Chapter 11

[1]Hotho:Vorstudien für Leben und Kunst, p. 383. Haym:Hegel und seine Zeit., p. 392. Scherer:Mélanges d'histoire religieuse, p. 299.

[2]"Die Objectivität der Gottheit ist mit der Verdorbenheit und Sklaverei der Menschen in gleichem Schritt gegangen, und jene ist eigentlich nur eine Offenbarung dieses Geistes der Zeiten.... Ausser früheren Versuchen blieb es vorzüglich unseren Tagen aufbehalten, die Schätze, die an den Himmel geschleudert worden sind, als Eigenthum der Menschen wenigstens in der Theorie zu vindiciren; aber welches Zeitalter wird die Kraft haben, dieses Recht geltend zu machen und sich in den Besitz zu setzen?"The objectivity of the Divinity has gone hand in hand with the slavery and corruption of humanity, and is in reality only one sign of the spirit of the times.... Attempts have been made before, but it has been specially reserved for our age to vindicate at least in theory, as the property of man, the treasures which have been hurled up into heaven; but what age will have the power to enforce this right and to place man in possession of his own?

The objectivity of the Divinity has gone hand in hand with the slavery and corruption of humanity, and is in reality only one sign of the spirit of the times.... Attempts have been made before, but it has been specially reserved for our age to vindicate at least in theory, as the property of man, the treasures which have been hurled up into heaven; but what age will have the power to enforce this right and to place man in possession of his own?

[3]Karl Gutzkow:Rückblicke auf mein Leben, p. 135.

When, from the all-embracing thought of Hegel, the noble art of Platen, the polished wit of Börne, the lyric and satiric genius of Heine, the classic fulness of Immermann'sOberhof, we pass on to the men to whom the name Young Germany was more particularly applied, we feel the change to be in the artistic sense a fall—a fall from the confidence and perfect skill of masters to the immaturity and makeshifts of beginners. And among the men of Young Germany there were those who were destined for ever to remain beginners. More especially is the transition from Heine to his successors felt like a fall from graceful, god-like audacity to clumsy youthful defiance of all established custom, all conventional morality.

And yet the best of these men in their best moments displayed a self-devotion unknown to Heine.

The Young Germany of accepted tradition includes neither Heine, Börne, and their contemporaries (who were regarded as its fathers), nor the circle of young scientific men who expressed their views in Ruge's and Echtermeyer'sHallische Jahrbücher, nor the group of political poets who in the Forties gave literary expression to the feelings which found practical expression in the deeds of 1848.

The name in its traditional acceptation has a much narrower signification than that given to it in the present volume.

Its originator was a very earnest, but not specially gifted North German author, Ludolf Wienbarg, born at Altona in 1803. In 1834, under the warlike title ofAn Æsthetic Campaign(a title invented by Campe, the publisher), Wienbarg published a series of lectures which he had delivered in Kiel, and for which he had been deprived of his right to lecture, though their inoffensive matter and their unctuous manner were little calculated to produce excitement of any kind. To this book, which it is a hard task to wade through nowadays, is prefixed the dedication: "To the young Germany, not the old, I dedicate this book" (Dem jungen Deutschland, nicht dem alten, widme ich dieses Buch). This is all that men remember to-day of Wienbarg's lectures. By young Germany he meant all the young German minds that had broken with tradition in art, church, state, and society, and were devoting their literary talents to the furtherance of the reforms which they felt to be imperative.

The programme he proposes for the new literature is alarming in its vagueness. Its conception of life is to be founded on a harmonious union of sensuality and spirituality. He proclaims a new Hellenism, in which the sensual will be more permeated by spirit than in the case of the Greeks, and the spiritual more permeated by the sensual than in the case of the Christians. But before literature can be born again, life itself must be. Not till the life around them has become healthy and harmonious, can the young generation produce a true work of art.

There was, as we see, nothing new in these declamations and prophecies. Heine had already said the same thing in a hundred ways, comic or poetic; even Menzel in his first period had said the same with all the eloquence of the unsuccessful poet and violent partisan. Here it was expressed in the flowery language and with the rhetoric which seldom fails to produce its effect on immature minds.

