We have shown at length how the cultural, literary, and artistic grandeur of Germany during the Minnesong period was a direct consequence of the high elevation of woman, and due to the worship accorded to her on account of her lofty station. Just so woman was one of the strongest impelling factors in bringing about well-nigh all that was great and good in the second period of Classicism. The world-famed Court of the Muses at Weimar, presided over by Duchess Amalia, "as unique in her way as Frederick the Great was in his," and her circle of noble women, aroused all the poetic power of the genius of Goethe, and later that of Schiller. All the courtliness and elegance of their art, which had been evolved in storm and stress, sprang from their intercourse with noble women, a fact which Goethe again and again frankly confessed, and from which Schiller derived the loftiest inspiration. The ancient Minnesingers' glorification of ennobling love was renewed by Goethe, whose highest ideal of feminine perfection was one illustrious woman, in whom he discovered "all the lofty happiness that man in his earthly limitations calls with divine names," Frau Charlotte von Stein alas! the wife of another man at the same court. She and Shakespeare a strange combination gave Goethe the incentive and stimulus by which were produced his immortal works. This is proved by his statement: "Lida, happiness ever present, William, star of loftiest height, to you I owe all that I am." Goethe's relations with this extraordinary woman, says Scherer, developed in his nature all the tenderness of which he was capable. She was frank and true, not passionate, not enthusiastic, but full of spiritual warmth; a gentle earnestness gave her majesty; a pure, correct feeling, combined with a thirst for knowledge, enabled her to share all the poetic, scientific, and human interests of Goethe. In his numberless letters and fleeting notes to her we find strewn broadcast a thousand germs of the grandest poetry. Her spirit hovers around him everywhere; she possesses him entirely, body and soul; his feelings are expressed constantly in inexhaustible lyrical, frank, and caressing terms, more concise and natural than those in Werther. But the impetuous lover in Werther's Sorrows is here a brother and true friend. He becomes helpful, noble, and good, his own words, eager to cherish his friend, to smooth her pathway through life; his extraordinary and extravagant genius is calm and tempered. Frau von Stein brings forth the pure and religious forces of his nature. His hot blood becomes chastened; he himself calls the higher inner life that grows and strengthens itself within him "Purity," and his poesy, too, becomes Purity realized. The ethereal, ethical world in which his love for Charlotte forces him to live is reflected in his lofty creations of immortal beauty, in his superhuman contemplation of the universe, which is subject to change, it is true, but a change according to firm, logical, and eternal laws. Such is the influence of Frau von Stein upon Goethe, such her influence upon the loftiest expression of German thought and feeling, or, briefly, upon supreme German Classicism. Thus the dramas of the soul arise:Iphigenie and Tasso. In the former, a pure priestess, though of an accursed house, brings liberation, purification, happiness, not only to her family, her race, but also to the barbarians, to the world at large. In the latter, women are again the guardians of culture and morality: in the character of the princess Leonore d'Este, who had learned toleration in the hard school of sorrow, who saves the poet Tasso from false and impure instincts, "as the enchanted man is easily and gladly saved from intoxication and delusion by the presence of the divinity," Goethe has united the traits of his guardian angels, Charlotte von Stein and Louise, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, daughter of the Landgravine Caroline of Hesse, a great woman, of whom Wieland said, she would be queen of Europe if he once were ruler of the Fates.
But such exaltation, such freedom from passion could not last forever. That soul which Goethe knew so well, which "with tenacious organs holds in love and clinging lust the world in its embraces," in the course of time began to assert itself. And his intense need of sensual love was at last satisfied by Christiane Vulpius, a woman strangely inferior to the other women who had possessed his love, yet handsome, good-hearted, cheerful, natural, physically desirable, and devoted to him body and soul. Since the summer of 1788 she was really his wife, though the Church was not called upon to consecrate their union until October 19, 1806. In the high circles in which he moved, a storm of indignation was aroused by this union, which also lost for him the friendship of Frau von Stein, a loss which he deeply regretted. However, Christiane Vulpius gave him a calm and ordinary happiness that compensated him somewhat for his ideal losses; she was sufficiently dear to him to move him to the characteristic simile: "On the bank of the sea I wandered and looked for shells: in one I found a pearl, it remains well guarded in my heart;" and again the beautiful allegory of the sweet flower, brilliant as the stars, which he dug out with all the roots and carried home, where it continues to blossom.
Women's love bore, from the first, quite a different character in the case of Schiller. He also had a good mother who believed in his genius and his future greatness, but born and raised in needy circumstances, and struggling with poverty all her life, she stood at an immense distance from the patrician and associate of princes, Frau Aja, the mother of Goethe.
Three widely differing women especially affected Schiller's life and works. The influence upon his youth of Charlotte von Kalb, an extraordinary, demoniacal woman, was, according to his own confession, not beneficent. In later years, this highly gifted and unhappy woman had the misfortune of affecting the lives of two other great poets: Jean Paul and Holderlin. The former escaped from the grasp of the "Titanide" whom he immortalized, nevertheless, in his "Titan"; the latter, the God-gifted poet of "Hyperion," the singer of the passionate, soul-stirring lyric poems in honor of another love, Diotima, died early in the darkness of insanity. Schiller's love for Caroline and Charlotte von Lengefeld, the former of whom was married to Wilhelm von Wolzogen, presaged a terrible danger, similar to that to which Burger succumbed, but which was averted by Caroline, who saved Schiller by smoothing the path to a lawful and happy marriage with her young sister. The correspondence between the three, Schiller and the Lengefeld sisters, published by Schiller's daughter Emilie, Baroness von Gleichen-Russwurm, sheds much light upon the thought and life of Germany's greatest dramatist and of two noble women. Caroline's biography of Schiller, which appeared in 1830, collected from reminiscences of the family, his own letters, and information furnished by his friends, still breathes her love and admiring affection for her immortal friend. The greatest record, however, of the powerful influence women exerted upon Schiller is to be found in his works, not only in the dramas, but especially in the lyric poems, wherein a wonderful galaxy of noble women appear, and in which there is not one chord untouched that ever vibrated through man's heart.
