Mann. Ein deutscher und ein freier, Wer hätte das gedacht! Dass selbst die deutsche Leier Aus ihrem Schlaf erwacht."[11]

The proceedings against Jacoby were carried on with extraordinary vigour. In less than four weeks he was brought up for examination twenty times; ninety-six witnesses gave evidence, shop-women, cooks, and school-children among the number. His real misdemeanour was merely a transgression of the press-laws, namely circumvention of censorship. But he was accused of instigation to disaffection—for which the punishment was two years' imprisonment and disfranchisement; of lèse-majesté—for which the punishment was four years' penal servitude; and of high treason—punishment, "death, with application of the most severe and deterrent pains and penalties."

It was in his native town, Königsberg, that Jacoby was brought to trial; but the court there declared itself incompetent to deal with the case, seeing that it was one of high treason, and passed it on to the Kammergericht in Berlin. The Kammergericht, aware that the charge of high treason was untenable, also declared itself unqualified, and sent it back. The king was obliged to issue an order in council, requiring the Königsberg court to proceed with the trial. It was altogether to Jacoby's advantage to be tried by his fellow-citizens; but he disdained the idea of an illegal acquittal, and obstinately demanded to be tried by the Kammergericht in Berlin, since he was accused of high treason. His wish had to be complied with. He was condemned to two and a half years' imprisonment with hard labour and disfranchisement. But three years later the highest court of appeal pronounced a full and free acquittal.

In the meantime all over Germany money was collected to present him with a civic wreath; subscriptions poured in; the names of eminent men headed the lists. Once more the Government was obliged to take action; the subscription lists were seized, the subscribers summoned, and a stop put to the whole proceeding. While the police and the censors were thus struggling to suppress the agitation for a free constitution, there was issued, on the 11th of August 1842, the most absurd regulation of which there is any record in the annals of an autocratically governed country—one of the country's own existing laws was added to the list of prohibited writings; it was forbidden to reprint the law of the 22nd of May 1815 (that relating to the institution of Estates of the Realm), because of its tendency to excite discontent.

In September 1842, those Prussians who had hoped to see their country under the new king shake itself free from its humiliating relations with the Emperor Nicholas, learned that Frederick William IV., in Platen's day the warm, if platonic, friend of Poland, the hater of Russian tactics, was preparing for a journey to Warsaw to meet the Czar. On the return journey the king stopped at Kalisch to inspect the monument erected there in memory of the meeting between the sovereigns of Russia and Prussia in 1813. A Russian officer, General Berg (the future castigator of Poland), translated the inscriptions for him. One of them was: "May the Almighty give His blessing to the alliance and friendship between Russia and Prussia, that it may advance the peace and prosperity of both countries and inspire fear in their common enemies!" On hearing this inscription read, the king hastened up the steps of the monument and in the dust upon its side wrote with his finger the word: Amen![12]

XXV

THE NEUTRAL LITERATURE

Nevertheless, Frederick William IV. was, and remained, the most intellectually gifted monarch of his day; his conversation gave evidence of both intelligence and imagination. It was a principle with him that all his feelings ought to be kingly; his published letters to Humboldt, written in amusing court jargon, are bright and clever; his sayings show quickness of apprehension, easily awakened compassion, ready wit.[1] Nor can it be said that he was out of touch with the German intellectual life and literature of the day; he showed favour to all the "good" writers, and disfavour to the "bad"; but it was not long before all Oppositionist writers were included in the latter class.

