Chapter XXII: Gutzkow, Laube, Mundt

The determination of the Federal Council to suppress the writings of Young Germany not only nipped the _Deutsche Revue_ in the bud, but also put an end to the existence of Mundt's _Litterarischer Zodiacus_, published in Leipzig, and prevented the publication of Laube's _Mitternachtszeitung_, which was to have appeared in Brunswick. Immediately after Menzel's first attack on Gutzkow and his friends, Mundt, with the valour of the prudent man, had written a series of severe articles against Heine, Gutzkow, and Wienbarg--but all to no purpose; his fate was sealed.

It seemed for a time as if the resolution were intended not only to affect everything that the proscribed authors had already written, but everything that they might write in the future.

An edict of the Prussian Government, dated 11th December 1835, expressly provides that "the _future_ literary productions of Heinrich Heine, wherever they may be published and in whatever language, are to be subject to the same regulations as the writings of Gutzkow, Wienbarg, Laube, and Mundt." And not only was every possible measure taken to silence the obnoxious authors, but (as in Russia, when a man is in disgrace with the Government) it was made illegal, even for those who desired to write disparagingly of them, to print their names. Mundt's name was erased from the list of contributors to the _Berliner Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik_, and in the announcements of Varnhagen and Mundt's edition of Knebel's _Literary Remains_, Varnhagen alone might be named as editor.

Excessively strict precautions were at the same time taken with regard to foreign publications. A few inoffensive English and French newspapers were countenanced. In the case of all the others the expedient was resorted to of requiring the same postage to be paid for them as for letters, thereby raising the cost of such papers to at least 500 thalers (£75) per annum.[1]

To the leaders of Young Germany the Government thus offered the compulsory choice between biding their time in defiant silence and purchasing other conditions for themselves by disowning their past and making humiliating promises for the future. No one who has had any experience of the average valour of the denizens of the literary world can feel surprised that few stood this test, that many accepted the second alternative. Neither Heine, Wienbarg, nor Gutzkow gave in; but many others made pitiable exhibitions of themselves. Crowds of the young authors who had plumed themselves upon their revolutionary-philosophical, their oppositionist-political ideas, now hastened to prove their philosophic commonplaceness, their political innocuousness. The name "Young Germany" had been an honourable name; but now that those who had borne it found themselves the objects of special police surveillance, they refused to acknowledge it, each declaring that he, at least, did not belong to the party, and that if he ever had done so, it was an old story, and he had since then become a most respectable member of society. In this case, as so often, it was proved that modern high-class education only provides desultory knowledge, does not form character, and least of all amongst those who make their living by their pens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] A. Strodtmann: H. Heine's _Leben und Werke_, 1874, ii. 174, &c.

[2] Cursed be the friend who is faithful to thee in trouble! Never shall a woman's loving heart cherish thee.

[3] He _is_ beloved! Trust better prophets!

[4] Th. Mundt: _Madonna_, pp. 142, 274, 326, 374, 406.

[5] Mundt: _Litteratur der Gegenwart_, p. 353.

[6] L. Tieck: _Gesammelte Novellen_, Breslau, 1855, i. 38, 79.