Romanticism, the reaction against Classicism which had become icy and petrified in the "epigons," or weak successors of the great classical poets, entered upon its victorious course at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The group of women-authors, who stand, as it were, in the second zone from classicism, Amalie von Hellwig, Elisa von der Recke, Louise Brachmann, Agnes Franz, Helmina von Chezy, Johanna Schopenhauer, all authors of considerable talent and grace, are nevertheless far surpassed by the versatility and poetic impressiveness of the literary women of Romanticism. They are the inspirers and coworkers of the founders of the movement, the brothers Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Brentano, Arnim, Kleist, and others. It is true that the "blue flower of Romanticism" was not conducive to virtue in love. Romanticists respected marriage the least of all sacred things, and a marriageà trois, says Theobald Ziegler, was quite a common thing, and the question only remained whether a marriageà quatrewas not even a pleasanter thing. In this, however, Romanticism was but a reaction against the Philistinism and prudery of the opposite pole of civilization at that period, where woman was oppressed, and a different standard of morality, and even of religion, was demanded from her than from man. Frederick Schlegel is not far wrong when he says that in the ordinary wedded life of the time both parties "live on, side by side, in a relation of mutual contempt." As, at the time of Pericles the great and superior hetaira, Aspasia, raised the social status of woman in general, and succeeded in elevating her in culture to the standard of the most intellectual men, so, during the first decades of the nineteenth century woman was raised to a higher plane through a long series of moral aberrations. Emancipation was frequently misunderstood, and liberty degenerated into the license of the will of the flesh. It would be impossible to absolve Romanticism from the reproach of license in thought and life. We owe it to Caroline Schlegel and to Dorothea Schlegel not to unveil their antecedents, and the way in which they became the wives of the two romanticists. Their share in the movement of liberation and in the work of their respective husbands is very considerable, and, mayhap, is meritorious enough to cover their sins. Tieck's sister Sophie wrote perhaps the finest novel of the romanticists, Evremont (published in 1836 in Breslau), and his daughter Dorothea was a classical translator of Shakespeare.
Bettina von Arnim (died 1859), Brentano's sister, is one of the most ingenuous of poets. She possessed a rich imagination, but upon her was the common curse of womanly genius, eccentricity, and inconstancy. These frustrated her intense desire to attain a lasting fame. Her daughter, Gisela von Arnim, wife of Hermann Grimm, is a notable writer of fairy tales, and a dramatist of considerable merit. Another romanticist, Caroline von Gunderode, who evinces much talent in her Poems and Fancies, had no time for the development of her genius. An unhappy love caused her to commit suicide at an early age. Such was also the end of Heinrich von Kleist, the greatest romanticist, who died with Henriette Vogel, the wife of another man, whom he killed at her own desire, in 1811. Theodor Korner, the patriot and soldier-poet ofLyre and Sword, died young, on the battlefield, with a pure and noble love in his heart for Toni Adamberger, a charming actress in Vienna, who was worthy of him in every respect. Körner's letter of 1812 to his father, Schiller's friend, characterizes this noble type of German womanhood: "I may confess without blushing, that without her I should indeed have perished in the whirlpool beside me (i.e., in Vienna). You know me, my warm blood, my strong constitution, my wild imagination; imagine this impetuous soul of mine in this garden of delight and intoxicating joy, and you will understand that only the love for this angel helped me to be able to step forth boldly from the crowd and to say: Here is one who has preserved a pure heart."
In spite of the many eminent women who arose during the first third of the nineteenth century, there is nowhere in Germany anything like the salon which has made French society so brilliant, the literary circles and centres so compact, and the great French authoresses and epistolographers so world-famed.
Schleiermacher, the philosopher-theologian of that transition period, said once that society on a grand scale could at that time be found only in the houses of the Jews. Though still disfranchised in many respects, their admission to all the rights of citizenship being accorded first in 1812 on account of Stein's reforms, some eminent Jewish families possessed sufficient wealth and aspirations for culture to form such social and intellectual circles. Marianne Meyer became the wife of Prince Reuss, and as such assembled an aristocratic literary society in her house at Berlin. But the climax of a German salon was realized by two brilliant women of Jewish origin, Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin. The former, wife of the famous physician and philosopher Marcus Herz, formed the first Goethe community in Berlin and scattered his fame broadcast through Berlin society. Without original talent, she exercised, nevertheless, great influence by her beauty, her social skill, and her ability in presenting the intellectual treasures of others. She was attractive to all. Jean Paul and Schiller came to her salon when in Berlin; famous foreigners, like Mirabeau, Madame de Staël, etc., visited her; the celebrities of Berlin were her constant guests, e.g., the brothers Humboldt, the poet Arndt, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, the Duchess of Courland; foremost among all, Schleiermacher, who had a fantastic devotion and friendship for her; and Borne, who for a time loved her passionately.
The same personages and many others, especially foreign diplomats, artists, and noblemen, enlivened also the house of Rahel Levin, who in 1814 became the wife of the author Varnhagen von Ense. Rahel was not beautiful, or especially scholarly, but she was noble, helpful, and good; she was original, attractive, had the charm of "Attic salt" in her conversation, and understood how to listen as well as how to talk. As she had in her youth studied the poet Novalis and the patriot-philosopher Fichte, so later she studied Hegel's philosophy. She won the friendship of such men as Ranke and Prince Puckler. Her attractiveness did not depend upon her youth, for, according to the word of a lady of highest nobility, Jenny von Gustedt, "she touched with her philosophy life itself, her thought became deed, as she aroused with her spirit the spark of soul-life in others, as she tried to destroy pettiness in all hearts, as she awakened great things in the hearts of men without abandoning the delicacy of womanliness, thus she stood with full practical knowledge in the midst of practical life, helping, counselling, comforting, careless of thanks or ingratitude, the genuine, pure, German woman."
Such was the origin of the modern German salon, and its origin explains its complex character. The German salon became a permanency; and even though it never attained the brilliancy of the French salon, yet it was more intellectual and had greater literary effect. The house of Amalie von Hellwig was a centre for courtiers, scholars, and artists, one of whom, A. B. Marx, wrote an interesting account of social life in Berlin. Other distinguished circles are reported, in which music, a never failing charm in Berlin, was the principal attraction. The opera passed through a period of bloom. Spontini's and Weber's masterpieces were performed by excellent singers, like Anna Milder-Hauptmann, who, in Berlin, created the rôle OfFidelio. The theatre brought into popular prominence the works of the great German dramatists; great actresses arose, like Sophie Muller, who played in a masterful way Emilia Galotti and roles from the works of Calderon and Shakespeare; Amalie Wolff, trained in Goethe's school, a masterly exponent of Iphigenie; Louise Rogee, later Holtei's wife, the incomparable performer of Kleist's Katchen von Heilbronn; Charlotte von Hagen (1809-1891), a beautiful woman and true artist, who celebrated immense triumphs, and was adored by the great and beloved by the women. The greatest of all, however, was Auguste During (1795-1865), who for fifty years ruled the German stage, "in the world of boards that signify life." Henriette Sonntag (1803-1854) was considered the most beautiful and most gifted singer. By the charm of her voice and the perfection of her acting she conquered all hearts. In no other fields has Germany produced so many and so great women as she has in those of the stage, of music, and of song.
