Part 10
On the morning of the 27th of May, the enormous procession made its way from Neustadt to the ruins of the castle of Hambach. Every one wore black, red, and gold colours, and black, red, and gold flags were carried in front of the procession, the ranks of which were swelled by a great number of women, wearing black, red, and gold belts. Siebenpfeiffer and the Bavarian Liberal journalist, Wirth, were the principal speakers. They proclaimed the sovereignty of the people to be the foundation on which every state must rest, and declared that Germany would ere long be a republic. All the speeches made were violent, and all described the degradation of Germany as the work of her sovereigns, in combination with the aristocrats. Wirth proposed the toast (for which he had afterwards to do penance by a long imprisonment) of "The united free states of Germany," and "federated republican Europe," and shouted as he waved the sword of honour that had been presented to him: "Accursed, three times accursed be the rulers of Germany!" These words were re-echoed by part of the assembly; there were shouts of: "Down with kings and princes! To arms! To arms!"
The participators in the Hambach festival had, however, no immediate, practical aim in view. Supposing the moment to have been favourable--a tolerably doubtful supposition--they allowed it to pass without taking advantage of it.
Heine writes humorously and bitterly: "I dare hardly tell the story, it seems so incredible, yet I have it from a reliable source, from a man who is an honest and truthful republican, and was himself a member of the committee at Hambach which deliberated on the impending revolution. This man told me in confidence that, when it came to the question of competence, to a dispute as to whether the patriots then assembled at Hambach were really competent to begin a revolution in the name of the whole of Germany, those who advised immediate action were outvoted, and the conclusion arrived at was that they were incompetent." Heine calls this the best story he has ever heard, good enough to make him forget all the troubles of this vale of tears, and even to cheer him after death in the dusky tedium of the realm of shades. Then he speaks words of comfort to kings and princes, tells them how it is quite unnecessary that they should imprison any more worthy citizens; they may sleep in peace; they are in no danger; the German revolution is still far off; the question of competence is not yet decided.[8]
For many years after he made Heine's literary and personal acquaintance, Börne's feeling towards that author was a friendly one; he spoke of him with affection, gave him his full due as a poet, and more especially appreciated him as a great power in the service of universal emancipation. But their natures were too unlike to permit of his judgment being quite unprejudiced. From 1831 onwards we come upon spiteful references to Heine in the Letters. Although Börne was devoid of petty vanity, the frequent comparisons made between Heine and himself rankled in his mind, especially as, in the matter of ability and gifts, they were often to his disadvantage. And Heine's _Französische Zustände_ ("The Situation in France") offended and wounded him; its perusal roused in him a feeling of ill-humour to which he gave vent (in the last volume of the _Letters from Paris_) in cutting satire, which struck Heine as it were from above, and, in the eyes of many readers, stamped him with the brand of political untrustworthiness.
It was in reality the deep-seated antagonism between the natures of the two fellow-combatants that found vent on this occasion. Börne did not understand the real nature of the difference between himself and Heine. To him it seemed to be the difference between manly earnestness and boyish frivolity, or, taken in its highest aspect, between devotion to truth and devotion to form, to art. With accurate perception he detected and exposed some of the small puerilities and snobberies of which Heine, when dazzled by the tinsel of life, could at a time be guilty, and also some of his unjust mockeries of ideal endeavour clothed in clumsy or naïvely popular form. Börne detested the Rothschilds, by whom Heine was impressed and fascinated. Börne, who felt out of his element in drawing-rooms, was quite at home among democratic artisans, and in gatherings of German emigrants, no matter how wild the schemes they planned, or how unpractical the undertakings for which they collected money; Heine, on the contrary, was annoyed by the constant solicitations to support this or that democratic undertaking, was quite unsuited to be a member of the democratic fraternity, preferred, in spite of his revolutionary leanings, to keep himself to himself, and had no intention whatever of being on terms of hail fellow well met with any chance band of emigrant fellow-countrymen.