In the beginning of the reign, Humboldt's was the dominating literary influence at court. Alexander von Humboldt, now eighty, the most famous scientist of the day, and a man of world-wide celebrity, kept the king well posted up in all the latest intellectual and scientific movements. His brother Wilhelm's liberal political theories had fallen into complete disrepute; to his own he dared not give expression at court; holding both superstition and reaction in abhorrence, he was a silent witness of much that was repugnant to him, though he now and again spoke his mind.[2] Honoured by the king and his intimates as the ornament of the court and the pride of his country, he took advantage of his position to further the cause of science and to say an occasional helpful word for this or that persecuted author. Published letters show that, before 1848, the king treated Humboldt with a sort of playful familiarity, though there was no real, deep sympathy between the two men. After 1848, when the Kreuzzeitung party became all-powerful, Humboldt gave expression to his annoyance at having lost his influence, in such remarks as, "It is no longer possible to amuse the king;" or, "the king persists in wasting fruitless affection on persons whom he has taken into favour." Amiability was not his characteristic at court; he was often sarcastic, and became angry when Ranke's political opinions found more favour than his. He was disliked by many, amongst others by the queen, who disapproved of his attachment to Louis Philippe and his family. He was in the habit of reading aloud all varieties of literature, but never his own writings; most frequently he read the Journal des Débats, whilst the king sat planning landscapes and architectural drawings.

Another of those who read aloud to the royal family was Tieck, whom the king had brought to Berlin from Dresden. Though Tieck was considerably younger than Humboldt, court life was a burden to him because of his bodily infirmity. Shakespeare and Kleist were the authors he most frequently read from. The king ordered Tieck's own old fairy play, Puss in Boots, to be performed in Berlin, it was like the appearance of some antiquated spectre. At the king's instigation Tieck put the Antigone of Sophocles on the stage, and Mendelssohn composed music for it. But Tieck was only one of literature's invalided soldiers. When the court dined in the garden of Sans Souci, he was afraid of draughts, even on the warmest days.

Another once famous author of the Romantic period whom the king called to Berlin was La Motte Fouqué. Though not much over sixty, this writer had completely outlived his reputation. His romances seemed to the younger generation to belong to a pre-historic period. People were tired of tales of chivalry and the service of love (Minnedienst) told in a conventionally childish style; his unhistorical conception of past times and his sanctimoniousness aroused derision. Had it not been for the king's support, he would have died in want and oblivion.

In 1841, chiefly on the recommendation of Varnhagen, the king invited to Berlin a great poet who did not belong to the Romantic school. This was Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866). Rückert was only fifty-three, but he did not belong to the period in which he lived; he was the expression in the literature of the day of that German universality which is unaffected by circumstances, of the gift of appropriation, absorption and imitation of the peculiarities of all other races. All his life long he shook poems out of his sleeve with a truly astonishing skill. As a young man he was initiated by Joseph von Hammer into the literatures of Arabia, Persia, and Turkey, and in 1826 he was appointed lecturer in Oriental languages at the University of Erlangen, but his duties as lecturer he constantly tried to evade.

There is something about him which reminds us of Goethe in the Divan period, and something which he owes to the Schlegels and their indefatigable study and translation. The essay on philology, Ueber das Wesen der Philologie, which he wrote in 1811, shows the influence of Friedrich Schlegel's work on the wisdom of ancient India; for he starts from the idea of a "universal poetry," for which he considers the German language the most sympathetic vehicle. And universal, cosmopolitan poetry is exactly what this great master of style has given us. He, as the German patriot, makes his début with Geharnischte Sonnette ("Armoured Sonnets"), polished and rather mannered verse. This book is followed by volume after volume of love-poems to various young women (five to six hundred poems). In the last and largest of these volumes, Liebesfrühling, inscribed to his fiancée, Louise Witthaus, feeling is predominant; everywhere else he is the didactic poet employing lyric forms, here he is the singer. But even here, set forms—as in the Canzonets of the South—stand in the way of the simple, natural outburst of feeling, and already Rückert's inclination to display his mastery over language shows itself in a hitherto unexampled free invention of new words and ease in interlacing within the limits of metre:

"Welche Heldenfreudigkeit der Liebe, Welche Stärke muthigen Entsagens, Welche himmlisch erdentschwungene Triebe, Welche Gottbegeistrung des Ertragens! Welche Sich-Erhebung, Sich-Erwiedrung, Sich-Entäussrung, völl'ge Hin-sich-gebung, Seelenaustausch, Ineinanderlebung!"