To appreciate, however, the ethical character of German woman we must return once more to the years of Germany's greatest political degradation.
At no time did the character of German womanhood shine in a more glorious light than in the sorrowful years of political upheaval and the trials of the years of humiliation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When Germany lay prostrate under the heel of Napoleon, the standard of national honor was upheld by princely women, like the never forgotten Louisa of Prussia, and the other Louisa of Saxe-Weimar, Goethe's friend, who changed Napoleon's plan of crushing out the existence of her duchy, and concerning whom Napoleon himself confessed to his suite: "This is a woman whom our two hundred cannons could not frighten!" The years of trial, distress, and again the rising of the nation, the struggle for liberation, saw genuine heroism, superhuman sacrifices by German women of all estates and of all classes. Nothing but the enthusiasm and the patriotism of the women at that epoch could have inspired the men to their heroism, self-abnegation, and suffering. Niebuhr, the great historian, calls the conduct of the German women admirable. All pleasures were given up, tender and distinguished women exposed their lives to the lazaretto, washed, cooked, mended, laid down their money, their jewels, nay, even their beautiful hair on the altar of the fatherland. Mothers sent their sons, sisters their brothers, brides their bridegrooms, to the holy war. Many, forgetting their sex, seized rifle and sword, and fought against the oppressor. Scherr gives many names: Johanna Stegen, Johanna Luring, Lotte Krüger, Dorothea Sawosch, Karoline Petersen, and the heroine Prohaska, who, in male attire, bravely fought in Lutzow's famous corps of volunteers. Lutzow and the heroic Prohaska were severely wounded in the victorious battle of the Gorde (September 16, 1813). When she was to be bandaged on the battlefield, she for the first time revealed her sex so that her modesty might be spared. She died three days later, and was buried amid a concourse of citizens and maidens in the town of Danneberg, where a monument was erected at the church in her honor.
That deeds of heroism were done by German women outside of the battlefield, appears from many sources and particularly from Goethe's song of praise for the glory of Johanna Sebus, a maiden of seventeen years, who, during the flooding of the Rhine, January 13, 1809, saved first her mother, then returned to save a neighbor and her children, and then was herself swept away by the flood.
In the face of such proofs of heroism, we count but lightly against German womanhood a number of degraded women of noble, even princely birth, who helped to make such courts as that of Jerôme of Westphalia abodes of licentiousness. In German cities, especially in Berlin, where the conquerors were quartered, German ladies conducted themselves "with much dignity, and such reserve as was becoming them toward the enemies of their fathers, husbands, and brothers." Only the dregs of society were at the disposal of the invaders. Voss reports that "the frequentation of the temples of lust was so great that the number of Venus's priestesses was found to be too small." The shamelessness of vile women became intolerable. Unnatural vices arose, and continued despite the severity of the law, which the police strove to enforce rigidly.
During the years of reconstruction, however, which carried with them the social liberation of the peasant-serfs and the Jews, the autonomy of the communes unavoidably produced a mighty advance in the emancipation of women. The frivolity and immorality of Romanticism, which appeared barefaced in Schlegel's Lucinde and in the lives of almost all the romanticists in their intercourse with women, was indignantly rejected in those troubled times, and a return to simple virtue, chastity, and housewifely qualities was preached and inaugurated. German youths began to yearn for pure and pious women, such as had fought in male attire for the fatherland, or healed the wounded patriots in the hospitals, or worked, suffered, and sacrificed fortune, comfort, and personal interests for the holy cause.
In the thirties of the nineteenth century, however, there was again, in the so-called Young-German movement, a retrogression to the lax morality of the first romanticists. The moral code of abstinence was represented as an antiquated conventionality, and the emancipation of the flesh was preached. Naturally the emancipation of woman became a principle of the new doctrine. Again Rahel Levin, the spirited Jewess, and Bettina Brentano (wife of Arnim), the free patrician, led the campaign, and added to arts and letters the fields hitherto alone accessible to women politics and religion. Freedom from the bonds of convention, liberation from social limitations, was the aim of the advanced women. They preached the extreme cultivation of their own individuality. They recognized only the perfection of love and beauty. The most earnest exponent of that exaggerated doctrine was Charlotte Stieglitz, who, to arouse her weakling husband from his indifference, committed suicide. By her voluntary death she wished to elevate him to activity, to heroism; desiring greatness for him, she thought she must inflict upon him a profound pain. Such exaltation and unnaturalness proves what an abyss threatens even the noblest woman when she once leaves the path of the normal. But to the Young Germans Charlotte Stieglitz became the heroine of the movement in which she had part. Theodor Mundt (died 1861) became the principal exponent of that unsound movement in Berlin. He was an author of repute, but is to us more important as the husband of the celebrated authoress Luise Muhlbach, a serene, active, inspiring hostess, whose house became in the forties a centre of literary sociability in Berlin. She was also the writer of many historical novels, all of which are of great interest, though some are of doubtful value.
How confused the moral code of that time was appears, for instance, from Gutzkow's recommendation of a reform. He says: "Be not ashamed of passion, and do not take morality as an institution of the State!... The sole priest who shall bind the hearts, shall be a moment of rapture, not the Church with its ceremonies and well-groomed servants...."
Saint-Simonism carried those licentious maxims to the extreme. Thus, the legitimate aspirations of woman to be freed from the fetters of the Middle Ages were, from the beginning, severely injured by lack of moderation. Instead of a claim for a systematic raising of the standards of education, impossible demands were made: immediate admission of women to the universities (without preparatory training), political equality with men, participation in the administration of the state, and even abolition of the fetters of marriage. Of course, opposition arose everywhere, and has neutralized or delayed even rightful claims to this day. The aspirations for material independence on the basis of free work succeeded to a certain extent: women entered many walks of life hitherto closed to them.
The most thoughtful and impressive champion of a reasonable emancipation of woman was Fanny Lewald. High moral earnestness and a clear intelligence pervade her writings, which are, however, lacking in poetic feeling. But she is a truly patriotic German woman who sees the need of a practical evolution of woman's education and activity in the interest of the entire nation. Her doctrine is the assurance that the spread of culture will wipe out all artificial differences of caste, religion, and sex, and thus solve all the questions of a genuine, legitimate emancipation.
Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn illustrates an opposite tendency in the emancipation of woman. Born in a high sphere and miseducated by a perverse father in the prejudices of her station, she has a perverted view of her sisters of the people, of their struggles and desires and possibilities. Only the "noblesse," which is free from the cares of physical needs, is to her worthy of higher endeavors. The world of highborn womanhood alone attracts her attention. Her study of this world culminates in her opposition to marriage, which is to her an oppressive fetter, handicaps the enjoyment of life, and, therefore, is in almost all her novels the object of ridicule, and its abolition is recommended. Her heroines are, therefore, sensuous egotists who according to her own words seek nothing, wish for nothing, desire nothing but their own satisfaction, without regard to others. Thus, her novels, with their gospel of barefaced selfishness, are frequently offensive, but the atmosphere of "high society" has never been depicted with such masterly and many-colored vivacity as by Ida Hahn-Hahn.
