Chapter V: Part 5

Why cannot ninety thousand deal with four hundred, even were the cause at issue less one of equity and justice? If, as has often been asserted, the Brigandage has been fed from Rome—if the gold of Francis II. and the blessing of the Pope go with those who cross the frontier to maintain the disturbance in Southern Italy—what should be easier, with such a superiority of numbers, than to cut off the communication? With sixty thousand men a cordon could be drawn from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic in which each sentinel could hail his neighbour. Were the difficulty to lie here, could it not be met at once? It was declared a few weeks back by Mr Odo Russell, that a whole regiment, armed and clothed in some resemblance to French soldiers, passed over to the south; and we are lost in amazement why such resources should be available in the face of an army greater than Wellington ever led in Spain or conquered with at Waterloo. To understand a problem so difficult, it is first of all necessary to bear in mind that this same Brigandage is neither what the friends of the Bourbons nor what the advocates of united Italy have pronounced it. If the Basilicata and the Capitanata are very far from being La Vendée, they are also unlike what the friends of Piedmontism would declare—countries well affected to the House of Savoy under the temporary dominion of a lawless and bloody tyranny from which they are utterly powerless to free themselves. If Brigandage is not in its essence a movement of the reactionists, it has nevertheless been seized upon by them to prosecute their plans and favour their designs. To render the Neapolitan States ungovernable—to exhibit to the eyes of Europe a vast country in a state of disorganisation, where the most frightful cruelties are daily practised—where horrors that even war is free from are hourly perpetrated—was a stroke of policy of which the friends of the late dynasty were not slow to avail themselves. By this they could contrast the rule of the present Government with that of the former ones; and while the press of Europe still rang with the cruelties of the Bourbons, they could ask, Where is the happy change that you speak of? Is it in the proclamations of General Pinelli—the burning of villages, and the indiscriminate slaughter of their inhabitants? Do the edicts which forbid a peasant to carry more than one meal to his daily labour, tell of a more enlightened rule? Do the proclamations against being found a mile distant from home, savour of liberty? Are the paragraphs we daily read in the Government papers, where the band of this or that brigand chief has been captured or shot, the only evidences to be shown of a spirit which moves Italians to desire a united nation? You tell us of your superior enlightenment and cultivation, say the Bourbonists, and the world at large listens favourably to your claims. But why, if it be true, have the last two years counted more massacres than the forty which have preceded them? Why are thousands wandering homeless and shelterless through the mountains, while the ruins of their dwellings are yet smoking from the ruthless depredations of your soldiery? If Brigandage numbers but four hundred followers, why are such wholesale cruelties resorted to? The simple fact is this: the Brigandage of Southern Italy is not a question of four hundred, or four thousand, or four hundred thousand followers, but of a whole people utterly brutalised and demoralised, who, whatever peril they attach to crime, attach no shame or disgrace to it. The labourers on one of the Southern Italian lines almost to a man disappeared from work, and on their return to it, some days after, frankly confessed they had spent the interval with the brigands. They were not robbers by profession nor from habit; but they saw no ignominy in lending themselves to an incidental massacre and bloodshed. The National Guards of the different villages, and the Syndics themselves, are frequently charged with a want of energy and determination; but the truth is, these very people are the very support and mainspring of Brigandage. The brigands are the brothers, the sons, or the cousins of those who affect to move against them. So far from feeling the Piedmontese horror of the brigand, these men are rather irritated by the discipline that bands them against him. They have none of that military ardour which makes the Northern Italian proud of being a soldier. Their blood has not been stirred by seeing the foreigner the master of their capital cities; their pride has not been outraged by the presence of the hated Croat or the rude Bohemian at their gates. To _them_ the call to arms has been anything but a matter of vain glory. Besides this, there seems in the unrelenting pursuit of the Brigandage a something that savours of the hate of the North for the South. Under the Bourbons the brigand met a very different measure, as he did under the French rule, and in the time of Murat. Men of the most atrocious lives, stained with many and cruel murders, were admitted to treat with the Government, and the negotiations were carried on as formally as between equals. When a Capo Briganti desired to abandon his lawless and perilous life, he had but to intimate his wish to some one in authority. His full conditions might not at first or all be acceded to, but he was sure to be met with every facility for his wish; and in more than one case was such a man employed in a situation of trust by the State; and there yet lives one, Geosaphat Talarico, who has for years enjoyed a Government pension as the reward of his submission and reformation.

Under the old Bourbon rule, all might be pardoned, except an offence against the throne. To the political criminal alone no grace could be extended. The people saw this, and were not slow to apply the lesson. Let it also be borne in mind, that the brigand himself often met a very different appreciation from those who knew him personally to that he received at the hands of the State. The assassin denounced in wordy proclamations, and for whose head a price was offered, was in his native village a “gran’ Galantuomo,” who had done scores of fine and generous actions.