There is more of philological and technical than of purely poetical interest in such verse as this. But Rückert was the philologist as poet. His predominating gift is the gift of language in its two developments—the capacity to learn languages and penetrate into their spirit, and the capacity, due to his profound penetration into the mysteries of his own language, to reproduce in German the best poetry written in other languages. He delighted in creating linguistic difficulties for himself to overcome. At one time we have him writing in the old German style that corresponded to his Albrecht Dürer curls, at another as a young officer of the time of Napoleon; now he is a Bedouin telling us Hariri's tales with marvellous skill, and again a Persian weaving his rhyme in the form of Ghazels or recreating the epic of Rustum and Sohrab. He appears before us as a Turk in caftan and turban, as a Chinaman with slippers and pig-tail; but most frequently and with most pleasure he sits as a Brahmin on the banks of the sacred Ganges, proclaiming in sonorous verse the thousand golden rules of a happy philosophy of life. It is said of Théophile Gautier that he was, intellectually speaking, equally at home in ancient Egypt, in the Russia of to-day, in Constantinople, and in Seville. This is only true to the extent that he was well acquainted with the climatic characteristics and the monuments of many foreign lands. It may be said with much profounder truth of Rückert, who comprehended the human beings through their literatures, understood their language and thought in their spirit. He never saw the foreign lands with his bodily eyes, therefore he has neither Gautier's colour, nor his power of graphic presentation; he views them all calmly, reflectively, with the eye of the mind, and gives us the mental pictures in an astonishing variety of metrical forms. Whoever desires to make acquaintance with excellent specimens of his art should read Hariri's Makamehs (more particularly the division entitled Jungfrau und Junge Frau) or Weisheit der Bramanen.

These works had gained Rückert a wide circle of readers and admirers in Berlin; but the town, with its restlessness, was antipathetic to him. He was to lecture on Oriental languages at the university, and his first lectures were attended by a curious crowd; but this crowd soon dwindled down to an audience of two or three, and Rückert gave up going to the university. He sat in his room in the third flat of a house in the Behrenstrasse and wrote poems in which he expressed his detestation of Berlin and its agitated, modern life. Even the Berlin of the royal romanticist was too modern for these celebrities of past days.

At a somewhat later date the king extended his patronage to Christian Scherenberg, whose poems, more especially the battle-pieces Waterloo and Abukir, were much admired at court—the author himself had to read them aloud. Even as an octogenarian, Scherenberg retained his place as a favourite in Berlin society. He was born in 1798. His life had been a hard struggle. After the dissolution of his unhappy marriage, he lived, from 1833 to 1840, in rooms in a small house at the corner of the Bendlerstrasse, looking towards the Zoological Gardens, in such poverty that he could not afford to buy firewood, and had to send his children to gather sticks in the Gardens. He wrote poems, tragedies, and comedies, for which he could never find a publisher; nevertheless he was so successful in his attempts to keep up the appearance of a gentleman, that his relations in Stettin believed he had won fame under an assumed name, and begged him to "remove his mask" and let them into the secret. All that his pen brought him was what he received for composing begging letters and for copying; the rest of his living he gained by acting as tutor to the families of the gardeners who lived in the neighbourhood, giving lessons which, according to agreement, were paid for in potatoes. A pretty story is told by Fontane in his Life of Scherenberg. Great hopes had been entertained in the Bendlerstrasse that a certain long-deferred payment would be made at Easter in the shape of a juicy roast of veal; but in place of this, the pupil, in his innocent desire to give pleasure, appeared with a lark in a little green cage. On Easter morning, 1840, Scherenberg himself carried the cage out to an open field, set the lark free, and wrote the sweet poem, one verse of which runs:

"Du, Vöglein, singst, das ist das Deine, Hub leise ich zur Lerche an, Ich geb' dich frei, das ist das Meine, Ein Jeder bete, wie er kann."[3]

The poor, struggling poet let the lark go, but kept its little clay water-dish as a remembrance, promoting it to be his ink-pot.

