Chapter XXV: The Neutral Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wrote in his _Duett der Pensionirten_:

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Examples of Frederick William's style of wit: When the king was at the play, lackeys stood in attendance outside the door of the royal box. One evening, when his Majesty, provoked by the tiresomeness of a new play, left his box before the close of the performance, he found one of the lackeys sitting on the floor of the passage, sound asleep, his head leant against the wall of the box. Instead of being angry, the king said: "Der hat gehorcht" (means both: He has listened, and: He has obeyed). In 1848, in the palmy days of the Revolution, the king was obliged to receive one deputation after another, sometimes of very pretentious and presumptuous common people. He addressed the members of one such deputation, one after the other. What are you?--A silk and woollen cloth warehouseman, your Majesty.--Most interesting occupation. And you?--A medical student.--Excellent preparation for taking part in the government of the country! And so on, all the time with a most polite, if ironical, smile. (Told me by an eye-witness.)

[2] The king was at one time deeply interested in the mysteries of table-turning, but it was long before any of the palace tables could be persuaded to perform, a fact which did not surprise Humboldt. At last the king received him one morning with the exclamation: "Aha! what do you say now? We sat round the table for a full half-hour last night before it would move, but at last off it went, round and round, faster and faster. How do you explain that?" "Why, your Majesty, in all disputes it's the wiser of the two that gives in." (Related by Humboldt himself.)

[3]

O little bird, to sing 'tis thine,
gently to the lark began;
I set thee free, that deed is mine;
We all must pray as best we can.

[4] A. de Reumont: _Aus König Fr. Wilhelm IV. gesunden und kranken Tagen.--Briefe Alex. v. Humboldt's an Varnhagen von Ense.--Varnhagen von Ense's Tagebücher_.--Hillebrand: _Zeiten, Völker und Menschen II_.

[5] All that is going on makes me as stupid as if a mill-wheel (a Freiligrath) were turning in my head.

[6]

"_Geibel_: Is this you? _Freiligrath_: Yes! will you recognise me? Truly it is I; servants now call me brother, yet I am the poet Freiligrath.

[7] Schmidt-Weissenfels: _Freiligrath._