Chapter 15

This is more resolute language than the poets used; these views are very different from theirs. Saint-René Taillandier animadverted on the fact that Feuerbach, holding such views, did not take part in the revolutionary movement of 1848. Feuerbach answered: "M. Taillandier! When another revolution breaks out and I take part in it, know, to the dismay of your godly soul, that that revolution will be victorious; the last day of the monarchy and the hierarchy will have come. Alas! I shall not live to take part in that revolution. But I am playing an active part in another great and victorious one, the results of which will not be evident till centuries have come and gone. For, according to my philosophy—which you know nothing about and presume to judge without having studied—according to my philosophy, which ignores gods, and, consequently, miracles wrought by means of political measures, space and time are necessary conditions of all being, all thought, and all action. It was not, as has been asserted in the Bavarian Reichsrathskammer, because the Parliament of Frankfort consisted of unbelievers that it was such a complete and shameful failure; as a matter of fact the majority of its members were believers—and surely God, too, respects a majority; it was a failure because it was destitute of the sense of place and time."[16]

Notwithstanding the number of different stages through which Feuerbach passed in his progress towards realism, notwithstanding all that can with justice be said of the diversity of the positions he took up, his ground-thought, the key-stone of the vaulting upon which the whole rests, is as simple as it is great. It is this: Man cannot be conscious of a being that is higher than himself. If it were possible for man to be conscious of himself—that is, his being or nature—as finite, compared with another being apprehended as infinite, he would by this consciousness limit his own being,i.e.deny it. His consciousness would extend beyond the limits of his being, which is impossible, for consciousness is simply the self-affirmation of being.

Instead, therefore, of saying with Hegel: Man's consciousness of God is God's self-consciousness, we are compelled to say: Man's consciousness of God is man's self-consciousness; religion is man's first and indirect self-knowledge.

It is universally acknowledged that the idea, God, can only be formulated by the aid of human predicates—God is love, God is goodness, knowledge, power, &c. The subject here is nothing but the personified predicate. The predicate is the original. What religion really means is this: Love is divine,i.e.of absolute worth, deserving of adoration; goodness, knowledge, power are divine.

Hence belief in a God is belief in man as the essential being.

The apparent axiom of religion is: I am nothing, measured with God; its real axiom is: Everything else is nothing measured with me; everything serves my purposes. By means of prayers and miracles, with God as intermediary, I have everything at my disposal. God is the creation of man's desire. The main desire of Christianity being unlimited happiness, bliss, God is the means whereby bliss is attained, or, more correctly, bliss and God are one.

In a word; theology is anthropology, the theological problem is a psychological problem—which Feuerbach has solved in all essentials for all time.

Viewed thus, his life-work is seen in its unity. Though it is not possible to express the whole in a few words, yet it is easy to feel that it is one single great thought, for which humanity is his debtor.

When a young man stands in the Pantheon in Rome, lost in admiration of its dome, the most beautiful in the world, his most natural thought is: O, like the builder of this temple, to have, were it but once in one's life, an idea, simple and great as that which produced this cupola—to conceive some single fundamental principle, some simple and yet composite formula, capable of expansion to a whole scheme, of dimensions as grand as this firmament in miniature! One such thought, simple in its beginning, stupendous in its development, would give greatness enough to any human life.

Feuerbach's was one of these fundamental thoughts.

[1]Sound the trumpet, herald of war! To arms! To arms! War to the death with the wicked horde of stupid, hypocritical priests!

[2]Fifty years ago our parents declared war against the fat and flabby priest; we, their children and grandchildren, have, like them, taken up arms against the cloth; but our cry is: Death to the lean and lanky priestlings!

[3]'Tis the lark, not the nightingale, that sings so clear; the great sun-ball is rising fast, borne by the winds of the morning. It is day! it is day! The night will end in blood. Awake, all ye who believe in the light eternal! Tear the rose-wreaths of love from your heads, and gird yourselves with swords of flame!

[4]'Tis not the fault of the Kings—theyare all lovers of freedom;But their misfortune is this: Freedom has no love for them.

[5]His youthful writings are collected inGedichte und kritische Aufsätze, 1845, 2 vols.

[6]Would you desecrate the temple for the sake of a woman, dance with her before golden idols, &c.

[7]Prosaic vulgar-mindedness cannot, will not, understand that thy name, a mind like thine, is a security for integrity of purpose; it is ready to believe only what is bad, &c.

[8]No longer, damned Liberty, shalt thou disturb my peace of mind. Lisette! another glass of beer! For the future I'm a respectable citizen.

[9]A respectable citizen! You an ordinary respectable citizen! Shame on you, my friend I Was this your aim in life? Is this the end of all your passionate song? Take back the offensive word, I pray; just imagine displaying such vulgar-mindedness! Mine is a nobler ambition: I am determined to be a Privy Councillor!

[10]My advice to you is to drop the cards and look out for yourself, O minister! Remember that you have to do with four stallions, not four citizens!

[11]You ask me why he lies sleepless? why in his rage he tears the lace from his pillow? A good conscience sleeps well everywhere, a bad conscience nowhere. He has sucked the blood of his country, gorged himself with its substance; during a whole long life he has stolen and lied and deceived.

[12]If heart and style remain still true,I'll not object, whatever you do.My friend, I never will mistake you,E'en though a Councillor they make you.(BOWRING.)

[13]They lie, they squabble, they hate one another with a deadly hatred; it is only want of courage that keeps them from robbing and murdering. They dare not do the things they long to do, and so they talk much about right and duty. Those that think keep their thoughts to themselves; most of them do not think.

[14]We clung to each other-was it to pass the time, or was it in despair? she a lost, new-born woman, I a lost, new-born man.