At last his poems caught the fancy of the public, and the king, delighted with the originality and rugged energy of the battle-pieces, took their author into favour. The only thing connected with the time when he read aloud at court that Scherenberg could be persuaded to talk about, was the pleasure of the half-hour before the reading, spent in his friend Count Bismarck-Bohlen's room, where men joked and smoked, and afterwards drenched themselves with Eau de Cologne, because the king disliked the smell of tobacco. Many years later there was another potentate in Berlin at whose court Scherenberg was an attendant. This was Ferdinand Lassalle. At his house the poet met livelier companions, in whose society he not infrequently permitted himself to make fun of his royal and aristocratic patrons. It was in his nature to suit himself to his company; his court friends knew his weakness and excused him.

Another favourite at the Prussian court, as indeed at all the courts of Europe, was Prince Hermann Pückler-Muskau, who from time to time came to Berlin to visit the wife whom, though divorced from her, he still loved. He was a handsome man, aristocratic in appearance and manners, accomplished and versatile, a favourite with men because of his spirit and gaiety, irresistibly charming to women; the list of famous women who were devoted to him is a long one; it includes Sophie Gay, Henriette Sontag, Bettina, and Ida Hahn-Hahn. In much the same manner as the Prince de Ligne before him, Pückler-Muskau belonged, by right of his intellectual qualities, to the international aristocracy of Europe. His desire to shine did not lead him to over-estimate his powers, did not even preclude real modesty. He was a brilliant vagabond, a master of the art of living, and a skilled professional in one department of art strictly so-called, namely, landscape gardening. He was the first in Germany to desert the stiff, French style of laying out a garden, and to reinstate nature in her rights. His garden at Muskau soon became the model garden of Europe.

There were many strange episodes in his life. Nothing could be much stranger than the story of his marriage. He was in love at the same time with two young girls, daughters of Count von Pappenheim, whose wife was a daughter of Chancellor Hardenberg. This lady, who was forty, nine years older than Pückler, herself conceived such a violent passion for him that she infected him with it. She gave up everything to become his, and he married her, but with the proviso that he was to be at complete liberty to dispose of his affections as he chose. The marriage turned out happily. But after they had lived together for ten years the couple amicably arranged a divorce, in the hope that the prince might find and marry a rich heiress, and thereby repair his fallen fortunes. With this aim in view he first visits London, then travels about in Germany. He writes daily to his divorced wife, his Lucie, keeping her faithfully informed of the progress he makes and of the difficulties he encounters in his pursuit of an heiress. Unable to capture one, he returns to Lucie, and they again live lovingly together for some years. After this he travels for six years, returning at the end of that time with a beautiful little slave, named Machbuba, whom he instals at Muskau. With this arrangement the princess was not altogether satisfied, though she had made it a rule never to plague him with jealousy. At the age of seventy she still loved and worshipped him, and in his intercourse with her he was always personified kindness, frankness, and cordiality.

Prince Pückler had never had any serious thought of taking up the profession of author, but in 1830 he determined to publish anonymously the letters which he had written to Lucie during his travels in search of an heiress. They had a great success. There was a society tone about them very uncommon in German literature, an attractive carelessness of construction, due to the fact that they were not written for publication, a pleasing mixture of wisdom and frivolity. As already mentioned, many ascribed their authorship to Heine. Their writer was modern in the extreme, thoroughly blasé, an advanced Liberal, a freethinker in the literal sense of the word.

For readers of to-day the four volumes of Briefe eines Verstorbenen ("Letters of a Dead Man") have much the same value as Madame de Girardin's attractive five volumes, Lettres parisiennes du Vicomte de Launay. She is fresher and writes infinitely better than the prince. He has cosmopolitan experiences of classes and of countries that she knows nothing about. As a specimen of his style, those interested should read the unassuming account of his conversation with Goethe in Weimar, to be found in the third volume of the Letters. Pückler's enthusiastic reverence for Goethe has a genuine ring, and the same may be said of Goethe's answer to Pückler's polite speeches. Goethe at once begins to talk about Muskau (referred to in letters as M.), and commends attempts like Pückler's to awaken the feeling for beauty, dwells on the fact that the welfare of all would be rapidly advanced if only each in his own sphere, great or small, would work faithfully and lovingly—that is what Pückler is doing in Muskau, and he himself has done no more.