To revolutionise feeling in such a matter is not an easy task. Let any one, for instance, fashion to his mind how he would proceed to turn the sympathies of the Irish peasant against the Rockite and in favour of the landlord, to hunt down the criminal and to favour his victim. It would be a similar task to endeavour to dispose the peasant of the Abruzzi to look unfavourably on Brigandage. Brigandage was, in fact, but another exercise of that terrorism which they saw universally around them. Was the Capo Briganti more cruel than the tax-gatherer? was he not often more merciful? and did he ever press upon the poor? Were not his exactions solely from the rich? Was he not generous, too, when he was full-handed? How many a benevolent action could be recorded to his credit! If this great Government, which talked so largely of its enlightenment, really wished to benefit the people, why did it not lighten the imposts, cheapen bread, and diminish the conscription? instead of which we had the taxes quadrupled, food at famine prices, and the levies for the services more oppressive than ever. They denounced Brigandage; but there were evils far worse than Brigandage, which, after all, only pressed a little heavily on the rich, and took from them what they could spare well and easily.

It is thus the Neapolitan reasons and speaks of that pestilence which is now eating like a cancer into the very heart of his country, and taxing the last energy of her wisest and best to meet with success. At this moment Southern Italy is no more under the control of the Italian Government than are the States of the Confederacy under the sway of President Lincoln, and all the powerful energies of the North are ineffectual to eradicate a disease which is not on the surface, but in the very heart of the people.

The Italian Brigand, like the Irish Rockite, is by no means of necessity the most depraved or most wicked of his native village. Perhaps his fearlessness is his strongest characteristic. He is in other respects pretty much like those around him. He has no great respect for laws, which he has often seen very corruptly administered. He has been familiar with perjury all his life. He has never seen the rites of the Church denied to the blackest criminals, and he has come to believe that, except in the accidents of station, men are almost alike, and the great difference is, that the filchings of the minister are less personally hazardous than the spoils of the highwayman.

That these men take pay and accept service from the Bourbonist is easy enough to conceive. To cry Viva Francesco Secondo, when they stop the diligence or pillage a farmhouse, is no difficult task; but that they are in any sense followers, or care for the King or his cause, is utterly and ridiculously untrue. The reactionists affect to believe so, for it gives them the pretext of a party. The French like to believe so, for it proclaims, what the press continues unceasingly to assert, that the North has no footing in the South, and that no sympathy ever has existed, or ever will exist, between peoples so totally and essentially dissimilar.

The Piedmontese, too, unwilling to own that the event they have so ineffectually struggled against has not all the force of a great political scheme, declare that the Brigandage is fed from Rome, and would not have a day’s existence, if the ex-King were compelled to leave that capital, and the favour of the Papal Court withdrawn from its support.

That the present rulers of Italy pursue the brigands with an energy, and punish them with a severity never practised before, is cause even to prefer the reign of the Bourbons to that of the Piedmontese. There is no need for them to enter upon the difficult questions of freedom and individual liberty, to contrast the rights enjoyed under one government with those available under another. It is quite sufficient that they see what was once tolerated will no longer be endured, and that the robber chief who once gave the law to the district he lived in is now hunted down with the remorseless severity that will only be satisfied with his extermination.

It may be asked, How could the people feel any sympathy for a system from which they were such heavy sufferers, or look unfavourably on those who came to rid them of the infliction? The answer is, that long use and habit, a sense of terror ingrained in their natures, and, not less than these, a reliance in the protective power of the brigand, disposed the peasant to prefer his rule to that of the more unswerving discipline of the State. The brigand was at least one of his class, if not of his own kindred. He knew and could feel for the peculiar hardships which pressed upon the poor man. If he took from the proud man, he spared the humble one; and, lastly, he possessed the charm which personal daring and indifference to danger never fail to exercise over the minds of the masses.

Let us again look to Ireland, to see how warmly the sympathies of the peasant follow those who assume to arraign the laws of the State, and establish a wild justice of their own—how naturally they favour them, with what devotion they will screen them, and at what personal peril they will protect them; and if we have to confess that centuries have seen us vainly struggling with the secret machinery which sustains crime amongst ourselves, let us be honest enough to spare our reproaches to those who have not yet suppressed brigandage in Southern Italy. It is not, in fact, with the armed and mounted robber that the State is at issue, but with a civilisation which has created him. He is not the disease, he is only one of its symptoms; and to effect a cure of the malady the remedies must go deeper.

Nor is the question an easy one to resolve; for though Garibaldi with a few followers sufficed to overthrow a dynasty, the whole force of a mighty army, backed by a powerful public opinion, has not succeeded in firmly establishing a successor.

Piedmont is not loved in the South. There is not a trait in the Piedmontese character which has not its antitype in the Neapolitan; and they whose object it was to exhibit the sub-Alpine Italian in the most unfavourable colours, could not lack opportunity to do so. The severities practised towards the brigands—which were not always, nor could they be, exercised with discrimination—furnished ample occasion for these attacks. Many of these assumed a Garibaldian, or even Mazzinian tone, and affected indignation at cruelties of which the people—the _caro popolo_—were always the victims. One of the chief brigands, Chiavone, pretended to imitate Joseph Garibaldi; and in dress, costume, and a certain bold, frank manner, assumed to represent the great popular leader. Amongst his followers he counted Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Belgians, and, it is said, Irish. One of these foreigners was a man of high rank and ancient lineage, Count Alfred de Trazégnies—a near relative of M. de Merode’s: he was taken prisoner and shot. Another was the famous Borjès, from whom was taken the instructions given him by General Clary, and, more interesting still, a journal written in his own hand.