In a letter dated the 25th of February 1833, Börne jeers at Heine for various things, amongst others for writing of the inhuman policy pursued by Austria for the last three hundred years as "sublime perseverance"; for calling King Louis of Bavaria, whom he afterwards so unmercifully satirised, "one of the noblest and most intellectual monarchs that ever sat upon a throne"; and for declaring it to be "courageous and admirable" of the Messrs. Rothschild to remain in Paris during the cholera, while he, at the same time, casts ridicule on the unpaid exertions of the German patriots. On these points, and others, Börne is right, but nevertheless he shows no delicate discernment or profound comprehension of Heine's real character.
In the case of Heine, as in the case of Goethe, he stood face to face with a genius he was unable to judge impartially, though he by no means wronged his restless contemporary to the same extent or in the same manner as he did his great predecessor.
[1] Stock expressions: "O, es ist zum Rasendwerden! (it is maddening!) O, ich habe eine Wuth! (I am in a transport of rage!)." On the subject of the encyclopædia: "Eine starke halbe Stunde musste ich das Schreiben unterbrechen, und meine Wuth war grenzenlos." (I had to stop writing for a good half hour, and was infuriated beyond all bounds.)
[2] "Was, wo, worauf, womit soll ich schreiben? Der Boden zittert, es zittert der Tisch, das Pult, Hand und Herz zittern, und die Geschichte, vom Sturme bewegt, zittert selbst.... Prophet wollte ich sein zwölf Bände durch."--What, where, upon what, with what am I to write? The ground, the table, the desk, hand and heart tremble, shaken by the hurricane, history itself trembles.... A prophet I would be, throughout twelve volumes.
[3] _Börne_, iii. 75, 86, 172; 43, 99, 267.
[4] _Börne_, iii. 159, 160.
[5] _Börne_, 98, 39, 270.
[6] "Und mit Zehn Ellen Hanf wäre der Welt Friede, Glück, und Ruhe zu geben."
[7] "Das einzige Volk im Norden, das seit dreihundert Jahren nie aufgehört sich für die Freiheit zu erheben, ist das polnische, und es blieb katholisch."
The one nation of the North that for three hundred years has not ceased to make a stand for liberty, is Poland, and Poland remained Catholic.
[8] Heine: _Sämmtliche Werke_, xii. 153.
XI
HEINE
For Heinrich Heine also, as already observed, the present moment in the development of the new German Empire is an unfavourable one. He is reproached with so much, that it is difficult to summarise. First there is his infatuation for France, and his supposed or real frivolity; then his un-German extraction and wit, his sentimentality, his foppery, his wantonness; and lastly, the defiant manner in which he parades his irreligion. New Germany is indifferent in religious matters, but tacitly so, and in the matter of morals it is thoroughly disciplined. In the Germany of to-day the highest virtues, truthfulness, independence, high spirit, and sensitiveness, are of much less account than dutifulness, correctness, social discipline, military smartness--_Schneidigkeit_, as it is called. In Heine's time the opposite was the case. No value was put on discipline. Piety counted for more than religion, humanity for more than patriotism. The best men of those days did not regard patriotism as an unqualified virtue; nor did they consider that justice ceased to be a virtue when shown to another nation.
To an abstract Radical bent of mind there was added in Heine's case the hatred of Prussia, whose future he did not foresee, whose strength he did not realize--that strength of which Carlyle gives us the best idea in his delineation of the father of Frederick the Great, a strength which lay in the ability, by means of sober severity, to conquer chaos, crush all foolish opposition, and rule. Heine's was no undefined dislike, it was the Rhinelander's mortal enmity to Prussia. Read his lines to the Prussian eagle:
"Du hässlicher Vogel! wirst du einst, Mir in die Hände fallen, So rupfe ich dir die Federn aus Und haue dir ab die Krallen.