Pückler's later volumes of travel, many in number, leave us quite cold. They lack the spontaneity of the Letters, and are still more destitute of that which could alone replace it, namely, literary talent. But until about the year 1840 they stood as high in the favour of the reading public as his first books, and their author's popularity was unbounded; he was, like Franz Liszt, known and admired everywhere. As late as 1854 Heine dedicates his Lutetia to him in an enthusiastic preface, in which he calls him "mein hochgefeierter und wahlverwandter Zeitgenosse" (that highly honoured contemporary, to whom I feel myself spiritually akin). And in Varnhagen's diary for July 7, 1839, we read: "Prince Pückler's name acts like magic. It needs but to be mentioned, and the great world of all countries listens in suspense. His fame is stupendous, and the cleverer men are, the more they appreciate him."

In 1834 Varnhagen had said of him that he possessed one quality in common with Young Germany, and that the most important, namely, absolute freedom of thought; at a later period he said that Pückler represented the upper house, Heine the lower house in modern German literature.

Pückler's attitude to the House of Hohenzollern was one of chivalrous devotion. He never came to Berlin without waiting on the king. He appreciated Frederick William IV.'s culture and wit, but, being a pronounced Voltairean, to whom every priest was a hypocrite and all vague piety an abomination, the romantic strain in the king's character repelled him. Like Humboldt he often fled from the court and took refuge with Varnhagen, the keen observer and critic, who sat forgotten in his corner, writing in his Journal (a diary kept in Sainte-Beuve's manner) the history of the times. And in later years Pückler, too, was a regular guest at Lassalle's small dinner-parties, where he often did most of the talking; it is said that he was the only person privileged by Lassalle to do so.[4]

To the authors already named we have only to add the aged Arndt, who in his day had been persecuted as a demagogue, and we have the complete list of the romantic, conservative, neutral, or aristocratic writers whom the most powerful king in Germany succeeded in attaching to his person. We see the length and the strength of the attachment. The Opposition attacked every author who had the very slightest connection with the court or with those in power. We have seen how Herwegh begins his first book with a defiant attack on Prince Pückler. He jeered even at Arndt—called him a sunset glow, incapable of illuminating the young world—and received a poetical reproof from Freiligrath for so doing.

Freiligrath was the only one of the young poets whom the king at once (1841) placed under an obligation (Geibel was taken into favour a year or two later). General von Radowitz, who admired Freiligrath's poem "Löwenritt," in spite of its unnaturalness, induced the king to look favourably on its author and to grant him a pension of 300 thalers. Herwegh, not content with making merry at Freiligrath's expense in such lines as the following, where Freiligrath is substituted for Mühlenrad (mill-wheel):

"Mir wird von alle dem so dumm, Als ging mir ein Freiligrath im Kopf herum,"[5]

wrote in his Duett der Pensionirten:

"Geibel: Bist du's? Freiligrath: Ja, willst du mich kennen? Ja, ich bin es in der That, Den Bediente Bruder nennen Bin der Sänger Freiligrath."[6]

This was more than Freiligrath could stand. He threw up his pension, a step which was soon followed by his complete conversion. His volumes, Ein Glaubensbekenntniss ("A Confession of Faith"), published in 1844, and Ça ira, published in 1846, show a steadily increasing passion of devotion to the revolutionary cause. He became the most honoured poet of the party. Immediately after the publication of Ein Glaubensbekenntniss he was obliged to flee the country, going first to Brussels and then to London, where he earned his livelihood as a merchant.