The only novelty lay in the fact that now for the first time the exponent of these ideas was a representative of that young generation who regarded Heine as the great author of the age, and that now for the first time expression was given to the theory that prose was the literary form of the new age, and of more value than poetry. Wienbarg's æsthetic theories resolve themselves into glorification of Heine, whom he proclaims to be the great, the greatest prose author. Not till now, he declares, under the influence of French prose, has German prose really been formed. Schiller's style he calls the language of the parade, and Goethe's the language of the court. All the earlier great authors, even Jean Paul, lived, according to him, within a magic circle, far removed from the stir of the world. What distinguishes the prose of a Heine, a Börne, a Menzel, a Laube, from that of the earlier writers is, in his opinion, the want of tranquillity, of placidity (Behaglichkeit), but it is this want that gives it its superiority, the superiority of life. Heine especially is praised for having disdained "the passing fame" of a lyric poet in order to play upon the colossal, cosmic instrument which lies under the hands of a master of German prose.

First Mundt and then Laube, neither of whom was capable of writing a respectable verse, joined eagerly in this glorification of prose at the expense of poetry, the more willingly as by so doing they entered a protest against the Swabian school of poetry, the tardy offspring of Uhland's branch of Romanticism. Mundt positively elevated this cult of prose to the rank of the newest gospel. How little real ability Wienbarg possessed is clearly shown by his second work,Zur neuesten Litteratur, a collection of weak essays, in which the only thing we find to admire is his courageous fidelity to Heine at a time when envious rivals and moral doctrinaires had turned the tide of popular opinion against him.

Wienbarg had called the name Young Germany into existence, but as yet it designated no exactly specified group of authors. Strangely enough it was first applied to definite individuals in connection with a public denunciation and harsh legal proceedings.

The facts were as follows: A number of young authors had gradually brought themselves into notice, who were not exactly in league with each other, but whose common watchword was, spiritual emancipation. They all held aloof from Christianity and dreamed of a new, pantheistic religion for the new era. Many of them desired, under the name of "the emancipation of the flesh" or "rehabilitation of the flesh," the abolishment of the traditional code of morals, and more freedom in the conditions regulating the union and separation of the two sexes. Both the expression of this desire and the desire itself were, in the case of a man like Laube, unpleasantly epicurean, in the case of a man like Gutzkow, unnecessarily defiant and curiously morbid; with others again, such as Mundt, it took the form of championship of what he vaguely called the emancipation of woman, by which he merely meant more independence in home life and in marriage. By all these authors certain distinguished women were held in high honour—in France, George Sand, by whom they were strongly influenced; in Germany, Rahel, Bettina, Charlotte Stieglitz.

They all talked much and loudly of the rights of youth, had all imbibed a certain faith in liberty from Hegel, and all owed their general political tendency to the Revolution of July. Their aim was to identify literature with life, as Hegel had reconciled idea with reality. They had no really profound sympathy with each other, and they soon went each his own way. They were widely enough separated as regarded their places of residence. Heine lived in Paris, Weinbarg at Kiel—entirely isolated; Gutzkow resided in South Germany, Mundt was in Berlin, Laube in Leipzig; and the distances separating these places were very considerable then. Laube was very soon in many ways an opponent of Gutzkow, and a cold, unpleasant critic of Mundt and Kühne. Mundt attacked Gutzkow. An accidental meeting between Laube and Gutzkow in the north of Italy in 1833 contributed to their estrangement rather than their reconcilement. There was no other community between these writers than that usually existing between men of the same age and calling; they were much less a political party than a literary coterie; nevertheless literature was not to them its own aim and end; they desired to devote themselves to the service of the spirit of the age.[1]

This was the reason why they did not occupy themselves with the pure forms of literary art, neither with epic nor with lyric poetry, and but sparingly with dramatic. They all idolised the "Zeitgeist" (spirit of the times), and did homage to it in journalism and fiction, in critical and argumentative essays, in fanciful descriptions of travel, after the pattern of Heine's and Prince Pückler-Muskau's, and at times in long-winded novels.