The revolutionary year of 1848, which shattered many cherished idols which she had formerly deemed eternal, made a profound impression upon her. Under the influence of the eloquent Baron von Kettler, later Bishop of Mainz, who explained to her the great social questions of that stirring time, she became converted to Catholicism. The haughty spoiled child of the world became an expiating Magdalena; her work From Babylon to Jerusalem (Mainz, 1851) presents a wonderfully interesting revelation of a forceful and original heart. Instead of liberating woman from the yoke of man, she now endeavors, through the influence of the Catholic Church, to liberate sinful, passionate mankind from earthly shackles. When she died, in 1880, she left an immense amount of literature, more or less valuable, but always intensely interesting to the searcher of woman's soul and achievements.
Ida von Duringsfeld was a poet and novelist of considerable force. Her novels present strong characters and fine descriptions of landscape and architecture; her translations of Czech and Italian popular songs are excellent; her work onProverbs of the Germanic and Romance Peoples, published by her in collaboration with her husband (Leipzig, 1875), is very meritorious. What type of woman she must have been appears from the fact that when she died suddenly on a journey, her husband, unable to live without her, killed himself the next day, to be buried beside her.
The poisonous plant of the exaggerated emancipation movement appears in the works and life of Luise Aston, who impetuously demanded that all the barriers which custom, tradition, and artificial social contracts had erected should be broken down, for woman could fulfil her mission only in free love. When she tried to turn her theories into practice, she was successively exiled from seven German cities, and finally emigrated to Russia in 1855.
Besides this academic propaganda for woman's emancipation, a practical agitation of the question was carried on by a great number of pure-hearted and clear-headed women. They strove only for the possible. They began to teach that woman cannot emancipate herself by opposing natural laws, by becoming aMann-weib(man-wife), as it is adequately expressed in German; but that she must retain all the peculiarly womanly traits, charms, and qualities, adding to them some art or science, trade or profession, by which she can support herself independently without being absolutely forced into marriage, good or bad, with or without her will. The leaders of this movement are consequently no fantastic dreamers or theorists, but energetic, earnest women. The novels of Julie Burow, Louise Otto, and others of their school, greatly influenced and aided the movement. Since their day the agitation has become universal: thousands and thousands of strong and earnest champions have arisen; we stand in the midst of the movement, in the smoke of the battlefield; yet, great things have been achieved; able women, like Luise Büchner, Lina Morgenstern, Hedwig Dohm, have not striven in vain. Breaches have been made in the walls of the sanctuaries heretofore reserved for men. Incited especially by American and Russian women, the women of Germany knock, and knock successfully, at the doors of the universities and academies. Even though they do not yet occupy academic chairs in German universities, as they do in America, they will do so in time. A Swedish university was the first to appoint a woman, Sonya Kovalevski, the great Russian mathematician, to a full professorship of this manliest of all sciences.
Thus far the outcome of the entire movement, however successful it has been, is yet undecided, especially owing to the modest reserve and conservatism of millions of women. This conservatism seems to be deeply rooted in the hearts of the vast majority of German women. They are, after all, happy in the old, primeval, original royalty of wifehood and motherhood, in the sweet leaning upon their complement, the beloved husband. Do they fear, perchance, lest their warlike sisters might drag them to the front, to unnatural battle, deprive them of their sweet, foreordained inheritance of man's love, protection, and fostering care? Has not their quiet, calm, and holy circle of activity, upon which all that is eternal in creation rests, which has been sanctified by custom, tradition, morality, and experience for thousands of years, blessed thousands, nay, millions of women, generation after generation? Had Saint Mary any other mission on earth or in heaven but love, infinite love, for the Christ, her Son? Has art ever been able to produce anything more beautiful, more divine, more touching, more powerful, than the Mother of God and the Christ-child, the symbol of every mother and every child? Do not the heavens in glorious constellations perpetuate the memory of great women? Is not the galaxy of women saints rich enough, and can it not be enriched still further for generation after generation to the end of the world? Is not well-nigh all the poetry that flows directly from the heart founded upon love, and indeed upon that love which is spontaneous, original, eternal? Forsooth, if there must be a change, it is a sorrowful change, due to the unnatural, complicated conditions of modern social life, but by no means due to the unanimous will of German women. The demon "physical hunger," the fear that there are not enough good men to go around, are the true motives of the emancipation movement with the masses of German women. The motives of the Ida Hahn-Hahns and the like are potent only with a few of the vast number of the women of Germany.
Thus it is but natural that the dangers of premature and ill-conceived emancipation soon aroused great and good German women who loved the best in the glorious past of Germany, the many models of German virtue, sacred simplicity, and blissful womanhood and motherhood, from Thusnelda to Queen Louisa of Prussia, and who were not eager for untried innovations. The very sight of the habits and nature of the new prophetesses, all of whom were abnormal in some respect, gave food for reflection. The strongest opposition to the movement was formed among women. It was women who warned against the modern gospel, who tried to divert attention from the loud and boisterous street, rostrum, and salon to the innermost recesses of the heart where woman's happiness secretly dwells, and to the bosom of family life where the children enliven the little world which is, after all, the great world in nucleo.
Foremost among the intellectual guardians of the noble traditions of old German life was Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff. Simplicity and an ardent religious feeling permeate her poetry, which she produced in abundance in spite of many obstacles put in the way of her intellectual pursuits by a prejudiced, bigoted, aristocratic family. Her poetry is rooted in the desire to induce the new "stormers" to cling to the old and tried German traditions of morality, faith, and patriarchal institutions. "Cling to thy friend, cling to thy word, cling to thy faith, cling to thyself," is her creed. "Who would exchange his blood for strange ichor (even though it were the blood of the gods)! Do not reject the Cherub of thy cradle; his wing will rustle to thee from every leaf! Do not suck dry the blood of thy heart, to animate therewith a bastard of thy soul."
Next important in her noble mission is Betty Paoli (Elizabeth Glück). Her thesis was: Church and society, fame and honor are the proper domain of man; woman can find her supreme happiness only in true, faithful, pure love for one man, and only once in life. Betty Paoli writes: "God has not sent me out, and has not given me the strength to aspire gloriously with a consecrated hand for the palm of victory. Let him be immortalized in marble and in brass who won them: I am nothing but a heart that has loved much and suffered much; and all my poetry is but an audible revelation of all the quiet pains of which a woman's soul is capable." According to her it is woman's destiny to subject her life to the magic charm of love, to sacrifice all her desires and inclinations to love: "My proud head defied boldly the lightning of the storm; but when thou saidst: 'I love thee!', I sank quiet and weeping at thy feet How weak am I!" In reality her happiness in love was short; the beloved one betrayed and deserted her; the deep sorrows of her heart find eloquent expression in touching and passionate melodies.
Luise Hensel's poems are simple and melodious, and are filled with a childlike humility. God and heaven are the motives of her song. There is a long series of women poets and novelists, who are defenders of the old faith, and whose works, though frequently insignificant, are yet noble monuments for German women of our own time who have offered a bold front to emancipation gone mad.
The impossibility of mentioning even the most eminent names of the German authors and poets is manifest when we consider the vast array of German women writers of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, catalogued by Schindel in a biographical work, published in Leipzig in 1823-1825; and in the two volumes of a Lexicon of German Women of the Pen by Sophie Pataky, which was issued in Berlin in 1898. A. Ungherini's Biography of Famous Women (Turin and Paris, 1892), also furnishes thousands of names of famous German women.
The inexhaustibleness of our theme leads us thus to abandon, even in the most general manner, the attempt at defining the impulses given by women to the poetry of the pure Suabian school of poets, to Uhland's veneration for woman, to Justinus Kerner's idealization of his wife Rickele, a model type of German hostess in whose vine-covered cottage many a weary poet's soul rested, as the deeply gifted, but profoundly unhappy Nicolaus Lenau. We forego to discuss the return of Mysticism which appears in Friederike Hauffe, the Seer of Prevorst; in the lives and loves of Heine, who was tossed on the storm waves of life by woman's love and hate, of Platen, of Immermann, whose passionate love for Elisa von Lutzow was finally converted to an almost ideal and platonic friendship; in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who, though an atheist himself, was led by his argumentation well-nigh to Saint Augustine's doctrine of woman being the vessel of sin.
We have to descend to the lower grades of society, and observe woman in poverty and degradation, to learn of the need of the endeavors to elevate her, to free her, and to put her on her own feet intellectually, socially, and morally. When the Revolution of 1848 knocked at the gates of absolutism in Germany, German women began to assert their inalienable rights. The struggles of men in higher domains were shared by many women, among them Frau Struve and Frau Herwegh, the wife of the passionate poet of the revolution. Johanna Kinkel, wife of the excellent poet and university professor Gottfried Kinkel, who was incarcerated as a revolutionist and clad in the striped clothing of a criminal, until rescued by his faithful student Karl Schurz, now a great American statesman, endured with her husband the martyrdom of want and exile. Johanna Scherr, wife of the historian of culture Johannes Scherr, is also one of the noblest types of able and modest women and heroines, who are strong in endurance and even in encouragement of their husbands.
The changes in industrialism which began in the middle of the nineteenth century began to produce the mass misery of machinery with which the state was unable to cope. Crises were inevitable. The workingmen, grouped in industrial circles, deprived of the right of association for common protection, were often abused by employers, who had them entirely at their mercy. Wages were entirely insufficient; Hungerlohne became a technical term; women and children were forced to work in the factories to supply the deficit in the amount needed for the support of the family. Acute misery led to outbreaks like that of the Silesian weavers, whose misery inspired the modern social drama of Hauptmann; typhoid fever and diseases of starvation raged among the sufferers.
For the first time women entered the arena of the political movement. Societies of women were formed in many German cities. Names of gifted women sprang up everywhere. The social and political struggles of the time are reflected in the memoirs of an idealistic woman, Malwida von Meysenbug. Though reared in narrow aristocratic prejudices, she struggled through them to a democratic association with her suffering sisters of a lower social status. She bore the painful breach with her family which, owing to her liberalism, became inevitable. She demanded economic independence for woman, not only because labor ennobles, but because only the economically independent woman is free to live according to her convictions, "liberated from the threefold tyranny of dogmatism, convention, and the ignoble bonds of forced marriage." Woman is to cooperate in the great work of the regeneration of the nation. "How could," says she, "a nation regenerate itself and become free, if one-half of it is excluded from the careful, all-around preparation which true liberty demands for a nation as well as for individuals." An institution was already founded which was to accomplish this ideal. A university for females, at Hamburg, was to give to young women the necessary preparation for a higher mission than had been theirs. Energetic Emilie Wustenfeld was the soul of the foundation, Professor Karl Froebel its head. Its aim was to embrace "all the sciences which practical, social, and intellectual life in its highest spheres may require on the part of cultured women." It is a matter of regret that, owing to the lack of material support, the enterprise failed. Fraulein Meysenbug was, after the dissolution of the university, exiled from Berlin, whither she had turned, and went to England. Yet all traces of her influence are not lost in Germany. Small, slow, and painful attempts, an advance measured by steps, interposition of legitimate and illegitimate obstacles, appear everywhere in the movement.
Another eminent woman, Luise Otto, of Meissen, Saxony, a strong and able champion in prose and poetry for woman's rights, developed a definite programme for the movement: she demanded a profounder, a more national education, a closer connection of the German maiden with the affairs of the fatherland, through instruction in history, her education in schools of a high order, if possible leading up to the university standard, a training giving "solid moral strength, a religious mind, German depth of feeling." And these qualities must be instilled in the maidens of the people, of the proletariat as well as in those of the middle and upper classes. Luise Otto demanded that education to the very highest point be given to those able to receive it; that woman be raised to economic independence, that she may escape the necessity of a degrading marriage "for material caretaking only," or downright shame, to which so many daughters of the people have fallen. In a similar way did Luise Btichner attempt the solution of the all-important question of woman's independence. The active Central Union for the Welfare of the Working Classes, under Lette's presidency, was founded to extend the field of female activity, but it excluded explicitly the aims of political emancipation and equality of woman with man. The Universal German Woman's Association, founded in Leipzig, proposed to itself a broader scope, namely, the raising of the moral status of the sex. Admission to the universities and participation in communal or municipal service were first mooted upon the initiative of Frau Henriette Goldschmidt, Marie Calm, Auguste Schmidt. Hundreds of other collective societies followed, and entered upon the discussion of the entire range of sex problems with marked results.
To protect the poor, especially the women and children, whose supporters went to the wars, the so-called "popular kitchens" (Volkskucheri) were founded. This great service was rendered to Berlin by Frau Lina Morgenstern, aided by noble men like Virchow, Lette, and Holtzendorff.
Intellectual needs came to be supplied by excellent schools of a high grade: the Victoria School for higher studies, presided over by Frau Ulrike Henschke; the Victoria Lyceum, founded by a Scotch lady, Miss Georgina Archer, in 1868, to give courses parallel to those of the university. These institutions derive their names from the late empress, then Crown Princess of Prussia, who was their protector.
It was a matter of course that the woman's movement, which was rooted in liberalism, and which combined the aspects of psychological, physiological, ethical, and sociological problems, aroused many and varied opponents, especially in the conservative camp. The greatest names appear in opposition, even that of one important woman, Mathilde Reichardt-Stromberg. The discussions of the medical faculties of Germany for and against (mostly against) the admission of women to the study of medicine, which would be "an insult and sin against nature," would "destroy delicacy, modesty, shame" in woman, are to-day, now that women have attained their desire, of high value to the student of cultural history. On the basis of "the right to work, the right to free personality," the privilege was demanded, especially by Hedwig Dohm, who says: "Woman shall study, because she wants to study, because the unlimited choice of a vocation is the main factor of individual liberty, of individual happiness."
The contest for the intellectual and economic advancement of women went on, almost side by side, with the contest for the moral regeneration of society. The fight against the cancer of prostitution, the darkest and sorest spot in the movement, was most arduous and discouraging. The demand of an equal morality for man with that incumbent upon woman was tacitly resisted. The puritanical regulations, issued by the German Culture Alliance, against alleged immorality in art, literature, and fashion conflicted frequently with the legitimate rights of artistic presentation. Frau Gertrude Guillaume, née Countess Schack, was the soul of the movement for social purity, and she boldly attacked the true cause of prostitution; she accused the authorities not only of indifference to the social evil, but of direct connivance with it. She came into conflict with the police, who considered her activity pernicious and accused her of socialistic tendencies, into which she was forced in 1885 by the chicaneries of the police. The fact of the matter is that her mission is diametrically opposed to that of socialism, which, according to Bebel's Woman and Socialism, considers "prostitution a necessary institution for civic society, as police, army, and church." It is the misery which wrecks so many families of the lower classes that drives thousands of hungry girls into the arms of prostitution. The statistics of the Berlin police authorities of a few years ago prove that of 2,224 registered prostitutes, 1,015 (47.9 per cent) came from petty artisan families, 467 (22 per cent) from factories, 305 (14.4 per cent) from poor clerks. In the Union for the Interests of Working Girls, founded in 1885, the alpha and omega of the discussion of the girls was again and again "the correlation between hunger-wages and prostitution, and the necessity of raising the economic condition of the working girls as aconditio sine qua nonfor the elevation of morality." Efforts to abolish prostitution, then as now, were the objects of bitter opposition on the part of the civil authorities. Frau Guillaume-Schack, unable to continue her work unhampered by constant police interference, emigrated to England.
The reactionary spirit which in 1851 prohibited by ministerial decree Frobel's kindergartens of Prussia as socialistic and atheistic exists even to-day in the German parliament, especially through the conservative and clerical parties. These stigmatize many of the most legitimate aspirations of women as "unwomanly." The word of Saint Paul, "woman shall be silent in church matters," is applied to her most appropriate activities. Yet, superior women, foremost among them Frau Henriette Schrader, Frau Marie Loeper-Housselle, and the eminent sociological writer Helene Lange, against great odds, forced the government to make provision for the higher education of girls. Not that the Ministry of Public Instruction was favorable to the demand, but that the extensive discussion by the daily press, the interest taken by the Crown Princess Victoria in the movement, and the formation of the Universal Women Teachers' Association, which has more than sixteen thousand members, compelled the powers that be to consider the movement as elemental and irrepressible. The first public "gymnasium" (Latin school) for girls was founded in Carlsruhe, Baden, in 1893; later another was established in Leipzig, and the higher courses for girls that had been established in Berlin by Helene Lange, were also consolidated into a gymnasium.
On the other hand, the Bavarian ministry refused its consent for such a school in Munich, and Dr. Bosse, former Minister of Public Instruction in Prussia, rejected a similar petition from the Breslau magistrate. Upon an interpellation in the Prussian Diet (Landtag) he declared himself "against any step in the direction of the modern woman's movement; the aspirations of women to appear as rivals of men are wrong; this was the opinion of the entire Prussian Ministry of State." Elsewhere the movement was branded as a mere "matter of fashion." But the aspirations of women are too genuine and deep-rooted to be disposed of by ridicule and abuse. New fields of labor open before women, the domains of letters and sciences lie before them, even though the honor of state recognition is withheld from the treasures of knowledge and thought which they have acquired. Reformers of both sexes, who have the influence and the will to bring the issue to a successful conclusion, are not wanting. All the divisions and sections of the movement for morality, temperance, legal protection, right of coalition, girls' homes, march separately, but fight with a united front in the campaign. The Society for Ethical Culture, led by the late Professor von Gizycki and his wife Lily, of Berlin, realized within the society the idea of absolute equality of the sexes. Excellent women, as Jeanette Schwerin, Minna Cauer, and many others worked for woman's economic improvement as a basis for their enfranchisement; others, like Frau Hanna Bieber-Bohm, for the protection of young homeless girls by the foundation of homes, and by assistance in cases of need. Several periodicals edited by women for women also carry on a lively and successful propaganda for enlightenment and progress. That the various religious denominations participate in the movement more or less successfully, according to their various dogmatic or liberal standards, goes without saying. That there is frequently a painful exaggeration on the part of the women who stand in the midst of the struggle is but natural. Revolution is preached instead of evolution. Passionate cries too often are heard against men in general, as if the war were raging between brutal and oppressive men and oppressed and abused women. The ridiculous Utopia of emancipation from men, the foundation of a "manless" Amazon empire is being preached by some radical women crazed by their mad prejudices. Womanliness is lost all too often; manly garb imitated, the customs of male students, which are not always aesthetic, and which are downright disgusting in woman, are aped. Some women try to force their way by elbow power, by loud screaming for their alleged rights; some "literary" women without tact, training, or moderation, create prejudices against their judicious sisters who try to win their way by the peculiarly womanly, refined and aesthetic qualities in literature. No wonder that thousands of the very best women instinctively shrink back from the movement, and thus withdraw their support from what is legitimate and needful and desirable to woman.