The following anecdote shows how popular he already was: From Brussels he had taken an excursion to Antwerp. There he and his friends went on board a barque that was lying in the river, ready to sail for Canton. While the boatswain was showing them over the ship, the captain, with some friends, came out of the cabin. Freiligrath's party made many excuses, but the courteous sailor bade them welcome, and invited them into the cabin. On one of the shelves of the little book-case stood Freiligrath's Poems. "Are you not pleased that your poems are going out to Canton?" asks one of his companions. "Eh!" says the captain. "This is Freiligrath? The real Freiligrath?" On his question being answered in the affirmative, the captain rushes to the speaking-tube: "Hoist the flags! Man the yards! and serve champagne on deck!"[7]

The fermentation throughout Germany was rapidly becoming more violent. Ever since 1842 the Hungarians under Kossuth had been defying Metternich; in Bavaria the prestige of royalty had suffered from King Ludwig's amour with the ballet-dancer, Lola Montez; in German Switzerland the Radical and Jesuit parties were engaged in stern conflict. In Prussia the authority of the State Church was being vigorously asserted; Roman Catholicism was favoured, but all other dissenters were harassed. It was not only the Free-Catholics, a sect founded by Ronge, and the so-called Friends of Light, another free sect, founded by Wislicenus, that were regarded with disfavour; even Pietists were objected to, as not orthodox enough to suit the State requirements. One protest after another reached the king from those whose liberty in matters of conscience was threatened. And purely political agitation was on the increase too. The leaders of the opposition parties in all the States of Germany decried with one voice the old Federal constitution (Bundesverfassung). Louder and louder rose the cry in Prussia (the king having laid no great restrictions on the liberty of the press) for the promised new constitution. From abroad too came revolutionary impulses. Since 1846 Pius IX. had been giving himself out as a Liberal and an Italian patriot. Insurrections were breaking out all over Italy; Metternich was unable to prevent them, and they were destroying his prestige. German emigrants in Switzerland and North America did their best to fan the flame in Germany.

Meantime the King of Prussia occupied himself with the institution of the new Order of the Swan and with architectural plans. He proposed the erection of a great Hermann monument on the Rhine, as a demonstration against constitutional France; and he set the builders to work again on the Cathedral of Cologne, after a pause of 300 years. This latter undertaking was considered symbolical, not from the national but from the ecclesiastical point of view. It gave Heine occasion for various protests and erroneous prophecies in Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen, and also gave occasion to Strauss's clever pamphlet, Der Romantiker auf dem Trone der Cäsaren, in which he manages to describe Julian the Apostate as the enthusiastic religious reactionary, in such a way that the parallel with Frederick William IV. suggests itself without being pointed out.

The new literature, to which the king was distinctly inimical, soon began to return his enmity with interest. He established Tieck, the fretful, crippled old man, at Sans Souci as poet-laureate, and Schelling, the mystifier, in Berlin as summus philosophus. He caused the Antigone of Sophocles and the Medeaof Euripides to be performed in the theatres of Berlin and Potsdam, in hopes of thereby counteracting the spirit of unrest in German literature. But that literature went its own way.

XXVI

POLITICAL POETRY, PHILOSOPHICAL REVOLUTION

In Anastasius Grün's (Count Alexander von Auersperg's) volume, Spaziergänge eines Wiener Poeten ("Walks of a Viennese Poet"), there is a poem, the title and the refrain of which is: Why? When new prohibitory enactments are pasted on the notice-board at the town-hall, a little man comes and reads them and quietly asks: Why? When the priests from their pulpits groan and howl at the sunlight, he asks: Why? When men go out to fight sparrows with halberts and spears, and use cannons to shoot larks, he asks: Why? And when they try, condemn, and execute himself, from his very grave is heard the question: Why?

Something of this kind happened in Germany as soon as the patriarchal faith in monarchy was thoroughly shaken. When an act of violence, or a stupid act, or a subterfuge on the part of the Government killed a hope, out of the grave of that hope grew a Why. And every Why gave birth to others. The four questions of the East-Prussian were inadequate now; questions grew and multiplied like those invisible but dangerous animals which in an incredibly short time can undermine an organism. Why revere? Why trust? Why endure? And, first and foremost, why keep silence? When they are going to shake off the yoke, men begin by refusing to bear it silently. Suffering and wrath, desire and longing, now found vent in words, in song.