[15]Briefwechsel zwischen Feuerbach und Christian Kapp, 1876, p, 176.

[16]Wesen der Religion, p. vii.

The profoundest characteristic of that literature which in the Forties still continued to be known by the name ofBewegungslitteratur, is its utter want of connection with official Germany. It is the absence of any such connection that gives it its strength and its freshness. Official Germany is not to be taken here in the narrow sense of German officialdom; it means all that part of the people—German or any other—which in normal circumstances appears to be the whole people, and as such sets the stamp of nationality on all that is produced by that people, the same stamp which it has set on all that has emanated from it in the past. With what a later period has calledBildungsphilisterei(cultured philistinism), the most eminent literary men of the period in question have no connection whatever. There is no corresponding group of personalities and writings in Scandinavian literature. Even the Radical poetry of the Scandinavian students became official in the course of a very few years. The most gifted of the German poets of the day are independent, or make themselves independent, of official Germany, and bear like men the consequences of the position they take up.

Among those who declare their independence, the most interesting figure is Freiligrath, born in Detmold in 1810. Fair, blue-eyed, massively built, and shaggy-maned, he is the true son of Westphalia. His father, a schoolmaster, educated him against his will as a merchant, and to his commercial education and pursuits are to be ascribed his freedom from classical reminiscences, his exclusively modern literary culture, his understanding of the foreign climes and countries with which commerce brings us into communication, and his distinctly modern turn of thought.

Freiligrath is not, like Hoffmann von Fallersleben, his predecessor in the field of political poetry, only a prolific song writer; he is a genuine, inspired poet. Hoffmann, who had made a study of the old German songs and ballads, and was himself a man of simple, popular tastes, poured forth an inexhaustible stream of polemical verse, directed against the squirearchy and bureaucracy, but he repeated himself with the monotony of the popular poet. Freiligrath wrote comparatively little, but every one of his poems has its distinct individuality. He is influenced by that modern French and English poetry of which he has given us so many admirable translations, and makes his debut as a descriptive poet of the Victor Hugo school, but soon develops a distinct literary individuality. He possesses in a very high degree two qualities which are seldom found united, the faculty of picturesque description and intensity of feeling. The former leads him to depict themes from foreign lands, full of glowing colour, the latter displays itself when he sings of home and fatherland. In his revolutionary period his warm feeling became powerful pathos, and his gift of graphic delineation was exclusively devoted to the service of hostility and ire.

In his youth, in Amsterdam (1831), the sea and the shipping made a deep impression on him. In his dreams he followed all the vessels that glided out of the harbour bound for Africa, for India, for Turkey, for America. He was seized by the desire to describe these foreign climes as they appeared in his imagination, and Hugo'sLes Orientalesnot only suggested the colours to be employed in the treatment of such themes, but also the metrical form. Freiligrath alone among German poets tried to master the alexandrines beloved of Frenchmen, despised in Germany, and to vindicate their beauty. Strangely enough, in spite of his usually correct ear, he so entirely misapprehended the peculiarity of this metre that he always writes it in pure iambics, a practice which Germans have continued.

He was possessed by the longing to roam—out into the wide world, across the great ocean. Instead of German "garret poetry," he wrote, in his garret, scenes laid in the deserts of Africa and the primeval forests of America. He attempted tropical local colouring, which was at times successful, at times unnatural; his linguistic specialty was new and remarkable rhymes, produced with the assistance of resonant foreign words like "Sykomore," "Tricolore," &c. His good verses were like living, his bad, in their lifeless splendour, like stuffed humming-birds.

But this African Freiligrath is not the best Freiligrath. Freiligrath, the Liberal patriot, is greatly his superior. After Herwegh's political challenge had roused him, he took himself to task, tested with simple-minded fairness those sympathies and tendencies of his nature as to which he himself was not yet absolutely clear, and discovered in the depths of his being an unquenchable desire for liberty and a sympathy with the oppressed which on occasion could develop into burning indignation and hatred. His genius chose the revolutionary path, pursued it at full speed, and finally spread its wings and flew.MarseillaiseafterMarseillaisecame from the poet's pen. O these hymns of 1848! they are enthusiasm itself, the enthusiasm that begets enthusiasm. In the earlier ones we have fierceness, faith, revolutionary piety, fiery sarcasm, the intoxicated jubilation of victory; in the later, noble despair, sublime in its expression.

But the poems which anticipate the Revolution and incite to it are also worth reading. Take, for instance, the volume entitledÇa ira, published in 1846. In each of the poems of which it consists a symbolical picture is graphically elaborated. In the first, a ship is setting sail; her name is Revolution, she is the black fire-ship that sends her rockets aboard that hypocritical craft, the Church, and then points her guns at the silver fleet of Wealth. In another we have a symbolical idea borrowed from Thomas Moore: the ice-palace of despotism, which will crack, and break up, and melt away as soon as spring comes. InWie man's macht("How the Thing is Done") the poet describes the storming of the arsenal of a capital with such infectious ardour, so dramatically and vividly, that we see it all, are ourselves in the thick of the fray. As the Revolution which he foresees draws nearer and nearer, his poetry becomes more and more up to date. He describes a Rhine steamer, which has the King and Queen of Prussia on board. The steamer is a picture of German society. The company on deck are enjoying the fresh air, the bright sunshine, the beautiful scenery of the Rhine; but down below in the engine-room stand the proletariat, in the shape of engineer and stoker, masters of the volcano that drives the ship onwards. One push, one blow from them, and the whole edifice of which the king is the crown, collapses; the deck is blown to fragments, the flames mount to the clouds—but not yet, thou angry element, not to-day! In such a poem asFreie Pressethe course of events is anticipated: the insurrection is on the point of breaking out; one day more, and there will be fighting in the streets. Ammunition being short, the owner of the printing works orders his workmen to melt down all the alphabets. And presently the hissing, glowing mass is flowing into the bullet moulds. The times are such that only in the form of bullets can the types emancipate humanity.

The days of Young Germany were over, but now it seemed as if Germany herself had grown young.

Robert Prutz (born in 1816 at Stettin) received that classical education which had been denied to Freiligrath. A critical student of philosophy and history, he wrote upon many subjects, but it is only as a political poet that he has any abiding significance. He was one of the young men who ardently vented their opinions in Ruge'sHallische Jahrbücher, the result in his case being banishment. He is the Feuerbachian as poet. His political poetry, from the absolute directness with which it follows its aim, is apt to be somewhat dry and unimaginative, but his sober and yet warm love of liberty attracts us. If you once learn to like him, it will be a thorough liking; you will even highly prize his latest collection of poems,Aus der Heimath, a book which has been foolishly condemned as sensual; it cannot be denied that he showed bad taste in dedicating it to his wife.

In his best work, a little Aristophanic masterpiece entitledDie politische Wochenstube("The Political Lying-in Room"), Zürich, 1843, Prutz, Holberg's warmest German admirer,[1]has succeeded in epitomising the wit, the irony, the endeavour, and the hopes of the younger generation.

It was only natural that a poet with Prutz's classical training should adopt the Aristophanic method, the pity was that he followed it too closely. His play became in consequence a jewel of price for a select circle of readers instead of food for the multitude. It is the production of a young, hopeful dreamer, whose faith in a glorious future for Germany was quite as lively and as strong as the pleasure he felt in demolishing with his sarcasm what was decrepit and decayed; the burlesque figures and conceits stand out against an idealistic golden background because the poet sees the sun of the future rising and shining behind them.

The action passes partly in, partly outside of the house of a doctor who keeps a kind of private lying-in hospital, where young ladies of the upper classes at times take refuge. Of late his business has not thriven. It had flourished when Pietism flourished in Königsberg; much pious embracing had gone on then, which, with God's blessing, had borne fruit; but now that the State Church has set itself to suppress Pietism, his wards stand empty. He will soon be driven to apply for a post on the staff of the Prussian official newspaper; those who are fit for nothing else can always earn their bread in its service. The Doctor's servant, Kilian, who is famishing, asks for food. The Doctor advises him to have his stomach removed, takes out his knife to do the operation, tells him that he will never feel hungry again, and that he will confer an inestimable benefit on humanity if he can show himself as a living proof that the operation is possible. For what is the rock on which virtue splits nowadays? Why did Freiligrath take a pension? Why did Dingelstedt allow himself to be branded. The stomach, and nothing but the stomach is to blame for everything.

In the meantime Herr Schlaukopf (Mr. Sly) has come on the scene, disguised as a beggar. He declaims some patriotic sentiment, in the style of the Niebelungenlied, on the subject of Hermann the Cheruscan, and then asks for a contribution for the statue of that national hero. The Doctor is incautious enough to call the statue a scarecrow, a hideous sentry brandishing a spit, on which Schlaukopf declares that he shall pay for these words by at least twelve years' imprisonment with hard labour. They fight, the Doctor pulls off Schlaukopfs false nose, and thereupon recognises in him the friend of his youth, the quondam socialist, singer of liberty, republican, and regicide, now advanced to the post of "Wirklicher-geheimer-königlicher Leibspion" (Real Private Royal Body-spy). They fall into each other's arms, and Schlaukopf tells his errand, but not till he has assured himself that the Doctor holds no awkward or seditious political beliefs. The Doctor, recognising the importance of the man with whom he has to do, falls on his knees and swears that he believes nothing except that crown-pieces are round. Then Schlaukopf divulges the secret: "Germany, our mother-country, the Germany of Frederick and of Luther, the fair-haired queen, is with child."

The Doctor is at first incredulous. Is it not dropsy, the result of all the water-drinking introduced by these new total abstinence associations? No, she is pregnant, and the only surprising thing about it is that the fact has not been announced in the newspapers, which usually inform the public when queens and princesses are in that condition. And now Schlaukopf communicates the joyful intelligence that the Doctor, as an experienced accoucheur, has been chosen to attend Germania; he, and no other, is to deliver her. The Doctor dances for joy, demands that he shall be rewarded with perquisites and an order, requests Schlaukopf to bring the lady—but see, she comes!

Slaves, who represent the enthralled people, bear her in in a golden chair. She is fair, with a fat, amiable face, a wide mouth, and eyes of watery blue. All salute and do homage to her as Germania. But from a confidential conversation between her and Schlaukopf we learn that she is not the person she gives herself out to be. He asks her if she is really pregnant; she replies that he ought to know best, he and the others whom he has introduced to her. It seems that he has taken her from the street and trained her to play her part. She is the official Germania—and she has done everything that her artful masters have ordered her to do, has bowed, and knelt, and pattered prayers at command. And now, at command, she is pregnant. Schlaukopf abuses her, and threatens to beat her; she taunts him and threatens in return to run away and leave him to find another Germania where he best can.

Meanwhile in the darkness of night a stranger has appeared in the street in front of the house, a woman with a harassed, hunted look, who declares that she knows not where to lay her outlawed head. "I," she says, "the legitimate queen, must, like a common vagrant, hide my royal head in the darkness of night, whilst she who has been exalted in my stead and impudently allows herself to be called by my name, sleeps voluptuously on silken pillows. Ye stones, be my pillow! For my people, like their queen, have to lie on stone."

Through the night comes a cry, "Germania!" The woman in the house and the woman on the street answer at the same moment. Wrangling and confusion ensue, the gendarmes arrive, and an attempt is made to discover which of the two has taken a name that does not belong to her. "Not I!" cries the stranger to Schlaukopf. She maintains that he has stolen her name and decked his brazen-faced paramour with it, and concludes: "Shame on you both! I alone am the real, the true Germania!" Kilian finds it impossible to believe that any one so slender and emaciated can be Germania, but the serfs are thrilled to the heart by the sweet sound of her voice. The diplomatic Schlaukopf alone keeps his countenance:

"Allein, so thut ein wenig nur die Augen auf,Zu sehen braucht Ihr diese da und jene nur,So ist's ja klärlicb, welche hier die Rechte sei:In Lumpen jene, diese jedoch im seidnen Rock;Die abgemagert, hungerbleich, ein Schattenbild,Verbannt zu Bettlern, selber eine Bettlerin;Höchst stattlich diese, wohlgenährt, anmuthiglich,In hoher Herren ehrender Festgenossenschaft,Ja selbst gesegneten Leibes ist, wie Ihr seht."[2]

To this comparison between her rival's magnificence and her own poverty the stranger answers with dignity:

"Wohl spotte mein! In meine Wunde lege duDie blutbefleckten, diebsgewandten Finger mir!Auf meine Lumpen speie du, und rühme dichWeil ich ein armes, heimathlos vertriebnes Weib;Du weisst am besten, wessen Hand mein Blut vergoss,Und wer vom Haupt die Krone mir gerissen hat.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Ihr bautest du Paläste, mir Gefängnisse.Ihr schmeichelten deine Schergen, mich verfolgten sie—Dir aber sag ich, Schattenkönigin, o du,Die du mit Zittern meines Namens dich erfrechst:Hinweg! verbirg dich! Räume du den Platz, der mirAllein gebührt! Denn eure Herrscherin bin ich."[3]

And the serfs bend low in homage to the woman who comes, not in regal purple, but in rags like their own, saying to each other: "May not this be the long-looked-for redresser of our wrongs, she who is to break our yoke asunder and awaken the sleeping world with the lightning flash of liberty?"

But now the two women are called upon to prove their respective claims. Schlaukopf exclaims: "It is the legitimist principle we are called on to defend!" and proceeds to prompt official Germania. That fat, fair lady, who boasts that she bears the future of Germany in her womb and claims in consequence to be treated with consideration and reverence, repeats a long rigmarole, supposed to be the story of her life: In the gray of eld she lay on bear-skins in the forest, drinking foaming mead and eating beech-nuts and acorns. "Beech-nuts and acorns!" cry the Doctor, Kilian, and Schlaukopf. "It is she." Then she tells how she was sent to school to the priests, had her nose flattened against the crucifix, becamechristlich-germanisch, endowed monasteries, built churches, kissed the Pope's toe, &c., &c., and once more the Doctor, Kilian, and Schlaukopf cry: "It is she!" She tells what a peaceable, governable disposition she developed, how she allowed any one that liked to box her ears, how her loyalty has now reached such a pitch that if her master but whistle, she comes, stands on her hind legs, fetches the stick—"In a word, I am a well-trained poodle." And again we hear the jubilant chorus: "It is she!" She concludes: "God and the king willing, I shall be in the future what I have been in the past. By government order I am now, as you see, with child. O gendarmes, take my part! Recognise me as the one, true, Germania, as the thoroughbred German, and be assured that in return I will bring up my son as a gendarme!"

The gendarmes are of opinion that she has made out a good case, and Schlaukopf is beginning to boast that the vagrant has been silenced, when she in turn lifts up her voice. She does not understand the art of self-praise, she says, nor has she much to praise herself for; the future will show what she is. "I cannot deny," she continues, "that she who stands there is a Germania; she is official Germany, the Germany of the Government, of the Federal Diet; but the Germany of the German people she is not; they do not know her, they do not care a straw for her rotten genealogical tree. If you would know which is the true Germania, ask these fettered serfs!" At this moment the other Germania is seized with violent pains. She suddenly explodes with a loud report and disappears in a cloud of smoke, which, as it gradually disperses, takes the shape of pilgrim monks, of romantic poets who sing the praises of the holy Middle Ages, of geese who lament that the Order of the Swan is not yet instituted, of moderate Liberals singing the chorus:

"Immer langsam voran, immer langsam voran!Dass der preussische Fortschritt nachkommen kann!"[4]

Then the serfs break their chains, cast themselves on the ground before the poor stranger, and do homage to her as the true Germania, who is still a virgin, but who one day will give birth to the ruler of the future....

The emblematical picture is a very fine, powerful one, and moreover it is true. The German Empire of to-day is not the offspring of the oppressed, divided Germany that was then extolled as pregnant with future greatness; it is the outcome of the much-despised, the harshly suppressed endeavours after liberty and unity. It is a mistake, however, to have represented the true Germania with no past, with all her power and glory in the future; though such a break of historical continuity did not in those days seem the impossibility that it does in ours.

One of the truths proclaimed by this Radical polemical poem admits of no controversion, namely, that the official fatherland, the official country, everywhere lays claim to all that the genius of the people in times past has produced, to all their great men, even those whose lives were one constant rebellion against it. It banished, imprisoned, executed them—no matter; now it wears their portraits next its heart. And the official fatherland claims, and always has claimed, to bear the future in its womb. It not only maintains that the present existence of all and of everything is inseparably bound up with its existence, but that it is pregnant with the new age and is consequently entitled to receive the respectful care that is the due of a pregnant queen. For the thinking men of any people there is, besides this fatherland, another, one that is not recognised, that is often disowned. It does not deck itself with the national colours; for it the national song is not sung. It exists wherever people feel and act in the spirit that has been the spirit of the best of the country's sons. It has the allegiance of all the thinking youth. Those of low degree have more part and lot in it than those in place and power. To it alone the future belongs.