Du sollst mir dann in luft'ger Höh' Auf einer Stange sitzen Und ich rufe zum lustigen Schiessen herbei Die _rheinischen_ Bogenschützen."[1]
At the Congress of Vienna, after repeatedly refusing, Prussia at last consented to take over the Rhine Provinces. Instead of the rounding off of her frontier in the east for which she had hoped, she thus acquired territory at a distance, and came to rule over a race of Germans totally unlike the Old-Prussians. This Rhine Province was the region where, in days gone by, the line of separation between Kelts and Germans lay. Most of it had been included in the Roman military province. At a later period the land came under priestly rule, which accounts for the fact that it was in no way influenced in the eighteenth century by the spirit of Frederick the Great. Old, decaying clericalism came here into direct contact with the French Revolution, and the propagators of the revolutionary ideas were joyfully welcomed.
The Old-Prussian's feeling towards the Rhinelanders was the distrust of antipathy, a feeling the Rhinelanders returned with interest. At the Rhine the Prussians were, and continued to be strangers, unwelcome strangers. When he spoke of a son serving in the army, the Rhinelander said: "He is with the Prussians." The government official transferred from Berlin to Cologne or Düsseldorf put on airs, and disparaged everything, and the Rhinelander long regarded a transfer to one of the old Prussian provinces as a sort of exile to Siberia. Complaints were heard everywhere of Prussia's inability to gain the affections of the peoples she had conquered.[2]
[Illustration: HEINRICH HEINE]
Heinrich Heine was born near the close of the century at Düsseldorf, then capital of the duchy of Jülich-Cleve-Berg. For six years the town was garrisoned by French revolutionary troops. They took their departure in 1801, and Max Joseph of Pfalz-Zweibrücken became Grand Duke; but in 1806 he was made King of Bavaria, and Joachim Murat was installed as Grand Duke in his stead. Only two years later Murat had to make way for the eldest son of the King of Holland, or, in reality, as the boy was not of age, for Napoleon, as his guardian. The country was now governed exactly according to the French pattern; serfdom, feudal law, and statute-labour were abolished, and complete religious liberty was proclaimed. This last innovation led to Napoleon's being revered by the Jewish population of the Rhine Provinces as their saviour from the oppression of a thousand years.
There can be no doubt that the contact with the audacious, victorious Frenchmen of that day powerfully influenced Heine's mental development. His respect for traditional authority was early undermined. His natural wit was developed in the direction of what the French call _esprit_. The germs of his enthusiastic admiration for Napoleon were generated. That enthusiasm seems to us to-day to be an isolated phenomenon in the German literature of the century; in reality it was very far from being so.
Let us go back to Wieland, and we shall find that he held Napoleon in the same high estimation, even before such an opinion had been justified by the events of history. In 1798 he declares that France stands in need of a dictator, and that no one is fit for the post except General Bonaparte, then in Egypt. In 1800 he prophesies that Bonaparte will and must make himself king, and defends him against the attacks of the English newspapers. Napoleon, having been told of these prophecies, had a lengthy interview with Wieland at Erfurt in 1808.
None of the great Germans at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century knew what national enmity meant. It was without a spark of any such feeling that Goethe, in the capacity of spectator, made the campaign of 1793 in France. Schiller valued his certificate of French citizenship, and believed that it might come to be of use to his children. Knebel, Goethe's friend, wished that he dared sing Napoleon's victories. Goethe himself looked on with complacency while Napoleon shattered the kingdom of Frederick the Great into fragments; it is evident that he must have regarded that kingdom of Prussia as a passing phenomenon in the history of Germany. He had witnessed Napoleon's rise and victorious career, and had seen him suppress that anarchy which was so hateful to himself, the aristocrat and evolutionist. At last he made his personal acquaintance, saw him surrounded by his marshals, in an atmosphere of brightness, amiability, geniality, general irresistibility. The personal impression made upon him by Napoleon was such as to increase his previous admiration for him. Hence it was that even after the Russian campaign, even during the rehabilitation of Germany, Goethe continued to say: "It is all of no use; the man is too strong for them." It was not till all was over that he made a sort of compulsory amends by writing a play for the fête on the occasion of the peace.
Goethe's valuation of Napoleon has been the subject of much discussion; less well known is the impression which the great Frenchman made on Hegel, who, as Heine's teacher and chosen philosopher, influenced him quite as much as Goethe. Hegel was born a subject of the small, despotically-ruled State of Würtemberg. He longed for a fatherland, but had never known what it was to have one, and in the beginning of the century he was so embittered by the situation in Germany, and roused to such anger and scorn by the political stupidity of his countrymen, that he, like Goethe, welcomed Napoleon with the unqualified enthusiasm of a cosmopolitan. He had spent his youth dreaming of a possible reconciliation of the real with the ideal, but had never come into contact with a real living power until Napoleon crossed his path and aroused his enthusiasm. It was said of Goethe that he took advantage of the distraction caused by the roar of the cannon at Jena to marry Christiane Vulpius without rousing remark; of Hegel it was said that he finished his work _Die Phænomenologie des Geistes_ ("Philosophy of Mind") in Jena itself, while the battle was raging. It is a fact that it was exactly at this time that he despatched the last pages of the work to his publisher; and there is a very striking contrast between his calm indifference to the ruin of Prussia and his keen anxiety lest any of the precious packets of manuscript should be lost in transit at that unsettled time. A letter to his publisher, which accompanied one of the packets, bears the date of the battle.
In the work, to which the finishing touches were put under such circumstances, Hegel expounded his theory of the development of the human mind with a curious mixture of historical and psychological argument. He maintained that humanity had now reached its goal, that such individual mortals as had attained to the highest degree of understanding, now possessed the insight of gods, that their lives, lives of far-reaching influence, were now simply the harmonious unfolding of an existence such as the Greeks imagined that of their gods to be, absolutely contented, absolutely reconciled. While Hegel was writing his concluding words, which are to the effect that history is but a play of the spirit that is conscious of itself as spirit, Napoleon drew rein at the gates of Jena.
And Hegel saw him, and seeing him, rejoiced. "I have seen the emperor, that soul of the world," he writes from Jena. "It truly gives one a strange feeling to see one such single individual who, concentrated on a single point, sitting on his horse here in Jena, influences and rules the world. As far as the Prussians are concerned, nothing better could have been prognosticated--but only such a man could have made such way between Thursday and Monday; it is impossible to refuse him admiration." And it is not only the emperor Hegel admires, but the whole French people. Three months later he writes that in the history of the day he sees convincing proof that culture overcomes barbarism, that intellect overcomes unintellectuality. And he even adds: "I have long wished the French army success, now all do so; nor can it fail to be successful, considering the enormous difference between its leaders and soldiers and those of the enemy."[3]
If Heine had ever imagined that his enthusiasm for Napoleon required any apology, he might have found one in the fact that he was but following in the footsteps of the man whom he invariably spoke of with reverence as "the great Hegel, the greatest philosopher Germany has produced since Leibnitz," the man of whom he makes the very questionable assertion that he quite unquestionably "towers high above Kant," and whom he criticises with such lenient and gentle disparagement as the following utterance conveys: "Hegel allowed himself to be crowned in Berlin, and alas, to be anointed too."
Not only Heine's great models and teachers, but contemporaries like Varnhagen von Ense, who had actually shed his blood in the war against Napoleon, shared his enthusiasm, and were equally free from patriotic enmity to France. Of the Dane Baggesen, who, half German by nature, was fain to be more German than the Germans, Varnhagen writes: "His hatred of Napoleon and the French is peculiarly offensive; it is an aversion which amounts to loathing, and yet it is groundless, for all that is good in us Germans, all that we are proudest of in ourselves, he holds in horror and would fain suppress with the help of Kant, Jacobi, Voss, and Klopstock." Kant is evidently included in this list on account of the very un-German "categorical imperative," the others on account of the extreme narrowness of their patriotism.
The cult of Napoleon is thus, we see, to be traced in the words and works of the men who had the greatest influence on Heine's development and on that of young Germany in general.
It inspired Heine's muse several years before it became epidemic in France, and Heine rises to an equal height of enthusiasm with Beyle and Hugo. It is not too much to say that the poetic expression of this enthusiasm in his youthful poem _The Two Grenadiers_ (which he probably wrote at the age of eighteen, though he himself claims to have written it at sixteen) surpasses anything of the same nature that exists in French. Not even Béranger's _Souvenirs du Peuple_ is so simply grand, although it, better than any other poem, has given tangible and touching expression to the French popular Napoleonic legend. In Heine's _Grenadiers_ the rhythm of each line answers exactly to its mood and matter--the mournful iambics: _Der Andre sprach: das Lied ist aus_; the fiery anapæsts: _Dann reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab_. The grenadier's impossible request to his comrade to carry his corpse to France passes almost unnoticed. The wildness of the principal strophe: _Was schert mich Weib, was schert mich Kind_, the grenadier's protest against the supposition that he is tied by the wife and child he has left at home, contrasts forcibly with the sentimentality of the Romantic style. It is only ostensibly that this poem glorifies fidelity to Napoleon personally; what it really glorifies is loving fidelity to the great leader, unbounded enthusiasm for the great personality.
The gift of describing by means of introducing characters into lyric poetry was common to both Béranger and Heine. But Béranger was a song-writer, Heine a genius. _The Two Grenadiers_ begins, as Heine almost always begins, quietly, smoothly. Nothing could be more unlike this than Victor Hugo's lyric attack: _Lui! toujours lui!_ Heine does not produce his effect by direct representation, but by delineation of the less important, of the small things in which the great are reflected, and which provide a standard to gauge them by; then at last, following on and issuing from the simple dialogue, comes the burst of visionary enthusiasm.
That the object of this worship was hardly worthy of it, does not make the feeling itself less admirable. It is a feeling of exactly the same kind that Heine describes in the _Reisebilder_, when he tells how, as a child, he saw Napoleon riding through the ducal garden in Düsseldorf. The chapter begins: "But what were my feelings when I saw himself, saw him with my own highly-favoured eyes, himself, Hosannah! the Emperor!" Note the _Hosannah!_ In the moment of ecstasy, the recollections of childhood bring the Old Testament cry of salutation and rejoicing to his lips. And what did the child think on the occasion? He remembered that it was forbidden, under a penalty of five thalers, to ride through the avenue. And, lo and behold! there was the emperor, with all his officers, riding straight through--the shuddering trees bent forward as he passed....
As a political poet, Heine is considered to be revolutionary, and so he was. But his political animosity is exclusively aroused by medieval conditions, medieval beliefs. He is anti-clerical in good earnest, but not democratic in good earnest. His longest political poem, _Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_, ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), gives abundant evidence of this. It rises to real passion only where the poet's invisible companion, the lictor with the terrible axe, breaks up the skeletons of the Three Kings in the Cathedral of Cologne, "the miserable skeletons of superstition." But it is in this great poem, Heine's most important work, that we have the clearest expression of the political feelings and principles which animated him, the element, new to German poetry, of warlike challenge and hand-to-hand struggle. Nothing of the kind is to be found in Goethe. In the end, indeed, Goethe was persuaded of "the absolute pitiableness of the time," but he feared that the overthrow of existing authorities would only make things worse. Not even in Schiller can we find any direct reference to the politics of the day. His political feeling finds a vent in dramas whose theme is liberty. But in Heine, from 1830 onwards, we have always this direct expression of the faith that was in him. His soul was in politics. And in politics he was honest, even in cases where his honesty was misunderstood.