Political verse, of which there had been occasional specimens among the work of Platen and Lenau, Uhland and Heine, now concentrates and crystallises itself into a separate species of poetry, a separate form of art. Political song of every variety is heard throughout the land. It is a time of growth; men of talent come to the surface in crowds—Hoffmann and Herwegh, Dingelstedt and Prutz, Freiligrath and Max Waldau, Karl Beck and Mofitz Hartmann—such a rich and fragant bloom as had never been seen in this domain before. Old Romanticists expressed their contempt for prose (i.e. political) poetry, dogmatic æsthetes declared these poets to be possessed of rhetoric and not of lyric talent; but all to no purpose; the very number of them, and the way in which they spontaneously fell into position as a group, showed that they had the very best, the only unchallengeable reason for coming into existence, namely, that they could not help it, that the spirit of the times was making its voice heard through them; and soon they also proved that they possessed the one and only right to exist, for they were able to hold their ground, they took their position as literary men, and gained the popular ear.

They had had a single forerunner in the Thirties, the above-mentioned Austrian poet, Alexander Auersperg. His verse was imposing, somewhat overloaded with imagery, at times wanting in taste; nevertheless it had the true ring, and his pathos was genuine. Joseph II. is Auersperg's hero, and it is from the "enlightenment" standpoint that he regards that political liberty which he so eagerly desires. It is the power of the priesthood that specially arouses his wrath; but he distinguishes between Pfaffen and Priester, attacks the worthless and sings the praises of the high-minded among the clergy. Upon lines like:

"Stoss in's Horn, Herold des Krieges: Zu den Waffen, zu den Waffen! Kampf und Krieg der argen Horde heuchlerischer, dummer Pfaffen!"[1]

follow others which extol the virtues of the really saintly priests. Still we feel that in his opinion more of the former than of the latter are to be found in his own day. He regards it as one of the signs of the times that the fat, animal priest has been succeeded by the lean, intelligent, ambitious one:

Die Dicken und die Dünnen. "Fünfzig Jahre sind's, da riefen unsere Aeltern zu den Waffen, Krieg und Kampf den dicken, kugelrunden, feisten Pfaffen! Auch in Waffen stehn wir Enkel; jetzt doch muss die Lösung sein: Krieg und Kampf den dünnen, magern, spindelhagern Pfäffelein!"[2]

In spirited verse the courageous poet attacked now Metternich, now the detective police, now the censorship. His poems display a frank, vigorous spirit of opposition, no hatred, no wild resentment; one feels that they are animated by anticipation of a glorious future and enthusiasm for the great men of the past. But Auersperg's plastic power is slight; he too often loses himself in a maze of allegory. The best of the political poetry of the Forties is, both intellectually and artistically, much superior to his.

About a year after his famous journey, from the effects of which he had completely recovered, Georg Herwegh published a second volume of Gedichte eines Lebendigen ("Poems of a Living Man"), in which some new and valuable qualities are combined with those characterising the first. There is more confidence and more fire, and both enthusiasms and animosities are less vague. We have fewer illusions, and a clearer understanding of ends and means; no more appeals to a king to lead the onward march of his people, or to God to give freedom and happiness to all the nations of the earth. Frederick William IV. had extinguished Herwegh's faith in princes, and Ludwig Feuerbach his faith in God. But we gain the impression that the dawning light in men's minds has broadened into the light of day.

In the old dawn-songs, which Shakespeare has imitated in Romeo and Juliet, the young girl always tries to keep her lover with her by declaring that it is not sunlight but moonlight that he sees, not the lark but the nightingale that he hears. This idea is cleverly reversed in the poem Morgenzuruf ("Cry of the Morning"):

"Die Lerche war's, nicht die Nachtigall, Die eben am Himmel geschlagen: Schon schwingt er sich auf, der Sonnenball, Vom Winde des Morgens getragen. Der Tag, der Tag ist erwacht! Die Nacht, Die Nacht soll blutig verenden. Heraus wer an's ewige Licht noch glaubt, Ihr Schläfer, die Rosen der Liebe vom Haupt, Und ein flammendes Schwert um die Lenden![3]

Unglückliche Liebe ("Unhappy Love") is an epigram pointed against kings:

"Nicht an den Königen liegt's—die Könige lieben die Freiheit, Aber die Freiheit liebt leider die Könige nicht."[4]

The tone of Herwegh's previous volume, even in its apparently irreligious utterances, had been theistic. On the adjuration to tear the crosses from the graves and use them as swords, follows the line: "God forgives the deed ye do." But in this new volume we find a poem in which Feuerbach's praises are sung because he has attacked the doctrine of immortality, and a Song of the Heathen, which is more daring in its mockery than any similar poem of Heine's:

"Die Heiden—'s ist doch Schade um solch Ingenium. Sie hiessen Vier gerade und nahmen Fünf für krumm. Auch hatt' die Jungfernschaft ein End, sobald die Magd ein Kind gebar, Dieweil das neue Testament noch nicht erfunden war."

And, unlike Auersperg, who makes a distinction between the good and the bad priest, Herwegh holds the whole brotherhood in derision, mocks at Catholic and Protestant, shorn and unshorn, in the witty, untranslatable epigram:

"Ob sie katholisch geschoren, ob protestantisch gescheitelt, Gleichviel—immer geräth man den Gesellen in's Haar."

He had pricked before, now he stung; the singer of liberty had developed into a herald and preparer of the approaching revolution.

If these powerful poems did not greatly move men's minds, it is to be ascribed to the fact that the deficiencies of Herwegh's personal character were subtly influencing his verse. They betray themselves in a certain straining after effect, in his evident satisfaction with his own witty sallies, and in his intellectual barrenness in every domain except that of polemics. This second volume of poems is not a collection which suggests that its author has any store of ideas, of imagination, to draw upon. When we read it, we understand his life; and his life helps us to understand this book, with which his career as a poet practically came to a close. All that he subsequently wrote, and he lived for thirty-two years longer, is contained in one small volume, published after his death. The poems of this last collection are full of wit and full of enthusiasm for liberty; they are written—hardly four in the year—by a man who to the day of his death remained faithful to his revolutionary youth.

Though faithful enough to his past, Herwegh was no worker in the service of liberty. The latter part of his life was spent in idleness. His career as a poet and critic began in 1839[5] and culminated with Gedichte eines Lebendigen. He married a rich young Jewess, an enthusiastic admirer of his poetry. After the Revolution of February he took up the position of a leader in Paris, and invaded Baden at the head of a body of republican German and French workmen; on the 27th of April they were defeated by Würtembergian troops; thanks to his wife's courage, Herwegh escaped. Heine has given a bitingly sarcastic, but very unfair description of this campaign in Simplicissimus I. The simple, truthful account which Herwegh's wife has published since, of all the incidents of the revolt, and of the part which her husband played in it, proves that, even if he lacked the tactical skill which he laid no claim to possessing, he was a brave man. Herwegh now became a member of the emigrant colony in London, and lived the emigrants' perniciously idle life; they had literally nothing to do but concoct futile plans for new revolutions and fall in love with one another's wives. He afterwards lived in Paris and Zürich, always the same inactive life, persistently dissatisfied with the progress of events in Germany. Like Kinkel and like Moritz Hartmann, Herwegh was unable to the day of his death (1875) to reconcile himself to the great development of power attained by Germany at the expense of liberty. He never relinquished the ideals of his youth; retained a manly admiration even for Heine, who had held him up to derision.

Being such as he was, it was only natural that Herwegh should from the very first be on the watch in the matter of his brother poets' fidelity to their flag and the genuineness of their liberalism. His attacks on Geibel and Freiligrath have already been noticed. He next turned upon Anastasius Grün (Auersperg), who had gone to Vienna in hopes of obtaining the appointment and rank of Chamberlain; his wife, by birth a Countess Attems, was invested with the Order of the Star of the Cross, and he wished to be able to accompany her to court. In stirring words Herwegh entreated him to retrace his steps:

"Darf man den Tempel um ein Weib entweih'n, Mit einem Weib um goldne Götzen tanzen," &c[6]

Dingelstedt retorted, defending Count Auersperg in a pretty poem: