Part 37

On the throne of Prussia at this juncture sits a king with a curiously complex character and many talents, a typical transition figure, whose personality, especially in its relation to the literature and intellectual life of the day, is of great interest. In the south of Germany it is Metternich, in the north it is Frederick William IV., who outwardly regulates the course of events. We see literary and political celebrities being attracted by him, coming into collision with him, and rebounding from him. The invalids of literature, men like Tieck and Schelling, pass their last days under his protection; Herwegh and Freiligrath are first attracted and then repelled by him; Jacoby attacks him, Dingelstedt ridicules him.

And now we follow the development of political poetry, from its founder Anastasius Grün to Herwegh and Dingelstedt, observing what a deep impression such a thinker as Ludwig Feuerbach makes on the intellectual life of his contemporaries. Men like Freiligrath and Prutz, Sallet and Hartmann, are the petrels that foretell the storm; in 1848 we hear the song of certain gifted poets high above the roar of the political hurricane, and we also notice that these unexampled occurrences transform men of minor or undeveloped talent into organs of the great movement of the hour.

During our study of this fragment of literary history we have passed in review a whole gallery of remarkable figures, devoting careful attention to the most important or most typical.

We saw how Napoleon's great personality, in its legendary form, exercised almost as powerful an influence on men's minds as Byron's. Of the great intellectual forces of the eighteenth century, Goethe, Jean Paul, Heinse, and Hegel are those by which our period is most perceptibly influenced. Some of the Romanticists influence as teachers and masters (Wilhelm Schlegel, Brentano, Chamisso), others as antagonists (Tieck). Börne and Heine, geniuses of most dissimilar types, by virtue of that polemical quality which was an essential characteristic of both, influence the whole period.

What a wealth of remarkable, original characters! Glance at our gallery of women--Rahel and Bettina, the friends of Goethe; Börne's friends, Henrietta Herz and Jeannette Wohl; Heine's La Mouche, Immermann's Elisa, and Princess Pückler and Charlotte Stieglitz--gifted women and devoted wives! Or let your eyes wander over our collection of male portraits--authors and men of the world, like Varnhagen and Pückler; stiff, stately figures, like Platen and Immermann; others that are all life and fire, like Börne and Heine; manly eccentrics, like Jacoby; kingly figures, like Feuerbach; grimacing fanatics, like Menzel; independent poets great and small, like Rückert, Hebbel, Ludwig, and Scherenberg; agitators, like Wienbarg and Gutzkow; men of pliant talent, like Laube and Mundt; weak desponders, like Stieglitz; bold singers of liberty, like Hoffmann and Freiligrath; immature characters, like Herwegh; problematic characters, like Dingelstedt and Meissner; brave men, like Sallet, Hartmann, and Prutz. Even when their productions are not of the highest quality, we study the men themselves with interest.

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And yet what is presented in this volume can only be fully understood by those who read it in its connection with the earlier volumes of the work of which it forms a part, who regard it in the light of the last act of a great historic drama. The plan of the work is indicated in the introduction to the first volume, and is strictly adhered to throughout all six.

The author's intention, as explained in the first lines of his work, was, by means of the study of certain main groups and main movements in European literature, to outline a psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century. The year 1848, which, as a historical turning-point, marks a conclusion for the time being, was indicated as the point to which he intended to pursue his subject. The six groups which, according to the original plan, have been portrayed, are, the French Emigrant Literature, German Romanticism, the French Reaction, English Naturalism, French Romanticism, and Young Germany. Each one of the six parts of the work has in the course of years either been re-written or revised.

The author's first proceeding was to separate and classify the chief literary movements of the first half of the century, his next to find their general direction or law of progression, a starting point, and a central point.

The direction he discovered to be a great rhythmical ebb and flow--the gradual dying out and disappearing of the ideas and feelings of the eighteenth century until authority, the hereditary principle, and ancient custom once more reigned supreme, then the reappearance of the ideas of liberty in ever higher mounting waves. The starting point was now self-evident, namely, the group of French literary works denominated the Emigrant Literature, the first epoch-making one of which bears the date 1800. The central point was equally unmistakable. From the literary point of view it was Byron's death, from the political that Greek war of liberation in which he fell. This double event is epoch-making in the intellectual life and the literature of the Continent. The concluding point was also clearly indicated, namely, the European revolution of 1848. Byron's death forming the central point of the work, the school of English literature to which he belongs, became as it were the hinge on which it turned. The main outlines now stood out clearly: the incipient reaction in the case of the emigrants, held in check by the revolutionary ideas still in vogue; the growth of the reaction in the Germany of the Romanticists; its culmination and triumph during the first year of the Restoration in France; the turn of the tide discernible in what is denominated English Naturalism; the change which takes place in all the great writers of France shortly before the Revolution of July, a change which results in the formation of the French Romantic school; and, lastly, the development in German literature which issues in the events of March 1848.

It is self-evident that the standpoint here adopted is a personal one. It is the personal point of view, the personal treatment, which presents literary personages and works thus grouped and ordered, thus contrasted, thus thrown into relief or cast into shadow. Regarded impersonally, the literature of a half-century is nothing but a chaos of hundreds of thousands of books in many languages.

The personal standpoint is not, however, an arbitrary one. It has been the author's aim to do justice, as far as in him lay, to every single person and phenomenon he has described. No attempt has been made to fit any of them into larger or smaller places than they actually occupied. It is no whim or preconceived intention of the author that has given the work its shape. The power which has grouped, contrasted, thrown into relief or suppressed, lengthened or shortened, placed in full light, in half light, or in shadow, is none other than that never entirely conscious power to which we usually give the name of art.

THE END