[1]The name of one of Holberg's best known comedies isThe Lying-in Room("Barselstuen").

[2]To know which is the true Germania, you need but use your eyes. Look first at one and then the other. Is not the one in rags, the other clad in silk? the one starving and pale, a mere shadow, driven to house with beggars, herself a beggar; the other stately, plump, and pleasant to the sight, consorting with right honourable gentlemen; with child moreover, as you plainly see?

[3]Yes, mock at me! Put your pilfering, blood-stained fingers into my wounds! Spit on my rags, and proclaim me to be a poor, banished, homeless woman. You know best whose hand shed my blood and tore the crown from my head.... For her you built palaces, for me prisons. Your menials flattered her, me they persecuted. And you, trembling phantom queen, who have the effrontery to call yourself by my name, away! hide yourself! make room for the rightful sovereign! make room for me!

[4]Slowly onward, slowly onward in the race!That Prussian progress may be able to keep pace!

There were real poets, aspiring spirits, who did not follow the general trend of literature at this period. There were men like Eduard Mörike (born in 1804), the last scion of the Swabian School, who broke the bounds of its narrow tradition, and in his lyric verse may rather be regarded as an offshoot of the Goethe stem—a genuinely gifted poet, the idyllic, arch, melancholy singer of the inner life, author of the immortal poem,Denk es, O Seele!And there were men like Otto Ludwig, the Thuringian, and Friedrich Hebbel, the Ditmarschian, the two most robust originals in modern German literature, who were both born in 1813, and both developed their very dissimilar peculiarities after 1848—two gnarled, leafy oaks standing without the forest's bounds. The only mark of the period in which they were youths is the peculiar defiant gloom which lies deep down in both natures. Specially their own is a kind of melancholy keen-sightedness, inclining towards bold realism. They are the heralds of the realism of a later, unpolitical age. But they have not the characteristic common to all the political poets of their own age—sunny enthusiasm, a natural bias towards public life, towards the radical reform, or, if necessary, the complete revolution of society.

This bias, in combination with the philosophic lucidity due to the influence of Hegel and Feuerbach, is perhaps most remarkably observable in an author whose writings are, undeservedly, beginning to be somewhat neglected nowadays, an author who, dying at the early age of thirty-one, did not live to see the Revolution of March. This is Friedrich von Sallet, a young German officer of extraordinary strength of character, whose solid, comprehensive culture was due to his own unaided efforts. In him the profound thought of his age is united with its extreme, passionate Liberalism. After his dismissal from the army in 1831, he devoted himself entirely to literature.

His best known work is hisLaien-Evangelium, a kind of devotional book for free-thinkers, a series of poems in which he gives a symbolical modern interpretation to the various events of the Gospels. He begins each poem with some story or lesson from the Bible, and then proceeds to show the living, eternal kernel in it, and to cast away the historical or mythical husks. The interpretations are at times rather far-fetched, and the employment of but one metre throughout the whole book undeniably tends to monotony. In its general conception the work reminds us of another, older book, Leopold Schefer'sLaien-Brevier; but the contrast is great between Schefer's comfortable satisfaction with the divine government of the universe, and Sallet's impatient inclination to interfere with the natural course of events. We are also slightly reminded of Rückert'sWeisheit der Bramanen; but Sallet's wisdom is a wrathful wisdom, no peaceful collection of golden rules of life like Rückert's, but fiery denunciation of deceit and stupidity. In his introductory poem Sallet compares those who had written Oriental poetry before him to the Kings of the East, who offered gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Light of the world, and then fell back again into their Oriental dream-life. Now, he says, light is once more dawning, thought is once more rousing from their slumber both East and West. In his eager advocacy of his ideals, he is too indifferent to colouring, too Western; his book is spoiled by its too modern, directly didactic tone.

The collection of poems known asGedichteis a much finer one. Here again the political poems are the most important.

He describes a sleeping giant, on whose head and breast foolish dwarfs are disporting themselves. They sit on chairs in his open mouth and pay compliments to each other; spread their tables and dine upon his stomach; declare that it is his duty to sleep—if he does not, they will punish him with pin-pricks. They believe that God has created the great giant solely that they may disport themselves merrily on the top of him, the truth being that if he were to awake and rise there would be an end of them. The poet himself is tickling the giant's nose with his paper in hopes that he will perhaps sneeze; that alone would play the deuce with them. He cries: "Awake and see how they are daring to behave; it will be an easy matter for you to drive them away." And he concludes: "I know perfectly well what the giant's name is, but I have my reasons for not divulging it."

In another poem,Ecce Homo, instead of appealing to the people as a people, he appeals to man as man: "There stands the old, grey cathedral, and there the old, fortified royal castle, looking down on wandering humanity passing beneath them, one generation after another. Song is heard from the one, fealty is sworn in the other, from century to century; we seem, in comparison with them, but insects of a day. And therefore fools preach veneration for these houses of cards. For what are they but card-castles, built for himself by man in his childhood! He built them, and he can knock them down, and build others in their stead. Heaven and earth are but soft clay, which man can mould as he inclines."

At times Sallet writes in a lighter, more playful tone: "What is the name of the old man to whom people everywhere, but these good Germans in particular, are devoted, though he has never done anything worth doing? He stands in the pulpit, he drills the soldiers, he administers justice, he lectures at the universities, and his voice carries weight in the councils of the State. Taking a hundred steps to do what could be done with one jump is called in his language 'the good old ways and customs'; this is what he approves of, but if you produce anything original and great, his wrath is aroused and he scolds and storms till men begin to be afraid of you. He is wanting both in brains and backbone, the old gentleman, and yet he rules almost absolutely, and to oppose him successfully one would need to be as strong as a lion. There is no reason for concealing his name; it is Old Routine."

Among theGedichteare also clever parodies, such as the one in which the poet attacks the censor, by whom he was perpetually worried:

"Kennst Du das Land, wo Knut und Kantschu blühn,Den Steiss von Zarenliebe machend glühn,Wo man das Zeitungsblatt schwarz überstreicht,Dass preussisch' Landtagsgift in's Volk nicht schleicht,Kennst du es wohl? Dahin, dahin,Möcht' ich mit dir, geliebter Censor, fliehn."

He is even more wroth with the cowardly prophet than with the censor: "Ever so slight a blow with your hand," he says, "and the mummy falls to pieces, once it has been brought up from the airless subterranean halls to the light of day; it will stand intact so long as no hand is raised against it." He is furious with those who declare that things will happen of themselves, that historical evolution, &c., will bring them about. Nothing irritates him so much as to hear people say: "A changemustcome; thingscannotgo on as they are doing." "Since the beginning of the world," he says, "nothing has ever happened of itself."

He could not, on account of the censorship, attack monarchy directly, but he gives us, in excellent verse, the parable of the bear. Much in the same manner as wolves are kept in the Capitol in Rome, the bear is kept in Berne as the emblem of the city. On this practice Sallet founds his fable: "The people of the Canton of Berne in days of old kept a bear. They let him live on the fat of the land, but they took good care to keep his claws cut in case he should take it into his head to tear them to pieces. When asked to explain what good the bear did them, they answered with surprise: 'Explain! Why, what should he do! He eats his fill, he moves about majestically, he growls—he is our bear, and that is enough.' If questioned as to why they kept him, they gave answer: 'Because our fathers did. If the race were to die out, all would be over with us.' If any one ventured once again to ask why, they only shouted; 'Hold your tongue, or we'll beat out your brains.'

"One day loud cries were heard throughout the town; the citizens thronged together—the bear lay dead. He had died suddenly; they had no new bear ready to take his place, and everywhere the dolorous cry resounded: 'It is all over with the Canton of Berne! Up and away, brave hunters! Get us a new bear!

In vain the hunters explore the mountains and the ravines; they cannot find a bear. But in spite of this, wonderful to relate, corn and grapes ripen, fruit grows on the trees—it seems as if nature were utterly indifferent to the woe of Berne. The sun, though it saw the bear lie dead, still rises every morning—the world still stands. What can be the meaning of it?"

Witty as the fable is, it will hardly convince any supporter of monarchy of the uselessness of that institution. Sallet only attacks the foolish worship of the supposedly indispensable symbol, without making any attempt to dispute the most frequently employed argument in favour of monarchy, namely, the benefit which results from the withdrawal of the highest of all positions from competition. He puts his whole soul into another poem,Aut—Aut, a poem which became a sort of watchword for the youth of the day. Its most characteristic verses are:

"Die ihr den grossen Kampf der ZeitAusfechten wollt, herbei ihr Ritter!Sprecht, welcher Sach' ihr euch geweiht,Sprecht frei durchs offne Helmgegitter!Entweder—oder!Für Fürstenmacht, für Volkesrecht?Für Geisteslicht, für Pfaffendunkel?Republikaner oder Knecht?Ja oder nein! nur kein Gemunkel!Entweder—oder!"[1]

And the poem concludes with an allusion to the time now fast approaching when the last on one side or the other with cloven skull will bite the dust.

Sallet did not live to take part in the great, decisive encounter for which he so ardently longed. He died in 1843. Not long after his death the storm-clouds begin to thicken and the birds to fly low. We are approaching 1848.

Literature follows in Sallet's path. From all parts of Germany comes the cry: "Let deeds follow upon words!" We hear it not only from the poets of North Germany, the Rhineland, and Switzerland; three poets of far-off Austria, Karl Beck, Alfred Meissner, Moritz Hartmann join in the chorus.

Karl Beck, the son of a Hungarian and a Hungarian Jewess, born at Baja in 1817, first studied medicine in Vienna, but gave that up, devoted himself to literature under the auspices of Gustav Kühne, and produced a succession of poetical works which attracted attention by their faithful and vivid delineation of Hungarian scenery and Hungarian national character. As regards this aspect of his work, Beck may be classed with the Hungarian national poet, Petöfi, a man five years his junior; but as the poet of liberty, he must be regarded as a disciple of Börne—the only one who was of any importance as a poet. Like Börne he is the champion of the Jewish race, of the proletariat, and of political liberty. In his writing we have the Old Testament style and pathos combined with the influence of the newest French and German oppositionist literature. In Austrian poetry Anastasius Grün and Lenau are his immediate predecessors. He had not the culture of a Prutz, but his writing is distinguished by fervid colouring, emotional glow, graphic power, and wrathful enthusiasm. He was, however, one of those who, hailing the outbreak of the Revolution with joy, changed the key-note of their song after the victory of the reaction. After the magnificent revolt of Hungary had been crushed, he addressed a poem to the Emperor of Austria in which he flatters the victor, and entreats him to have mercy on the captive heroes. This poem enraged his old companions in arms. They called to mind that he who was now playing the part of a loyal subject of the Emperor of Austria had, before the collapse, been a republican and a socialist.[2]

Alfred Meissner (born at Teplitz in 1822) and Moritz Hartmann (born at Duschnitz in 1821), Bohemia's two best lyric poets, are both inspired by the most ardent desire for political liberty.

It is unfair to allow the unpleasant ending to Meissner's literary career to blind us to his unquestionably genuine poetical talent. It is both pitiable and monstrous that one of Germany's best lyric poets should, after an honourable youth, have descended so low as to buy the manuscripts of an inferior novel-writer and publish them under his own name, but it does not detract from his worth as author of the fine poems which undoubtedly are his own. As specimens of a revolutionary eloquence which was, and with reason, irresistible to the youth of the Forties, read his glowing lines to the memory of Byron and George Sand.

Moritz Hartmann, Meissner's countryman and contemporary, is a figure cast in different metal; there is no flaw in him; he is a hero as well as an unusually gifted poet. No other German poet has loved liberty so faithfully and passionately from his earliest youth to the day of his death, or risked his life for it so daringly and so often.

Hartmann, who was one of the handsomest men it is possible to imagine, was born of Jewish parents in the little town of Duschnitz. The family was of Spanish origin, the name Hartmann being a translation of Duros. Moritz was sent to school in Prague, where, as a boy, he witnessed the banished King Charles the Tenth's melancholy entrance into the town. At the early age of thirteen he emancipated himself from the religious faith of his family, and while still a mere child was deeply affected by the news of the discomfiture of the Polish revolutionists. As a student he became acquainted with Lenau, to whom he devoted himself with the enthusiasm of a boy and a disciple. From his childhood he spoke both Czech and German, and his first book of poems,Kelch und Schwert("Chalice and Sword"), contains abundant indication of his love for the Czech language, which he ranks with Polish, and extols as superior to Russian. But when it comes to the question of Czech political sympathy with Russia and hatred of everything German, he is entirely the German.

InKelch und Schwert(1845) the Bohemian predominates. The little introductory poem tells us as much:

"Der ich komm' aus dem Hussitenlande,Glaube, dass ich Gottes Blut genossen,Liebe fühl' ich in mein Herz gegossen,Lieb' ist Gottes Blut—mein Herz seinKelch.Der ich komm' aus dem Hussitenlande,Glaube an die fleischgewordnen Worte,Dass Gedanken werden zur KohorteUnd jedwedes Lied ein heiligSchwert?[3]

A native of that country from which the emancipating doctrines of Huss have been banished, he feels himself a Hussite, and interprets the old Hussite war-cry, the right of the laity to receive the chalice in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, in a modern spirit, almost the spirit of Feuerbach. In a poem on the German "songs of liberty" he tells the lyric poets of Germany that song is not the hammer that will shatter a prince's heart; also that liberty is a woman, and not to be won by words alone. He feels for the Poles as if he were himself a Pole. We are made aware that he loves a Polish lady, and that through his love to her he has become in his heart her countryman. The poem,To C——a, is one of the most beautiful that sympathy with Poland has produced. Hartmann can at times be prolix and commonplace, but much more frequently he is concise and dramatic. Some of his scenes impress themselves indelibly on the reader's mind. Read, for instance,Die Drei, the poem of the three exiles who meet in a lonely inn on the plains of Hungary. They are sitting silent over their wine in the stillness of night, when some one suddenly raises his glass and cries: "Our country!" Of the three, one is a gipsy, one a Jew, and one a Pole. They have no country; they look at their glasses and sit silent as before.

Even more impassioned than his pity for Poland is his pity for Bohemia, "the poor stag that is bleeding to death in the depths of a forest." Nothing is left to the Bohemians but their music, that sweet music which awakes compassion for them everywhere, which sings and sobs and melts men's hearts with its mysterious melodies.

We may say of this first book of poems what the poet himself has said of the following: "Not a song in it but has been kissed on the brow by liberty, the most beautiful and noble of all muses." He already gives frank expression to his hatred of Metternich's Austria, that Austria which in 1848, in hisReimchronik des Pfaffen Mauritius, he was to call the Bastille of the nations, within whose walls the silence of death is only broken by the clank of fetters.

The sensation created byKelch und Schwertmeant exile for Hartmann. He had, in the first instance, transgressed the laws of Austria by publishing in a foreign town a work which had not been submitted to Austrian censorship. He knew that if he were to return from Leipzig, where he had been living for some time, in intercourse with Kühne and Laube, he was liable to be arrested on the frontier. But he could not resist the desire to see his mother again, and succeeded in making his way secretly to his native town. It was not possible to conceal his presence there; a traitor betrayed him, and he was obliged, before many days had passed, to make his escape by a back-door while the police were forcing their way into the house. In hisZeitlosenthere is a set of poems entitledHeimkehr und Flucht, in which he describes this youthful escapade, and thus proudly delineates his own character:

"Und als der Verrath mich ausgewittertUnd als die Häscher herangekommen,Da hat die bleiche Mutter gezittert,Der Schwester Aug' in Thänen geschwommen.Ich aber sprach: Die Thränen verwischet,Wir müssen scheiden und von einander,Und da mich rings die Gefahr umzischet,In Flammen werd' ich zum Salamander.Ich bin geboren, ich, für Gefahren,Sie lauern immer auf meinem GangeWie Wegelagrer in dunklen Schaaren;Doch kenn' ich nimmer die Furcht, die bange.Ich bin zu Gefahren bestimmt und geboren,Sie lieben mich, wie Löwen den Meister.Ich hab' sie alle heraufbeschworen,Sie dienen mir, wie dem Zaubrer die Geister."[4]

On account of the prologue which he spoke at the Schiller Festival at Leipzig on the 11th of November 1847, a festival which was in reality a demonstration in favour of the liberty of the press, Hartmann was accused of high treason and of offering affront to the Emperor of Austria. In 1848, as soon as the revolution broke out, he hastened to Prague. He and two friends, of whom Alfred Meissner was one, were sent as a deputation to Vienna. He has given an exquisitely humorous account of their audience with Archduke Franz Karl, who received them because his brother, the Emperor, was ill, and who was perfectly unable to understand what they wanted.[5]When the rabble, during the disturbances in Prague, attempted to storm the Jewish quarter and slaughter its inhabitants, it was Hartmann who rushed to the university, persuaded a body of armed students to accompany him, and with their assistance defended the quarter against the maddened crowd until the grenadiers arrived.[6]

In the Parliament of Frankfort Hartmann voted with the extreme Left; his aim was the unity of Germany as a republic. He spoke seldom, but attracted much attention; he was known as the handsomest man in the Parliament. Kinkel describes him at this time as a handsome, amiable man, with firm convictions; "the Southern imagination of the Austrian gave him fluency of speech, his German training had given him solidity; with Jewish cosmopolitanism he combined a steadfast patriotism which not unfrequently found utterance in proud words." At first he took part enthusiastically in the proceedings of the Parliament. Afterwards, when these became both tedious and barren, and the assembly showed its incapability of laying any great and lasting new foundation, his disappointment found vent in the witty, impressiveReimchronik, a work written in the metre of Hans Sachs. Hartmann, however, was not only a man of words, but a man of deeds. In the engagement in the streets of Frankfort on the 18th of September, he exposed himself a hundred times to the bullets of both parties in his endeavours to arrange a truce. After the revolution had broken out in Vienna, he and Froebel went there as deputies from Frankfort to the provisional government to express the sympathies of the national assembly, and Hartmann entered the army of the revolution as a common soldier. When Vienna was defending itself desperately against the Croats, he one day, with apparently certain death before him, joined a party that were determined to march through a severe fire to gain possession of a mill, and was made officer and leader when the original leader fell. After the fall of Vienna he escaped, thanks to the protection of a lady of high position, who procured him a falsified passport. He returned to his duties in the Parliament of Frankfort, and, when it broke up, went with the protesting party to Stuttgart. There this last remnant of the Parliament was dispersed by force of arms.

All Hartmann's work, including the youthful poetry written before 1848, bears the mark of his resolute character. In the volume,Neuere Gedichte, published in 1847, which as a whole is unpolitical, we find in the divisionOst und Westwild omens of the coming European storm—for example, the irate poem to the King of Prussia, in which Hartmann, deprecating Platen's and Herwegh's respectful attitude, cries shame upon him for delivering up the Poles to the Russian knout, and that other very touching poem,Hüter, ist die Nacht bald hin?("Watchman, is the Night nigh past?"), which is one long sigh of impatient desire for the dawning of the new era.

And now that Bohemia and Hungary, Franconia and North Germany, were lifting up their voices in one great chorus—the voices of thinkers and of poets blending in unison—the youth of the country, as soon as they awakened to intellectual life, were impelled to join that chorus; from the boy on the school-bench to the oldest student, their minds were re-attuned, attuned to the key of revolution. Now they suddenly began not only to imbibe a revolutionary spirit from the works of the revolutionary writers of the day, but to read one into the writings of approved neutral and conservative authors long since dead. At a given moment it became their persuasion that all literature called to arms, even that old classic literature which was living its immortal life in handsome bindings on the bookshelves. A certain frame of mind is the result of our reading of all books.

What had he been, that Schiller whose writings had been put into their hands when they were children? What but a revolutionary, the motto of whose first book was the famous saying that what medicines cannot cure, cold steel cures, and what cold steel cannot cure, fire cures. Did the spirit of his works in any single point harmonise with the royal Prussian or the Austrian imperial spirit? What had Goethe's youthful attitude been but one of Titanic defiance? Did not even the work of his old age, the second part ofFaust, end with the wish that he could see a free people on free soil? He had loathed the Berlin of Frederick II., would not his detestation of the Berlin of Frederick William IV. be greater still? From the writings of Hegel, who had begun life as a revolutionary and ended it as an ultra-conservative, they drew all the conclusions which he himself had left undrawn. Feuerbach had declared that he would have nothing to do with politics, nevertheless they transposed his philosophic decapitation of the historical state into the region of practical politics.

Yes, the clouds were gathering. In place of the swallows, the heraldic eagles of Prussia and Austria were flying low. The monarchs attempted in vain to exorcise the tempest. Frederick William IV. convened a general Landtag (Parliament) in April 1847. With his convictions he could not do otherwise than open it with a speech in which, in spite of all concessions, real and apparent, he made it clear that he was not prepared to take the decisive step which his people demanded of him.

"No power on earth," he cried, "will make me consent to the exchange of the natural relation between a king and his people for a conventional, constitutional relation; never with my will shall a written paper interfere between Almighty God and this country, rule us with its paragraphs, and supercede ancient, sacred loyalty."[7]

The time had come. The assembly demanded annual Parliaments and complete fulfilment of the promises made in 1815 and 1829. Jacoby, Heinrich Simon, Gervinus, and others criticised the king's proposals and rejected them.

Then the storm broke—first in Switzerland, where in November 1847 the Liberal cantons armed and suppressed the JesuiticalSonderbund(league of the Catholic cantons), then with overpowering force in Paris, then in all the German and many of the other European capitals. As thunder in a mountainous country echoes from hill to hill, so the thunder of the revolution echoed from one European country to another in the mad and holy year, 1848.

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