In similar circles, with equal difficulties and drawbacks, moved the progress of women in Holland and the Scandinavian countries. Multatuli (pseudonym for E. Douwes Dekker, 1820-1887), through his genius and originality, attained in Holland well-nigh the importance of a Goethe for his nation. He considered the prevailing opinion regarding the inferiority of woman as the result of her long oppression, and preached her self-determination to the point of free love. He is the father of the movement for the liberation of woman in conservative Holland, and Mina Kruseman and her friend Betsy Perk, the first champions of the woman's movement, are his direct disciples. Frau Storm van der Chijs (1814-1895) attempted to introduce educational reforms and higher scientific culture into Holland. Fraulein W. Drucker sought and obtained the support of the Dutch women in the agitation against the abuse of woman, and child labor in the factories, as hod-carriers; for the protection of illegitimate children, and for a higher training of women for skilled labor. Frau Klerck, née Countess Hogendofp, profoundly touched by the social misery of fallen women, founded with the aid of a number of noble women, the Woman's League for the Elevation of Morality. About five hundred societies are scattered through the kingdom and exert their beneficent influence in all the domains of female activity. The Netherlandish universities opened their doors wide to female students after the graduation of the first woman, Alletta Jacobs, as "M. D." in 1879. Many Dutch women are active and successful in arts and letters; Minka Bosch Reitz is favorably known as a sculptor, Theresa Schwarze as a painter, Fraulein Oosterzee as the composer of an oratorio, and Catharina van Rennes as a composer of children's songs.
An exposition of the works of Dutch women at The Hague in 1898, planned by Frau Pekelharing-Doijer, presided over by Frau Goekoop, gave an admirable survey of the entire domain of the activity of Dutch women. The exposition aroused the feeling of solidarity among women, which resulted in the formation of associations composed wholly of women; the nation, the government, and the queen took a lively interest in the achievements of the Dutch women, whose enfranchisement, though just begun, is moving rapidly to completeness.
The same progress is visible everywhere in the other Teutonic countries, Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Excellent abstracts of that progress are given by Kirstine Frederiksen, Maria Cederschioeld, and Gina Krog, respectively, and in Helene Lange and Gertrude Baumer's admirableHandbook of the Woman's Movement(two volumes, Berlin, 1901). We must, however, regretfully forego the pleasure of enumerating even the foremost of the thousands of women with their varied talents, many of the highest order, who belong to the knighthood of the spirit, and who labor bravely in the realm of advancement of the human race in general, and of the Teutonic family in particular.
This chapter would, however, be incomplete and unsatisfactory were we to conclude it without mentioning a few German women who, preeminent and royal, have wielded an immense influence, and in whom, as it were, are crystallized German virtues, German qualities, and German intellect.
The first German empress, Augusta, the daughter of Carl Frederick of Saxe-Weimar and of a Russian princess, was reared in the atmosphere of the Court of the Muses at Weimar; so that the image of Goethe hovered around her throughout her life, and influenced her artistic, literary, and humanistic tastes. At the age of eighteen, in 1829, she was married to Prince William of Prussia, little dreaming at that time of the great future in store for Germany and for herself. By her intellectual qualities, her humanity, and her charity, she soon acquired a highly privileged position at the Prussian court. It was she who inculcated into the soul of her only son, later Emperor Frederick III., those qualities which secured for him the historic title "Frederick the Noble." After her consort ascended the throne in 1861, and especially after the great wars, she became the soul of the great charitable movements of Germany. She took an active part in bringing about the establishment of the Geneva Convention, a most beneficial event in its effects upon the humanization of war and its consequences. She was an angel of mercy to the wounded soldiers of both friend and foe, and to their widows and orphans, and was active in the Society of the Red Cross, founded in 1864, and the Patriotic League of Women, founded after the Austrian war in 1866. The Augusta Hospital, the Langenbeck House in Berlin, named after the great surgeon of that name, and the Augusta Foundation in Charlottenburg, were created by her. She was deeply religious and broadly tolerant; so that the so-called Kulturkampf,i. e., the struggle between the Prussian state and the Roman Catholic Church, was profoundly distasteful to her, a fact which precipitated a silent, but bitter, feud between the empress and her party, on the one hand, and Prince Bismarck, on the other. While her political influence cannot at all times be considered to have been beneficent, her cultivation of the arts certainly enriched the national life of Berlin, and indeed of Germany. She was a cultured musician, and composed several marches, an overture and the music to a balletThe Masquerade. She died in January, 1890, in Berlin, and was buried beside her great consort in the Mausoleum of Charlottenburg. Beautiful monuments have been erected in her honor at Baden-Baden, at Berlin, and at Coblenz, her favorite resort. The memory of the noble empress is engraved upon the hearts of her people.
Victoria, princess royal of England, born November 21, 1840, daughter of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort Albert, became eighteen years later the wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, finally, for ninety-nine days, Emperor Frederick III. (1888). She came to Prussia when the dawn of its future greatness was scarcely visible. The king, Frederick William IV., was hopelessly ill, his mind affected; her father-in-law, Prince William of Prussia and in 1861 king, was regent for him. The times were gloomy: constitutional conflict, political struggles threatening the monarchy itself, then a seven years' war as it were with Denmark, Austria, and France until 1871, agitated the country and tried the soul of its rulers. This was the time when Victoria appeared greatest and dearest to the German people. From the royal palace to the poorest cottage, there was no household then that had not sent its best and bravest to defend hearth and home and fatherland. The heir to the throne, following the traditions of his race, had gone forth ready to yield up his life, if need were, for the safety and honor of his country. The princess, waiting wearily in her home, shared the anguish of every German woman during that autumn and winter. With her clear insight into political complications, she could realize more vividly than those who were less well informed the frightful contingencies that might arise. She felt deeply her obligations toward the support of her countrywomen. The crown princess as such, in her own name, addressed an appeal to Germans all over the world, in behalf of the families that sacrificed their supporting fathers, brothers, sons:
"Once more has Germany called her sons to take arms for her most sacred possessions, her honor, and her independence. A foe, whom we have not molested, begrudges us the fruits of our victories, the development of our national industries by our peaceful labor. Insulted and injured in all that is most dear to them, our German people for they it is who are our army have grasped their well-tried arms, and have gone forth to protect hearth, and home, and family. For months past, thousands of women and children have been deprived of their bread-winners. We cannot cure the sickness of their hearts, but at least we can try to preserve them from bodily want. During the last war, which was brought to so speedy, and so fortunate a conclusion, Germans in every quarter of the globe responded nobly when called upon to prove their love of the Fatherland by helping to relieve the suffering. Let us join hands once more, and prove that we are able and willing to succor the families of those brave men who are ready to sacrifice life and limb for us! Let us give freely, promptly, that the men who are fighting for our sacred rights may go into battle with the comforting assurance that at least the destinies of those who are dearest to them are confided to faithful hands.
"VICTORIA, Crown Princess."