Though his “instructions” are full of grandiloquent descriptions of battalions and squadrons and batteries—horse, foot, and dragoons—with exact directions given as to the promotions, the staff appointments, the commissariat,—let us hear how he himself describes the first steps of his enterprise.

Having with great difficulty succeeded in obtaining about twenty muskets at Malta, he saw himself in some embarrassment as to getting away from the island, where intimations as to his project were already about. He succeeded, however, in getting on board of a small coasting vessel with his officers, and landed after a two days’ voyage at Brancaleone. “The shore,” he says, “was totally deserted, no trace of habitation to be seen; and, directed at last by the glimmer of a solitary light, we came upon the hut of a shepherd, who received us kindly and hospitably. The next day he guided us to the little town of Precacore, where we were met by the curate, and amidst cries of Viva Francesco Secondo conducted into the Piazza. I was cheered by this,” says he, “and deemed it a lucky augury. About twenty peasants enrolled themselves here under my command, and we moved on to Caraffa, where I was told a friendly welcome awaited me. On passing, however, near St Agata, a company of the mobilised National Guard, about sixty in number, opened a sharp fire on us, and my new recruits took to their heels, leaving me alone with my officers. Sustained, however, by a strong position, we held our own for an hour and a half, after which a deputation from Caraffa came to offer me the hospitality of that city—an offer I was fortunate enough to refuse, for another and far more serious ambuscade was prepared for me there.”

At Cirella he came up with a Bourbon partisan named Mittica, with one hundred and twenty men under him, but who refused to accept him as a leader, and in fact treated him and his officers as spies and prisoners.

After many dangers and much suffering, deserted by Mittica and his band, Borjès found himself in Tovre, “where an old soldier of the 3d Cacciatori offered to accompany me—the only follower I have met with up to this day.”

His narrative, simply and unaffectedly written, is one of the most extraordinary records of suffering, privation, and peril, and at the same time of devotion to his enterprise and zeal in the cause of the ex-King. He firmly believes that the mass of the people are “royalist,” that he only needs five hundred men, well armed and disposed to obey him, to “overthrow the revolution” and restore the sovereign.

He met his death like a brave man. He was surprised with some of his followers at a farmhouse in the very last village before crossing the Roman frontier, to which he was hastening. A young Piedmontese Major, Franchini, with a detachment of Bersaglieri and some mounted gendarmes, surrounded the house and at last set fire to it, on which Borjès surrendered and was immediately shot. “I was on my way to tell the King,” said he with his last words, “that he has nothing but cowards and scoundrels to defend him—that Crocco is a villain and Langlais a fool.” Then turning to the Major he added, “Thank fortune for it that I did not start one hour earlier this morning, for I should have gained the Roman frontier, and you would have heard more of me.”

The Piedmontese have been severely blamed for the execution of Borjès. Indeed he has found no less an advocate than Victor Hugo, who would not consent to have him ranked with Crocco, Ninco Nancho, and the rest, mere brigands and robbers on the highway. That the popular sentiment of Italy was not disposed in his favour may be assumed from the indignation felt by all the villages of the frontier when General Lamarmora consented that the body of Borjès should be exhumed and conveyed to Rome. There is little doubt, however, that his being a Spaniard influenced this feeling. In no country of Europe is the foreigner regarded with the same jealousy and distrust.

While the report of General Lamarmora shows that no disparity of force, not even ninety thousand to four hundred, is sufficient to deal with the Neapolitan Brigandage, it affects to explain why. In fact, the report is one insinuated accusation of the French, who by their occupation of Rome supply arms and money to the reactionists, and feed a movement which, if left to its own resources, must perish of inanition. The report shrinks from the avowal that the whole inhabitants of two great provinces are friends and sympathisers with the brigands; that however little political reasons enter into the issue, the priests have contrived to give a political colouring to the struggle, and by contrasting the immunities of the past with the severities of the present, have made the peasant believe that the rule of the Bourbon was more favourable to him than that of the House of Savoy. It is not merely in the conscription for the regular army that the pressure is felt, but in the very enrolment for the National Guard, which, liable as it is to being “mobilised,” exacts all the services and all the privations of soldiering. So much as 3000 francs have been paid for a substitute, rather than serve in a force which compels the shopkeeper to desert his business or the farmer his fields for eight or ten months of the year!

If we have heard much of the personal unpopularity of the Piedmontese in Southern Italy, it is a theme which cannot be exaggerated. There is not, perhaps, throughout Europe a people who have less in common than the sub-Alpine and the South Italian. If Garibaldi and his followers came as liberators, the Piedmontese entered Naples as conquerors. The Garibaldians won all the suffrages of a people who loved their free-and-easy manners, their indiscipline, that “disinvoltura” so dear to the Italian heart;—their very rags had a charm for them. The rigid, stiff, unbending Piedmontese, almost unintelligible in speech and repulsive in look, were the very reverse of all this. Naples was gay, animated, and happy under the sway of the same lawless band of red-shirted adventurers, but she felt crushed and trampled down by the regular legions of the King.

In the great offices of the State, and in the Prefectures, it was easy enough for the Piedmontese to appoint their own partisans; but how do this throughout the rural districts, the small towns, and the villages? In these the choice lay between a Royalist—that is, a Bourbonist—and a Mazzinian. If you would not accept a follower of the late King, you must take one who disowned sympathies with all royalty. The Syndics and “Maires” of the smaller cities have been almost to a man the enemies of the Northern Italian. It is through these all the difficulties of propagating “union” sentiments have been experienced. It is by their lukewarmness, if not something worse, that Brigandage is able still to hold its ground, not so much because they are well affected to the Bourbons, or that they cherish sentiments of Mazzinianism, but simply that they disliked Northern Italy, nor could any rule be so distasteful to them as that which came from that quarter. That the French occupation of Rome has tended to maintain and support Brigandage cannot for a moment be disputed. The policy of France, from the very hour of the treaty of Villafranca, has been to perpetuate the difficulties of Italian rule—to exhibit the country in a state of permanent disorder, and the people unquiet, dissatisfied, and unruly—to reduce the peninsula to that condition, in fact, in which not only would the occupation of Rome be treated as a measure of security to Europe at large, but the graver question urged whether a more extended occupation of territory might not be practicable and possible.

If Garibaldi’s expedition had not terminated so abruptly at Aspromonte, it is well known the French would have occupied Naples. When they would have left it again, it is not so easy to say. It is clear enough then to see, how little soever the French may like that Brigandage that now devastates the South, they are not averse to the distress and trouble it occasions to the Italian Government, all whose ambitions have been assumed as so many menaces against France. Had you been content with the territory we won for you—had you remained satisfied with a kingdom of six millions, who spoke your own language, inherited your own traditions, and enjoyed your own sympathies, you might have had peace and prosperity, say the oracles of the Tuileries; but you would be a great nation, and you are paying the penalty. “This comes of listening to England, who never aided you, instead of trusting to us who shed our blood in your cause.”

France never has consented to a united Italy; whether she may yet do so is, however improbable, still possible; one thing is, however, clear—until she does give this consent, not in mere diplomatic correspondence, but in heart and wish, the southern provinces of the peninsula will remain unconquered territories, requiring the presence of a large force, and even with that defying the power of the Government to reduce them to obedience.

Brigandage is but the open expression of a discontent which exists in every class and every condition in the districts it pervades. It is the assertion of the Catholic for the Pope, of the Royalist for the Bourbon, of the Revolutionist against a discipline, and last of all, of the Southern Italian against being ruled by that Northern race whose intelligence he despises, and for whose real qualities of manliness he has neither a measure nor a respect.

One word as to the Camorra before we conclude: and first of all what is this Camorra of which men talk darkly and in whispers, and whose very syllables are suppressed while the servants are in the room? The Camorra is an organised blackmail, which, extending its exactions to every trade and industry, carries the penalties of resistance to its edicts even to death.

The Camorra has its agents everywhere. On the Mole, where the boatman hands over the tenth of the fare the passenger has just paid him—at the door of the hotel, where the porter counts out his gains and gives over his tithe—at the great restaurant, at the theatre, at the gaming-table—some one is sure to present himself as the emissary of this dreaded society, and in the simple words, “for the Camorra,” indicate a demand that none have courage to resist.

The jails are, however, the great scenes for the exercise of this system. There the Camorra reigns supreme. In the old Bourbon days the whole discipline of the prisons was maintained by the Camorristi, who demanded from each prisoner as he entered the usual fees of the place. The oil for the lamp in honour of the Madonna had to be paid for, then came a sort of fee for initiation, after which came others in the shape of taxes on the income of the prisoner and his supposed means, with imposts upon leave to smoke, to drink, or to gamble. His incomings too were taxed, and a strict account demanded of all his gains, from which the tenth was rigidly subtracted. To resist the imposts was to provoke a quarrel, not unfrequently ending fatally; for the Camorristi ruled by terror, and well knew all the importance of maintaining their “prestige.”

The revenues of the Camorra, amounting to sums almost incredibly large, are each week handed over to the treasurer of the district, and distributed afterwards to the followers of the order by the Capo di Camorra, according to the rank and services of each, any concealment or malversation of funds being punished with death. The society itself not only professes to protect those who belong to it, but to extend its influence over all who obey its edicts; and thus the poor creature who sells his fruit at the corner of the street sees his wares under the safeguard of one of these mysterious figures, who glide about here and there, half in listlessness, and whose dress may vary from the patched rags of almost mendicancy to the fashionable attire of a man of rank and condition.

In the cafés where men sit at chess and dominoes, the Camorrist appears, and with his well-known whisper demands his toll. In vain to declare that the play is not for money; it is for the privilege to play at all that his demand is now made. The newly appointed clerk in a public office, the secretary to the minister, it is said, have been applied to, and have not dared to dispute a claim which would be settled otherwise by the knife.

Recognised by the old police of Naples, tolerated and even employed to track out the crimes of those who did not belong to the order, the Camorrists acquired all the force and consideration of an institution. Men felt no shame at yielding to a terror so widespread; nor would it have been always safe to speak disparagingly of a sect whose followers sometimes lounged in royal antechambers as well as sought shelter under the portico of a church.

It has been more than once asserted that Ferdinand II. was a sworn member of the order, and that he contributed largely to its funds. Certain it is the Camorra in his reign performed all the functions of a secret police, and was the terror of all whose Liberalism made them suspected by the Government. To the Camorra, too, were always intrusted those displays of popular enthusiasm by which the King was wont to reply to the angry remonstrances of French or English envoys. The Camorra could at a moment’s notice organise a demonstration in honour of royalty which would make the monarch appear as the loved and cherished father of his people.

It was, however, by the Liberals themselves the Camorra was first introduced into political life, and Liberio Romano intrusted the defence of the capital to these men as the surest safeguard against the depredations of the disbanded soldiers of the King; and, strange to say, the hazardous experiment was a perfect success, and for several weeks Naples had no other protectors than the members of a league who combined the atrocities of Thuggee with the shameless rapine of the highwayman. The stern discipline of Piedmont would not, however, condescend to deal with such agents; and Lamarmora has waged a war, open and avowed, against the whole system of the Camorra. Hundreds of arrests have been made, and the jails are crowded with Camorrists; but men declare that all these measures are in vain—that the magistracy itself is not free from the taint: and certain it is that the system prevails largely in the army and navy, and has its followers in what is called the world of fashion and society.

The Mezzo Galantuomo is the most terrible ingredient in the constitution of a people. The man who is too bad for society but a little too good for the gallows, is a large element in this land, and it will require something more than mere statecraft to deal with him.

A Parliamentary Commission is at present engaged in the investigation of the whole question of Brigandage, and their “Report” will probably be before the world in a few days. It is very doubtful, however, if that world will be made much the wiser by their labours. There is, in fact, no mystery as to the nature of this pestilence, its source, or its progress.

It may suit the views of a party to endeavour to connect it with Bourbonism, but it would be equally true to assert that the peasant-murderers in Ireland were adherents of the Stuarts! The men who take to the mountains in the Capitanata are not politicians. They have no other “cause” at heart than their own subsistence, for which they would rather provide at the risk of their heads than by the labour of their hands. All that they know of civilisation is taxation and the conscription. In these respects the old _régime_ was less severe than the present; neither the imposts were so heavy, nor the levies so large; not to add that, under the Bourbons, soldiers led lives of lounging indolence, and “no one was ever cruel enough to lead them against the Austrians.”

The Bourbon Government of Naples had many faults, but the Piedmontese rule has had no successes. There is that of ungeniality in the Northern temperament that renders even favours at their hands little better than burdens, and their justice has a smack of severity in it that wonderfully resembles revenge.

What may be the future fate of Southern Italy it is not easy to say; but one thing at least is certain, the influence of Piedmont has not obtained that footing there which promises to make _her_ cause _their_ cause, or _her_ civilisation _their_ civilisation. If the Bourbons governed badly, their successors do not govern at all!

LUDWIG UHLAND.

Incontestably, since the death of Goethe, Ludwig Uhland has been, at least in the hearts of the people, the Laureate of Germany. He is not a poet who took the world by storm with his earliest productions; but he has been gradually growing in favour and general acceptance, until his death is now deplored as a national affliction. He died quietly at Tübingen, the place of his birth, on the 13th of November 1862, in his seventy-sixth year, having been born on the 26th of April 1787. He was said never to have known a day’s illness until his last, which was occasioned by his attending the funeral of a friend and brother poet, Justin Kerner, in inclement weather.

The parents of the poet were Johann Friedrich Uhland, Secretary to the University of Tübingen, and Elizabeth (born) Hoser, daughter of one Hoser who held a similar office. He had a brother, Fritz, who died in his ninth year, and a sister, Luise, who married Meyer, the pastor of Pfullingen, near Reutlingen. His education conduced to bringing out the talent that was latent in him, as it was the custom of Kauffmann, the rector of the Tübingen school, to give free themes to be worked out in prose or verse, according to the inclinations of his scholars; and the young Uhland generally chose the latter, and was early distinguished in his choice. Even at school he was known as an enthusiastic student of German and Scandinavian antiquities. At the age of sixteen and seventeen he produced many compositions of merit, but only two, ‘Der Sterbender Held,’ and ‘Der Blinder König,’ found their way into that collection of his poems which was published in 1815. At this time he was hesitating between the professions of law and medicine. As a youth, though given to long walks alone in the beautiful neighbourhood of Tübingen, he was distinguished by his love of social manly exercises, particularly of skating. Two of his earliest poetical friends were Schröder, who was afterwards drowned in the Baltic, and Harpprecht, who fell in the Russian campaign of Napoleon. This is the friend who is alluded to in the exquisite poem of ‘Die Ueberfahrt’ as “brausend vor uns allen,” while the fatherly friend spoken of there is Uhland’s maternal uncle, Hoser, the pastor of Schmiden. He was also much influenced in his tastes by Haug of Stuttgard, and Gortz, Professor of Ancient Literature in Tübingen. Later he became acquainted with Justin Kerner, whose talent he placed above his own, Oehlenschläger the Danish poet, and Varnhagen von Ense the historian. Goethe he had seen once when a boy in 1797, and he records his impressions in the ‘Münstersage.’ In 1810 Uhland went to Paris, in order to work at the treasures of Romance literature contained in the Imperial Library. On his return he applied himself to practice as an advocate at Stuttgard, without remitting his poetic labours. His tragedy, ‘Herzog Ernst von Schwaben,’ which belongs to this period, elicited the warm admiration of Goethe. In 1819 he was elected a deputy of the Würtemberg States. In 1820 he married Emma Vischer, a daughter, by a former marriage, of a celebrated woman, Frau Emilie Pistorius, to whose memory Rückert dedicated a poem called ‘Rosen auf das Grab einer edlen Frau.’ In 1834 he was made Professor of German Literature at Tübingen. He distinguished himself as a political character in 1848, though without joining the extreme Liberal party, and on one occasion presented an address to the King of Würtemberg, praying for the restoration of the Constitution, the prayer of which was immediately granted, as most prayers of the kind were at that particular time, from prudential motives. He had already resigned, in 1833, his office of deputy, finding it incompatible with his professorship, and had returned to his residence at Tübingen. His marriage with Emma Vischer was in many respects a fortunate one. He appears to have lived with her in great harmony till his death, and the dowry she brought him, though not large, was sufficient to keep from his door the anxieties which usually beset a priest of the Muses. On the other hand, the marriage was not blest by children. There are old pictures extant of Uhland as a child, with a fair honest face and powdered hair. His later face is now familiar to the Germans. Its first impression is decidedly heavy. The upper-lip is long, the cheekbones high, the eyes not large, the forehead broad over the brows, and narrower above—altogether an ordinary honest man’s face, nothing more. A phrenologist in a steamboat, to whom the poet was unknown, once guessed him to be a watchmaker, adding, to console him, that every one could not be a poet. Uhland’s manners appear to have been plain and unpretending—rather those of a man who makes friends than acquaintances. Yet those who knew him, knew him as a hearty and even jovial companion. He was shy, and shunned publicity, and could not bear to be treated as a literary lion. On one occasion, when he was presented with a crown of laurel, he hung it and left it on an oak beside the road. His habits were early and healthy. In summer he lived in his open garden-house, and at ten o’clock every morning used to go out for a long walk, prefaced by a plunge in the Neckar when the weather was genial. At Tübingen, which is a very pretty quaint little university town, lying in that finely-broken country which intervenes between the Black Forest and the Alps, he owned a plain house on the country side of the Neckar bridge, only ornamented by Corinthian pilasters in front; behind it was his garden, arranged in terraces, and his “Weinberg,” from which he made his own ordinary supply of wine. He was of social habits, but, at the same time, fond of musing and solitude. The homely but intellectual society of Tübingen fully sufficed him. He was not a man to care for that of those above him in station, as his sterling independence shrank from patronage in the same way in which his diffidence shrank from general notoriety.

Politically, Uhland was a people’s man without being a Radical. His love of medieval literature imbued his mind with respect for hereditary rank, station, and honours, while his love of freedom and optimist views of the future of his country and mankind in general, made him a sturdy opponent of any attempt to infringe on what he called “the good old right.” In England he might have been a Tory or Conservative Whig. In Germany, it has pleased the powers that be to count him with the Democratic party; hence the admiration or policy which prompted Louis Napoleon to make a national affair of the funeral of Béranger, was wanting in the case of Uhland, who was buried, as he had lived, in privacy. Although this does not tell well for the temper of the Government of Würtemberg, and fully accounts for the hatred of Englishmen which is said to be dominant at Stuttgard, the deceased poet would probably not have wished it otherwise. No doubt he was, as far as the honours that proceed from the great are concerned, to the end of his life an unacknowledged and unappreciated man. But he had all he wanted—robust health, self-respect, and the respect of those he loved, sufficient worldly means, and that divine gift which Homer himself thought a full compensation even for blindness.

The uneventfulness of Uhland’s life, his unpretending presence, his very look and bearing, his intense love for nature, the simplicity of his habits, his steady domestic character, and unaffected religious feeling, all bring to mind our own Wordsworth; and in his poems, as in those of Wordsworth, the gems are to be sought among the shorter compositions. But Wordsworth made it his business to sit down at the Lakes and paint nature in words, as the pre-Raphaelite or naturalistic school of landscape painters sit down and paint her in colours. Wordsworth wooed the beauty of nature immediately and for itself. His human figures are merely put in roughly to help out the foreground. But Uhland rarely paints nature directly; he rather uses natural scenery as a background to his “genre” pictures, which interest chiefly by presenting the phases of human feeling, and the joys and sorrows of mankind. All his poems are alive with the breath of Spring—fresh, luminous, and joyous; but we are aware of his surroundings rather from the effects they produce upon him than from any actual descriptions. His poems have the ring of the true singer; an internal melody permeates his verse, capricious rather than monotonous, changing its airs and cadences like the voice of a bird, rather than flowing on with the mechanical jingling of a musical box. This is the quality which gives the bardic stamp to the compositions of a Burns, a Béranger, a Tennyson, and a want of which is felt in the glowing rhetoric of Byron, and in

“The beauty for ever unchangingly bright,
Like the soft sunny lapse of a summer day’s light,”

which belongs to the poetry of Moore. In matter and choice of subject, and in some measure in respect of treatment, he has much in common with Walter Scott. His preparatory studies were much of the same nature, consisting in the history, scenery, and legends of his own country. He has done for Germany what even Schiller and Goethe with all their greatness omitted to do in the same degree. He has immortalised her local recollections. Second only to the man who leads an army to rescue his country from the stranger, such a man is a patriot of the true kind, whatever the colour of his politics may be. Some poems he has written are like those exquisite ancient miniature pictures on a gold ground, best to be understood and appreciated by the educated connoisseur, while others are so plain in language and sentiment that they have sunk into the hearts of the people, and will flow for ever from the lips of the people in the shape of national songs. Uhland differs most from the twin stars of Germany—Schiller and Goethe—in that his poetry is more exclusively objective than theirs. Goethe was all wrapt in his glorious self, and his all-absorbing devotion to art. Like Horace’s hero, a world might have fallen in ruins about him and he would not have quailed; and, indeed, all the crash of empires and clash of armies in which he lived left his brow as serene as that of one of the gods of Epicurus. But Uhland could not sing through the humiliation of his country, and his voice sank within him through the French occupation; but when Germany arose at length, and with incredible hardihood pushed back the flood of invasion, Uhland, like Körner and others, did manful service, not by fighting and falling among the foremost, as Körner did, but with even better judgment, as husbanding his gifts, becoming the Tyrtæus of the Liberation War. His songs of that time have a deep and manly note peculiarly their own, and they are such as no lesser circumstances could have called forth. Uhland, again, as distinguished from Schiller and Goethe, was the prominent poet of the Romantic school. But he was to them what Socrates was to the Sophists—counted with them, but not of them. From whatever source he derived his inspirations, he always remained fast rooted in truth and nature. The unreal and morbid sentimentality of Tieck and Novalis was unknown to him; nor did he share the Romeward tendencies of Friedrich Schlegel, while fully appreciating the beauty of the Roman Catholic ritual and associations, and freely interweaving them with the golden tissue of his compositions. On the whole, he is the most German of German poets, as he owes none of his inspiration to “the gods of Greece,” and little to any foreign source, except those old Romance writers whom he studied at Paris; but then it must be borne in mind that the early threads of history in France and Germany are closely interwoven, and the empire of the Franks in particular belonged as much to one as to the other.

In attempting to present to the English reader some of the best of the poems of Uhland, we must premise that to translate a perfect poem from one language into another is simply an impossibility, and difficult exactly in proportion to the degree in which any poem approaches perfection. The special difficulty of translating German poetry into English, and _vice versâ_, consists in this, that though the two languages are not in their basis much more than dialects of the same original stock, yet German is as generally dissyllabic as English is monosyllabic, owing in part to English having discarded inflection where German retains it. We are aware that many of Uhland’s poems are already known through very good translations, one of those most highly spoken of being that of Mr Platt. Longfellow has also done freely into English verse the ‘Castle by the Sea,’ ‘The Black Knight,’ the ‘Luck of Edenhall,’ and others, and has succeeded admirably in catching the spirit of the original. Not having Mr Platt’s translations before us, as we write in Germany, we must apologise, in our zeal for Uhland’s memory, for attempts of our own in the same direction, in which we have tried to reproduce as nearly as we can the ideas of the original in the metres in which they appeared. It is impossible to find a song in the whole collection more perfect than ‘Der Wirthin Töchterlein.’ There is not a word or thought one would wish changed. The pathos is expressed, without a single pathetic epithet, solely by the situation. This poem has been interpreted politically, as alluding to the different feelings with which three classes of patriots regard the corpse of German liberty. But to our mind this spoils the simplicity of the picture. It is more likely to be true that the poem was occasioned by an incident of Uhland’s youth, since it is said that he once stopped some students who were singing it under his window, telling them not to end it, as the end had too close a personal interest for him. If this be true, the poem is more complimentary to the memory of the fair maid of the inn than to the lady who became Frau Uhland. But poets will be poets, as boys will be boys.

THE LANDLADY’S DAUGHTER.

Three students they hied them over the Rhine,
And there they turned in at a landlady’s sign.

“Landlady, hast thou good beer and wine?
And where is that beauteous daughter of thine?”

“My beer and wine are fresh and clear;
My daughter she lies on the funeral-bier.”

And when they did enter the inner room,
There lay she all white in a shrine of gloom.

The first from her face the veil he took,
And, gazing upon her with sorrowful look,

“Oh, wert thou living, thou fairest maid,
’Tis thee I would love from this hour,” he said.

The second let down on the face that slept
The veil, and turned him away and wept:

“Alas for thee there on the funeral-bier!
For thee I have loved full many a year.”

The third, he lifted again the veil,
And kissed her upon the mouth so pale:

“I loved thee before, I love thee to-day,
And I will love thee for ever and aye!”

The last line, “Und werde dich lieben in ewigkeit,” would be more correctly rendered, “And I will love thee _in_ eternity.” And we are equally aware that our “landlady’s sign” is objectionable, as the original is simply, “They turned in there to a landlady’s.” But it would be hard to render it otherwise without losing the quadruple rhyme, which has a certain mournful elegance. ‘The Landlady’s Daughter’ naturally leads us to ‘The Goldsmith’s Daughter.’ In this poem we must not suppose that the hero and heroine meet for the first time. The maiden has fallen in love with the knight, her superior in station, but scarcely dares even confess it to herself, till the knight agreeably surprises her by adorning her as his bride, taking her acceptance for granted. We would not spoil the romance by hinting that it may not have been an uncommon case in the middle ages for young noblemen of small fortune to seek their brides from the rich _bourgeoisie_ of the Free Towns.

THE GOLDSMITH’S DAUGHTER.

A goldsmith stood within his stall,
Mid pearl and precious stone:
Of all the gems I own, of all,
Thou art the best, Heléna,
My daughter, darling one.

One day came in a knight so fine:
“Good morrow, maiden fair;
Good morrow, worthy goldsmith mine;
Make me a costly crownlet,
For my sweet bride to wear.”

The crown was made, the work was good,
It shone the eye to charm,
But Helen hung in pensive mood
(I trow, when none was by her)
The trinket on her arm.

“Ah! happy happy _she_ to bear
This glittering bridal toy;
Would that true knight give me to wear
A crownlet but of roses,
How full were I of joy!”

Ere long the knight came in again,
Did well the crown approve:
“Now make me, goldsmith, best of men,
A ring with diamonds set,
To deck my lady-love.”

The ring was made, the work was good,
The diamonds brightly shone,
But Helen drew ‘t in pensive mood
(I trow, when none was by her)
Her finger half-way on.

“Ah, happy happy _she_ to bear
This other glittering toy;
Would that true knight give me to wear
But of his hair a ringlet,
How full were I of joy!”

Ere long the knight came in again,
Did well the ring approve:
“Thou’st made me, goldsmith, best of men,
The gifts with rarest cunning,
For my sweet lady-love.

“Yet would I prove them how they sit;
So prithee, maiden, here
Let me on thee for trial fit
My darling’s bridal jewels:
In beauty she’s thy peer.”

’Twas on a Sunday morn betime;
It happed the maiden fair,
Expectant of the matin chime,
Had donned her best of raiment
With more than wonted care.”

With coyness all aglow, behold
The maid before him stand;
He crowns her with the crown of gold,
The ring upon her finger
He sets, then takes her hand.

“Heléna sweet, Heléna true,
I’ve ended now the jest;
That fairest bride is none but you,
By whom I would the crownlet
And ring should be possest.

“Mid gold and pearl and jewel fine
Hath been thy childhood’s home;
Be this to thee a welcome sign
That thou to heights of honour
With me shalt duly come.”

There is a great dramatic beauty in the accident of the girl having put on her best apparel to make ready to go to church, so that the knight has only to furnish her with the bridal accessaries to prepare her at a moment’s notice to go to church with him.

A ferry-boat is a favourite subject for painters; and the navigation of his native Neckar has been to Uhland the occasion of some of his sweetest verse-pictures. In the poem called ‘The Boat’ he shows how a freight of people, before unacquainted with each other, and therefore silent, struck up an intimacy, and parted with regret, when some improvised music had once furnished an introduction.

THE BOAT.

The boat is swiftly going,
Adown the river’s flowing;
No word beguiles the labour,
For no one knows his neighbour.

What pulls from coat the stranger,
The tawny forest-ranger?
A horn that sounds so mildly,
The stream-banks echo wildly.

Then haft and stopper screwing,
His staff to flute undoing,
Another, deftly playing,
Chimes with the cornet’s braying.

Shy sat the maid, self-chidden,
As speech were thing forbidden,
Now blend her accents willing
With flute and cornet’s trilling.

The rowers with new pleasure
Pull strokes that match the measure;
The boat the stream divideth,
And, lulled by music, glideth.

It strikes with shock the landing,
The folk are all disbanding;
“May we again meet, brother,
On board this boat or other!”

The companion to this little cabinet picture of the boat going with the stream is the crossing of the ferry. The poet offers the ferryman three times his fare, because the spirits of two friends, now dead, who crossed the same ferry with him in past years, are supposed to have gone with him.

THE FERRY.

Many years have passed for ever
Since I came across the river;
Here’s the tower, in evening’s blushing,
There, as erst, the weir is rushing.

Then with me the boat did carry
Two companions o’er the ferry,
One a friend, a father seeming,
One a youth with high hopes beaming.

That one lived a peaceful story,
And is gone in peace to glory;
This, of all most fiery-hearted,
Hath in fight and storm departed.

So when I, mid blessing cherished,
Dare to think on seasons perished,
Must I still to sorrow waken,
Missing friends that Death hath taken.

Friendship may not be united,
Save when soul to soul is plighted:
Full of soul those hours went by me,
Still to souls a bond doth tie me.

Ferryman, I gladly proffer
Thrice the fare that others offer,
Since two spirits thou didst carry
At my side across the ferry.

Longfellow, in his ‘Hyperion,’ has beautifully rendered the spirit of this poem, if he has somewhat missed its cadence.

The fine elegy on the death of Tell belongs to Uhland’s ‘Songs of Freedom,’ Tell’s death is undemonstrative, and he characteristically comes by it, by rescuing a child from a torrent. ‘The Sunken Crown’ stands before it in the collection, probably by way of introduction:—

THE SUNKEN CROWN.

There, over on the hill-top,
A little house doth stand;
One gazes from the threshold
On all the lovely land.
There sits a free-born peasant
Upon the bench at even;
He whets his scythe so blithely,
And sings his thanks to Heaven.

There, under in the hollow,
Where glooms the mere of old,
There lieth deeply sunken
A proud rich crown of gold:
Though in it gleam at nightfall
Carbuncle and sapphire,
Since ages grey it lies there,
To seek it none desire.