KARL GUTZKOW

The most able of them all was undoubtedly Karl Gutzkow, born in Berlin in 1811, a man of a tireless, energetic, inquiring spirit, absorbed in the thousand problems of modern life, a cross between an analytical critic and a poet, but a man to whom nothing came of itself and who achieved nothing with ease. His personality had no charm, his youth no freshness, his prose no rhythm. But he was bold, inventive, intelligent, and enterprising. He had the gift of pathos, but not the lyric gift; his style was effective, but unmelodious. His mind was specially open to ideas, to all the thoughts and spiritual movements that were abroad at that day. By nature he belonged to the ungainly, but his literary enthusiasm was so genuine, his ambition so great, and his will so strong, that he gradually became an intellectual centre and diffused his influence in many directions. There was a time, about the year 1840, when a great part of what was best in German literature took its tone from him and his adherents.

We saw how it was the Revolution of July that awakened in him a desire to write. The following year, the great year of dismissals, imprisonments, and banishments in Prussia, put the pen into his hand. It was a time when every word underwent the strictest censorship; even the advertisements in theIntelligenzblattwere carefully examined, in case they might contain some hidden political meaning.

Gutzkow began by publishing a newspaper,Forum der Journallitteratur. He had been brought up on the Hegelian idea of the progress of the world towards ever greater liberty. As Gottschall has expressed it: "There swam before his eyes a constant succession of political sunrises and world-liberating theories." His newspaper reached a circulation of seventy copies, and was then given up.

Wolfgang Menzel, at that time the acknowledged master of German criticism, had repeatedly invited Gutzkow to come to Stuttgart and assist him in the editorship of hisLitteraturblatt, as he himself, having been elected a member of the Würtemberg Parliament, was no longer able to conduct it alone.

In spite of his hatred of Goethe, nay, partly because of it, Menzel, at this period of his career, was revered by the youth of Germany much as Katkóf and Ploug in their first periods were revered in Russia and Denmark. He, above all others, was to them the man of the day, the friend of liberty. One of Gutzkow's aims in his newspaper had been to defend Menzel, the man after his own heart, against the attacks of his enemies—and Menzel had many enemies, for as a reviewer he was disputatious, quarrelsome, and abusive. But he was, or seemed to be, a man of sincere convictions. He urged the necessity for a profounder conception of patriotism and of religion than was then in vogue, but at the same time he was an ardent Liberal in politics, and as such an admirer of Börne and Heine, who looked upon him as a trusty companion in arms; in Parliament he championed all progressive measures, amongst others the emancipation of the Jews.

Gutzkow, not yet much over twenty, short, slight, fair, and pale-faced, entered the presence of his lord and master, who was thirteen years older than himself, with a bashful reverence which he has compared to that of the student who appears before Mephistopheles-Faust in the first part of Goethe's drama. He saw a man with broad shoulders, a well developed chest, and dark hair, whose clean-shaven face reminded him of a Romish priest's. Round the mouth, with its ugly yellow teeth, a satiric smile played; the expression of the short-sighted eyes behind the spectacles was half defiant, half dignified. The man's temper seemed to be violent, his will inflexible. An expression of faun-like sensuality would come over his features when he talked of some erotic book, and yet Goethe's worldliness was as hateful to him as his indifference to politics, and he uncritically bowed the knee to men and phenomena that to his mind represented the mysterious. His character was a genuine priestly blend of irony and mysticism. He loved Voltaire, and enthusiastically admired Görres.

Master and pupil agreed well at first, both in their social and in their business relations. Gutzkow, who lived now in one, now in another of the towns in the neighbourhood of Stuttgart, indefatigably reviewed the great parcels of books sent him by Menzel. He soon caught the brisk, sweeping journalistic style, and all went well. The youthful works which he himself published, naturally found a more than lenient critic in Menzel. Yet they were poor enough.Briefe eines Narren an eine Närrin("Letters from a Male to a Female Fool") are humorous effusions without originality, in a style which is partly an imitation of Jean Paul, partly of Heine; andMaha Guru, the History of a God, the description of the psychological condition of a Tibetan who is made Dalai-Lama and consequently worshipped as a divinity, is a piece of fantastic writing, now totally unreadable. Yet Menzel, when reviewing this latter book, chose from amongst the vignettes which alternately figured on the title-page of his review, a laurel wreath, and had Gutzkow's name twice printed within its circle.

Gutzkow's intention inMaha Guruwas to show how the god who is supposed to be incarnated in the Dalai-Lama is subordinated to the man in him, the false divinity being completely thrown into the shade by the true nobility, true divinity of the human being. But besides this, the book was intended to be a philosophical-satirical romance in the old style, representing home institutions in foreign guise. The Tibetan theocracy was intended to suggest the European hierarchy, the Tibetan polyandry the European emancipation of woman. The foreign scenery, which Gutzkow had never seen, the foreign customs, which were not described for their own sake, could not interest. The book was suggested to him by the story of the French atheist, Billaud-Varennes, who escaped the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, took refuge in America, and was there worshipped by the Indians as a god. His skill in catching, training, and stuffing birds made such an impression on them that they looked upon him as a second creator. But all this had little to do with Tibet, and the would-be gravity of Gutzkow's theme.

Up to this time Young Germany and its fathers had not seemed to Menzel to be sacrilegious scoffers or bad patriots. Gutzkow's irreligion so far had not disturbed the good relations between him and his master. Menzel himself praised Börne'sLetters from Paris, which were attacked on all sides, as manly utterances, and excused their strong expressions as outbursts of feeling which must not be too roughly dealt with; he compared them to the glow-worms which shine so beautifully on mild summer nights, but which turn into poor little grey insects when seized by rough hands.

But it was inevitable that the tie between Gutzkow and Menzel should soon be loosed. From the first Gutzkow had received warnings not to involve himself too deeply with the Stuttgart author. Hegel himself, who took an interest in the young man, had said to him: "How can any one bind himself to a man like that?" The first disagreement between them was on the subject of Menzel's attitude to the South German lyric poets, the so-called Swabian school, followers of Uhland, a poet who not only enjoyed the fame which he most undoubtedly deserved, but a far greater. As a good Swabian, Menzel esteemed and supported these men—Gustav Schwab, Gustav Pfizer, Karl Mayer, &c.—as bulwarks of conventional piety and morality. But Gutzkow, with his keen sense of what was the life-idea of the time, Gutzkow, to whom literature was the church militant, had the greatest objection to such Sunday afternoon, gilt-edged poets, men who put into rhyme old, dead ballad themes, or their own petty, sentimental feelings, whilst they were cautiously watching over their interests as government servants aspiring to professorships or consistory counsellorships.

WhenGoethe's Conversations with Eckermannappeared, it became known how severely Goethe had judged his admirer Uhland's poetry. He would hear of nothing but the ballads, considering all the rest unworthy of notice. And a most contemptuously disparaging verdict upon the whole Swabian school, from Uhland to Pfizer, was presently published inGoethe's Correspondence with Zelter: he (Goethe) had never expected anything fresh or capable from that quarter; the fellows concealed their want of genius under the moral-religious-poetical beggar's cloak.[2]

After this Gutzkow took courage and proclaimed that to him also this antiquated pastoral and cloistral Romanticism was an abomination. In an essay entitledGoethe, Uhland, und Prometheushe made a violent attack on those poets who sought and "found their creed in their certificates of baptism, their morals in conventionality, their principles in established custom, and their poetry in the poetry of other people." What have you to offer us? he cried. Evening walks in the setting sun. Where is your effort to keep pace with the times?

Meanwhile the reaction against the Revolution of July was in full progress everywhere. The policy of Prussia, as well as that of Austria, was controlled by Metternich; and when the youth of Germany began to understand on what side the power and the energy were, and probably would be for long to come, they went over to that side. Gutzkow says, that out of every hundred students at the University of Berlin at that time, ninety-seven were strong Conservatives; and every meeting with an old school or college companion, more especially if he happened to be a civil servant or an officer, left a most painful impression on his mind.

In such circumstances it often happens that high-spirited, able young men lose their heads and commit rash actions for which they are blamed all their lives.

Schleiermacher was dead, laid to rest with great ceremonial, mourned as a father of the Protestant Church, one of the saints of theology. It had long ago been said, and well said, of him, that his character answered to his name (Schleiermacher = veilmaker). By dint of ambiguities and uncertain utterances he had kept himself popular to the end of his days. No one had brought up against him that Romantic sin of his youth, theVertrauliche Briefe um Lucinde("Confidential Letters on the Subject of Lucinde.")

But now Gutzkow, who erroneously concluded that this forgotten book would be omitted from the edition of Schleiermacher's works then in preparation, could not resist the temptation to republish it, and to defend himself and his friends against the perpetual accusations of godless immorality by showing that their erotic views, and even their doctrine of the rehabilitation of the flesh, had been held by that man of God who was the revered lord and master of the theologians.

This might have been a good tactical move if the youth, for he was still only twenty-three, had not written a foolish, boyish preface to the book. In it he addresses himself to the "watchmen of Zion," scoffs at their sanctimoniousness and spiritual coquetry, and thus adjures them:—"For one moment cast your priestly robes from you, forget that a man whom you still perpetually crucify was God, and listen to what happened once on a time elsewhere, in the world of liberty, youth, and fancy!"

What had happened was the publication of Schlegel'sLucinde, that lewd skeleton, which in Gutzkow's eyes is glorious and classic, and of Schleiermacher's letters about it, which in Gutzkow's estimation are divine. The Letters speak for themselves. They absurdly over-estimateLucinde, but the genuine human feeling in them is beautiful and courageous. In Gutzkow's preface everything is emphasised in a disagreeably defiant manner. He avers that love is of the nature of genius, maintains that priestly action neither adds to nor takes from the sacredness of marriage, tauntingly declaims against the cold prose of the ordinary marriage, "the water-soup weddings, the sordid procreation of children and struggle for mouldy bread." He winds up flippantly with: "Now tell me truly, Rosalie! Is it not since you have worn spurs on your little silk boots, since I have taught you how to throw your cloak over your shoulder, since I have invented a new sort of inexpressibles for you, so that every one takes you to be my youngest, dearly loved brother, is it not since then that you know what I meant by: I love you?" And not content with this female wearer of breeches, who is the realisation of his idea of the emancipation of woman, Gutzkow last of all plays out an atheistic trump; "Where is Franz?—Come here, dear boy. I know they baptized you secretly. Who is God? What! you don't know, you innocent atheist, you philosophic child! Oh, if the world too had only not known about God, how much happier it would have been!"

No specially acute critical faculty is needed to detect the unreality in this student's braggadocio. The original of the Rosalie who was to follow Gutzkow about in page's dress was more probably the Kaled of Byron'sLarathan any Heidelberg or Berlin seamstress. It is easy to imagine what effect such a preface to such a book would produce on the general public and on orthodox journalism.

Only a drop was needed to fill the cup of public indignation, and that drop Gutzkow did not fail to add. In 1835 he wroteWally, die Zweiflerin("The Sceptic"), which is an exceedingly weak story, with a positively burlesque crucial episode, but which nevertheless influenced the course of events more powerfully than any other German literary work of the day.

Strauss'sLife of Jesushad lately come out, and its resolution of the historical element in that life into myths, bold and fanciful to the verge of folly as the hypothesis was, had violently perturbed the thinking minds of Germany. Indignation was universal. A thousand-voiced cry of condemnation rose from the Eider to Switzerland. For many a year, in the public mind, there was a dark stain on the name of David Strauss.

The book was talked about everywhere, and Gutzkow one evening began to discuss its problem with a young girl to whom he was attached. "Don't let us talk about that," she said, "the very thought drives me mad!" These words made a strong impression on him.

Strauss's book itself had not satisfied him. Rationalist as he was, he felt the need for a historic Jesus, and betook himself to the study of Reimarus's oldWolfenbüttel Fragments, to which Lessing before him had devoted so much attention. He determined to publish a selection from these, but it was in vain that he applied with this intention to the most courageous of the German publishers, Campe. In spite of his bold political attitude, Campe dared not expose himself to the rancour of the Hamburg clergy, Pastor Goetze's successors in the cure of souls.

It was about this time that the noble Charlotte Stieglitz committed suicide. The impression produced by this tragic event combined itself in Gutzkow's mind with the impressions made by his young friend's remark and by Reimarus's Biblical criticism—andWally, the Sceptic, was the result.

It is a childish book, thisWally, but it is innocent, honest, and artless. The heroine is a young lady moving in good society, who, in despair at not being able to overcome the religious doubts awakened in her mind by the man she loves, the sceptical,blaséCæsar, kills herself with a dagger.

Gutzkow had been unable to withstand the temptation of reminding the venerable lights and defenders of the Church, the dignitaries of all the different classes of the Order of the Red Eagle, that there had once lived men named Hume, Voltaire, Lessing, &c. There was something fascinating to a young man in the idea of reminding such grand folks of such forgotten existences. But it ought to have been done with talent. In Gutzkow's novel the plot was a mere excuse for ventilating theories,Wallywas a weak imitation ofLélia, the last novel which George Sand had published.

But its author was in the spring-tide of his youth. It seemed to him as if the whole world were growing young again. The glow of Hegel's sinking sun still illuminated the horizon, Bettina arose like a morning star, the ever-young wisdom of Rahel was scattered abroad over the earth after her death like fruitful dew, Lenau's and Rückert's early poems were like the song of the lark, Ruge's first critical articles and Feuerbach's first philosophic writings were like fresh spring breezes that cleared the air—the time seemed to him so sunny, so promising, so laden with fruit, that it was as it were symbolised by the two glorious summers of 1834 and 1835, with their rich harvests of corn and wine. And it was then he committed his first great youthful blunder.

He was not satisfied with embodying his religious heterodoxy in his book; he also proclaimed his moral heterodoxy, his defiance of the accepted code of sexual morality—a very clumsy and immature defiance. But the best idea of how very innocently Gutzkow interpreted that watchword, "the emancipation of the flesh," which he himself employs, is to be gained from the notorious scene inWally, which was intended by the author to express his worship of beauty.

Wally loves Cæsar and is loved by him, but they cannot marry each other, because Wally has been obliged to betroth herself to the Sardinian ambassador. Cæsar entreats her that she will as it were symbolically celebrate a spiritual marriage with him by showing herself to him in all her naked beauty the night before her wedding. In an old German ballad, the heroine, Sigune, thus displays herself to Tchionatulander.

No one will deny that Cæsar's request is insane and its fulfilment ridiculous. But the intention of the scene was so chaste and its execution so inoffensive, that only positive low-mindedness could have made it the occasion of calling for the assistance of the police. We read; "The cloak slips from the young hero's shoulders; his hair waves freely and luxuriantly. To the left there appears out of the sun-mist an image of intoxicating beauty—Sigune, displaying herself more bashfully than the Medicean Venus hides her nakedness. She stands there helpless, dazzled by the glamour of the love that besought this favour; her will is gone; she is the personification of shame, innocence, and self-abandonment. And in sign that this is a consecrated, holy scene, no roses bloom, but a high-stemmed lily has shot upwards close to her body, symbolically covering her as the flower of chastity. It all happened in one breathless, silent moment—it was sacrilege, but the sacrilege of innocence and of woeful, eternal renunciation." This is all.

The relations between Gutzkow and Menzel were no longer what they had been. Now and again, in some preface or article, Gutzkow had ventured to make a small joke at the expense of his former patron, or a modest protest against one or other of his utterances. And in a more practical way Gutzkow had for some time past been a thorn in the side to Menzel. His literary supplement to the Frankfort newspaper,Phoenix, was a dangerous rival to Menzel'sLitteraturblatt.But there was worse than this. Gutzkow had gradually got into friendly correspondence with the leaders of the new literature, Laube, Wienbarg, Mundt, &c., men who were rapidly taking possession of all the more important literary organs in Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfort, and Hamburg. When, in 1835, Gutzkow and Wienbarg issued the prospectus of a literary review in the style ofRevue des Deux Mondes, with almost all the most eminent literary names in Germany on its list of contributors—university professors like Boeckh, influential writers like Varnhagen, not to mention a talented author like Börne and a genius like Heine—Menzel felt the necessity for striking a telling blow.

An invitation to subscribe to theDeutsche Revuehad been published. It was written by Gutzkow, in flowery, metaphoric language—declares that science is longing to escape from musty class-rooms into the free open air, that the bird of Minerva is no longer the owl, which is afraid of the light, but the eagle, which gazes steadfastly into the sun, &c., &c.

Instead of confining his attack to this programme, which was inoffensive and in some respects promising, Menzel, in hisLitteraturblattof the 11th and 13th September 1835, published a general manifesto against the company of young authors headed by Karl Gutzkow. The apology for this action, which he makes as an old man (in hisMemoirs, p. 304), shows unquestionable proof of narrow-mindedness, but not of any honest conviction. To emphasise the cosmopolitan tendencies and French sympathies of Young Germany, he wrote of it as "La jeune Allemagne." He directed his principal attack againstWally, from which book he quoted a few disconnected passages to show that the whole novel was immoral and sacrilegious; the insignificant sensual element in the story, the Sigune scene, is made its main feature.

"Only in the deepest mire of immorality, only in brothels, are such atheistic views hatched. They were in vogue among the philosophical parasites of the old French court. In the Palais Royal they were translated from the language of the court into that of the Jacobins. Herr Gutzkow has taken it upon himself to transplant once again into Germany that infamous French ape who, in the arms of a harlot, mocks at God, but he has done it in an age which, praise be to God, is more mature and more manly than the age of Voltaire. Even then vice was foiled by the natural disposition of our nation; now it will be even more impossible for it to effect an entrance. Literature will expel it, public opinion brand it.... If such a school for the most impudent immorality and the most refined falsehood is allowed to establish itself in Germany, if all the noble minds of the nation do not set themselves against it, if German publishers do not beware, but venture to offer such poison for sale and to praise their wares, we shall soon see the result.... But I will tread down your filth, though I know that I shall defile myself by doing so; I will bruise the head of the serpent that warms itself in the hot-bed of sensuality.... As long as I live, such infamous dishonouring of German literature shall not go unpunished...."

And Menzel, the practical journalist, was not satisfied, like the ordinary author, with saying a thing once for all. He repeated his accusations in one number after another of his paper with growing emphasis, more abusive language, more venomous imputations, appealing more and more plainly to the State to interfere while it was yet time.

On the 26th of October he wrote: "I know that their war against Christianity, against morality, against marriage is of no more significance than the war of young owls against the old sun. But a spark may give rise to a conflagration.... Upon the new literary judgment-seat in Frankfurt, Venus vulgivaga will be enthroned in place of justice ... never will these men, who only believe in the flesh, these priests of foulness, forgive an author for being purer than they are.... Is it possible to sit still and allow them to propagate French morality among us by word and deed? Under the mask of French republicanism, this libellous, infamous new Frankfurt school is introducing the most frightful immorality. The flesh, unbridled sensuality, the abolition of marriage, are their watchwords, and they not only write obscene books themselves, but serve up the old ones afresh.... They are to a certain extent disciples of Saint-Simon, they proclaim a still more dissolute republicanism, without any virtue, a hetæra-republic on the grandest scale.... As yet these principles are confined to the narrower, aristocratic circles of literature.... But to what do these doctrines appeal but to the bestiality and ferocity which, though they are still slumbering, would be so easily aroused in the great capitals and manufacturing towns, with their obscene haunts of drunkenness and depravity."

On the 11th of November Menzel directly denounces the Prussian university professors who have been rash enough to promise Gutzkow their co-operation in his review: "Are the universities not State institutions? Does the Prussian State no longer protect Christianity, morality, marriage? We have heard so much of the moral, religious, Conservative spirit that prevails in Prussia. Are we now to see the most eminent professors of Berlin, Königsberg, and Halle following at the heels of an obscene Marat, who, like the real Marat, literally preaches the sacrament of 'the irresistible moment' and a republic of sans-culottes and sans-chemises? Are we to hear them raving with him against Christianity, morality, marriage, the family, modesty, against God and immortality, against German nationality and the established order of things?" And he concluded his outburst by applying the designation of a Jewish party to the good Germans, Gutzkow, Wienbarg, Laube, Mundt, and Kühne, because of their sympathy with the ideas of Börne and Heine. Young Germany, he declared, was in reality Young Palestine.

As a consequence of this denunciation, Karl Gutzkow was arrested on a charge of blasphemy and lewd writing, and Menzel was dishonourable enough to go on exciting public indignation against him whilst he was in confinement and the case was being tried at Mannheim. The sentence pronounced was, however, only ten weeks' imprisonment for attacking the existing religious institutions of Baden.

But fear of the revolutionary movements which Menzel maintained would be the result of the teaching of Young Germany, induced the German Confederation to take action, and on the 10th of December 1835 the Federal Diet passed a resolution, which aimed at nothing less than the annihilation of the whole group of authors, young and old, which it comprehends under the designation Young Germany. It reads as follows: "In view of the fact that a school of literature has lately come into existence in Germany, a school now known by the name of 'Young Germany,' or 'the young literature,' whose aim is, by means of belletristic writings, accessible to all classes of readers, impudently to attack the Christian religion, to discredit the existing conditions of society, and to subvert all discipline and morality, the Council of the German Confederation (Bundesversammlung) ... has unanimously passed the following resolutions: (1) All the German Governments bind themselves to bring the penal and police statutes of their respective countries and the regulations regarding the abuse of the press in their strictest sense to bear against the authors, publishers, printers, and disseminators of the writings of the literary school known as 'Young Germany' or 'the young literature,' to which notably belong Heinrich Heine, Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube, Ludolf Wienbarg, and Theodor Mundt, as also by all lawful means to prevent the dissemination of the writings of this school by booksellers, lending libraries, or other means," &c., &c.

It was in this manner that the appellation Young Germany first became familiar to the general public. It was the German Police-Confederation which, constituting itself a critical authority, stigmatised a group of authors, mentioned by name, as an immoral and injurious "school"—and this on the information of one single rival of these men in the favour of the reading public.

Menzel was to Young Germany what Southey in his day was to the "Satanic school" in English literature,aliasByron and Shelley, or Katkóf, a generation later, to the "traitorous school" in Russian literature—Herzen, Ogarev, and Bakunin. In disturbed times the informer is as necessary an appendage to the foreground figures as the envious rival and spy was to the hero of the old tragedies.

[1]See Ludwig Geiger:Das junge Deutschland und die preussische Censur. Berlin, 1900.

[2]"Wundersam ist es, wie sich diese Herrlein einen gewissen sittig-religiös-poetischen Bettlermantel so geschickt umzuschlagen wissen, dass, wenn auch der Ellenbogen herausguckt, man diesen Mangel für eine poetische Intention halten muss."The fellows manage to throw a kind of moral-religious-poetic beggar's cloak so cleverly round them, that, even if the bare elbow shows, we are obliged to consider this defect a poetic intention.

The fellows manage to throw a kind of moral-religious-poetic beggar's cloak so cleverly round them, that, even if the bare elbow shows, we are obliged to consider this defect a poetic intention.

The determination of the Federal Council to suppress the writings of Young Germany not only nipped theDeutsche Revuein the bud, but also put an end to the existence of Mundt'sLitterarischer Zodiacus, published in Leipzig, and prevented the publication of Laube'sMitternachtszeitung, 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 "thefutureliterary 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 theBerliner Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, and in the announcements of Varnhagen and Mundt's edition of Knebel'sLiterary 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 theAllgemeine 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 hisMitternachtszeitung, 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 theDeutsche 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 wroteUeber den Denunziantenand Börne wroteMenzel 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 errorPrivatschelmenlebenis substituted forPrivatmenschenleben) 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 novelSeraphineand a work entitledPhilosophic der That und des Ereignisses("Philosophy of Action and Event"), a kind of criticism of Hegel'sPhilosophy 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 ofUriel 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 ofUriel 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 FreundDer 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:

"Erwirdgeliebt! 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 ofUriel Acostaoccupies 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'sUriel Acostawith Heine'sAlmansor, 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 stageUriel Acostahas now long been a favourite play. The pure style and the treatment of the subject remind us of Lessing'sNathan 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. HisGoethe(1836) is a thoughtful little work, in the first instance a protest against Menzel; his long series of portraits (ZeitgenossenafterwardsSäkularbilder) show qualities which somewhat later stood him in good stead as a novelist; hisLife 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. HisRichard 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 adeus 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 isZopf 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'sFrederick the Greatto 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 Schwertis a species of light-hearted pendant to Kleist's seriousPrins 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 isDer 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 ofDas 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. HisReisenovellen, a long series of volumes, are the direct offspring of theReisebilder. 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 theReisenovellen, in spite of the off-hand way in which they are written, there is little originality. At the very beginning, in the division entitledLeipzig, with its French sympathies and its reverence of Napoleon, there is too strong a suggestion of theReisebilder. 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'sArdinghello. "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 ofDas 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.

Back to Index Next