A truly German woman and princess indeed! She was worthy to be the consort of Frederick the Noble, and the mother of William II., who has imbibed her genius, her versatility of mind, her fine artistic feeling. Politically she was broad-minded and strictly constitutional; in her home, a true German housewife and mother. She loved the arts, sciences, and letters, and was herself no mean painter. Charity was her chosen domain; the education of the lowly her passion. The Pestalozzi-Froebel House is her monument; the Museum of Industrial Arts in the Koniggratzer Strasse is perhaps more representative of her artistic efforts than any other institution in Berlin. It is said that the princess chose, if she did not design, each of its sculptured groups, its metal castings, its fine mosaics and ornaments. Hans Holbein the Younger and Peter Visher, the famous brass founder, stand at its portal; life-sized figures round the building represent the mechanical arts: the loom, the printing press, the potter's wheel, the student's desk; the frieze above represents the great epochs of art and sculpture. The Victoria Lyceum, which we have mentioned above, testifies to her great interest in the higher culture of women. Space forbids us to follow the years of peace, of achievements, of joys and griefs in the princely household, the loss of the beloved young Prince Waldemar; the political controversies which followed the princess's disapproval of many measures, in the inner policy of Prussia, taken by Bismarck; and at last the long and hopeless illness of her consort, her touching sympathy and devoted care of him until his death on June 15, 1888, and certain medical altercations that disturbed her years of sorrow and mourning.
It would hardly be proper to speak at length of Augusta Victoria, the present Empress of Germany, who stands now in the prime of her life and activity for her nation and her own family. She is a princess of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, who became the consort of the ruler of the German Empire instead of becoming a ruling princess of a petty grand duchy, the rightful inheritance of her house, which became part and parcel of the empire by two great wars. Married in February, 1881, to the present emperor, she is the mother of six sons and one daughter, all of whom are worthy scions of the Hohenzollern race, which has furnished the world with more great rulers than perhaps any other dynasty that ever ruled over the fate of a great nation. The empress is the crystallized type of a noble German wife and mother on the throne. She is profoundly religious and especially active in the duties of a devout Christian; she has built many churches; she is the protectress of the Elizabeth Children's Hospital, of several great Evangelical missions, and of the Patriotic Women's League. It is difficult to emphasize sufficiently the great influence upon the morality of the entire nation of an empress so womanly and pure in her simple greatness, just as we cannot estimate the influence for evil by bad examples on the throne on every woman in the land during the eras of the Catherines of Russia, the Pompadours and the Dubarrys in France, the Lichtenaus in Prussia.
In contrast to the happiness of the present Empress of Germany stands the fate of the late martyred Empress of Austria (1837-1898). A daughter of Duke Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria, she became the consort of the present Emperor of Austria under the happiest auspices. Exceedingly beautiful and intelligent, a Greek scholar of a high order, a lover of nature and of all that is beautiful, fond of horseback riding and of every sport tending to produce that symmetry of intellectual and physical beauty called by the Greekskalokagathia; the happy mother of daughters and of one son, the ill-fated crown prince, Rudolf, she adorned the Habsburg throne with beauty and brilliancy instead of the ancient formal etiquette and Spanish grandest. But sorrow came to her in its most terrible form: the tragic and mysterious death, while on a hunting expedition, of her son Rudolf and Countess Vetsera, whom he loved, though he was married to Stephanie of Belgium, broke her heart. Her entire life changed, she hid herself in her Greek palace on the Island of Corfu, or travelled restlessly through Europe. On a visit to Geneva, while walking from her hotel to the ship, she was assassinated by a miscreant Luccheni, an Italian anarchist (September 10, 1898). One of the vilest deeds in the history of criminology ended the brilliant life of the greatest woman martyr on a throne since the Austrian archduchess Marie Antoinette who shed her royal blood on the guillotine, as Queen of France in 1793, for the crimes of preceding royal generations.
Among the German women authors of the last quarter of the nineteenth century who are really gifted with great poetic talent we meet with a poetess, a German princess on a foreign throne: Princess Elizabeth of Wied, Queen of Rumania, famous under the name of Carmen Sylva. She belongs to a family which for many generations has produced remarkable men. Her great-grandmother, Louise von Wied, was a poetess of considerable talent; other members of her family had excelled as naturalists, poets, and painters; three of her granduncles fell during the Napoleonic wars. The genius of her family seems, however, to have been concentrated in Carmen Sylva. She was exceedingly beautiful in her youth, and is charming to-day at the age of sixty. As a child of seven in Bonn, she frequently sat on the lap of the aged patriot-poet Ernst Moritz Arndt, who inspired the little princess with his patriotic tales. Her youthful sorrows, the loss of a beloved brother and of her father, and the protracted illness of her mother had a deep and melancholy influence upon her. Extended journeys to the south, to Sweden, and to Russia widened her poetic horizon. In 1869, Prince Carol of Rumania wooed the "Forest Rose," as she was called poetically; in 1870, all the wondrous feelings of a happy mother and a great poet were opened to her by the birth of a daughter; four years later she lost her child, and then she sings the words of despair: "For what purpose the great royal castle, we are but two!" She translated into German verses the Rumanian songs that had pleased her child, and later she translated many of the great Rumanian poems. There is in them the wild melancholy and simplicity of true popular ballads; there is the ring of a poetic sympathy with nature. They come straight from the heart of the people, and the translation is full of the same poetic feeling. HerThoughts of a Queen(Paris, 1888) are worthy of a Pascal in their depth and earnestness and wide range, covering life, humanity, love, happiness, sorrow, pain, spirit, and art. She is of a wonderful intellectual and spiritual fertility. She wrotePilgrim Sorrow, which has reached its fifth edition, and has been translated into English by Helen Zimmern.Sappho, Hammerstein, Storms, Some One Knocks(translated into French, prefaced by Pierre Loti),From Two Worlds, andAstraare universally recognized.
It is indeed a strange phenomenon that the two most gifted German poets are a queen and a peasant woman: Johanna Ambrosius. It is true that the refinement, the melody and sweetness of Carmen Sylva contrast with the painful plaints of poor Johanna, who suffered physical want many times during her life. Yet both have been in their way chastened in the school of pain and sorrow, only it was in one case the sorrow of the hut, in the other the sorrow of the royal palace.
Of the other women who have excelled in letters in recent times, the great majority exerted their influence through novelistic literature: Wilhelmine von Hillern, spirited, though somewhat too sensational; Louise von Francois, who skilfully characterizes higher sodety; Adelheid von Auer (pseudonym for Charlotte von Cosel), who depicts the social sins of the higher classes; Emmy von Dincklage, the painter of the life and nature of the low-lands on the Ems; E. Vely, Helene von Hiilsen, Fanny Arndt, Eudemia von Ballestrem, and scores of others whom in the evolutionary process of the present time we must not attempt to describe prematurely.
Indeed, life wells forth with ever increasing strength from the inexhaustible fountains of women's hearts, leaving the problem in the mind of the observer where all this activity is to end, and reminding us of theEarth-spirit's chantinFaustwith reference to the "Creative Power" which eternally works and weaves: