Part 32

When Roman fields are red with cyclamen, And in the palace gardens you may find, Under great leaves and sheltering briony-bind, Clusters of cream-white violets, oh then The ruined city of immortal men Must smile, a little to her fate resigned, And through her corridors the slow warm wind Gush harmonies beyond a mortal ken. Such soft favonian airs upon a flute, Such shadowy censers burning live perfume, Shall lead the mystic city to her tomb; Nor flowerless springs, nor autumns without fruit, Nor summer mornings when the winds are mute, Trouble her soul till Rome be no more Rome.

DESIDERIUM

Sit there for ever, dear, and lean In marble as in fleeting flesh, Above the tall gray reeds that screen The river when the breeze is fresh; For ever let the morning light Stream down that forehead broad and white, And round that cheek for my delight.

Already that flushed moment grows So dark, so distant: through the ranks Of scented reed the river flows, Still murmuring to its willowy banks; But we can never hope to share Again that rapture fond and rare, Unless you turn immortal there.

There is no other way to hold These webs of mingled joy and pain; Like gossamer their threads enfold The journeying heart without a strain,-- Then break, and pass in cloud or dew, And while the ecstatic soul goes through, Are withered in the parching blue.

Hold, Time, a little while thy glass. And Youth, fold up those peacock wings! More rapture fills the years that pass Than any hope the future brings; Some for to-morrow rashly pray, And some desire to hold to-day, But I am sick for yesterday.

Since yesterday the hills were blue That shall be gray for evermore, And the fair sunset was shot through With color never seen before! Tyrannic Love smiled yesterday, And lost the terrors of his sway, But is a god again to-day.

Ah, who will give us back the past? Ah woe, that youth should love to be Like this swift Thames that speeds so fast, And is so fain to find the sea,-- That leaves this maze of shadow and sleep, These creeks down which blown blossoms creep, For breakers of the homeless deep.

Then sit for ever, dear, in stone, As when you turned with half a smile, And I will haunt this islet lone, And with a dream my tears beguile; And in my reverie forget That stars and suns were made to set; That love grows cold, or eyes are wet.

LYING IN THE GRASS

Between two golden tufts of summer grass, I see the world through hot air as through glass, And by my face sweet lights and colors pass.

Before me dark against the fading sky, I watch three mowers mowing, as I lie: With brawny arms they sweep in harmony.

Brown English faces by the sun burnt red, Rich glowing color on bare throat and head,-- My heart would leap to watch them, were I dead!

And in my strong young living as I lie, I seem to move with them in harmony,-- A fourth is mowing, and the fourth am I.

The music of the scythes that glide and leap, The young men whistling as their great arms sweep, And all the perfume and sweet sense of sleep,

The weary butterflies that droop their wings, The dreamy nightingale that hardly sings, And all the lassitude of happy things,

Is mingling with the warm and pulsing blood, That gushes through my veins a languid flood, And feeds my spirit as the sap a bud.

Behind the mowers, on the amber air, A dark-green beech wood rises, still and fair, A white path winding up it like a stair.

And see that girl, with pitcher on her head, And clean white apron on her gown of red,-- Her evensong of love is but half said:

She waits the youngest mower. Now he goes; Her cheeks are redder than a wild blush-rose; They climb up where the deepest shadows close.

But though they pass, and vanish, I am there. I watch his rough hands meet beneath her hair; Their broken speech sounds sweet to me like prayer.

Ah! now the rosy children come to play, And romp and struggle with the new-mown hay; Their clear, high voices sound from far away.

They know so little why the world is sad; They dig themselves warm graves, and yet are glad; Their muffled screams and laughter make me mad!

I long to go and play among them there; Unseen, like wind, to take them by the hair, And gently make their rosy cheeks more fair.

The happy children! full of frank surprise, And sudden whims and innocent ecstasies; What Godhead sparkles from their liquid eyes!

No wonder round those urns of mingled clays That Tuscan potters fashioned in old days, And colored like the torrid earth ablaze,

We find the little gods and Loves portrayed, Through ancient forests wandering undismayed, And fluting hymns of pleasure unafraid.

They knew, as I do now, what keen delight A strong man feels to watch the tender flight Of little children playing in his sight.

I do not hunger for a well-stored mind; I only wish to live my life, and find My heart in unison with all mankind.

My life is like the single dewy star That trembles on the horizon's primrose bar,-- A microcosm where all things living are.

And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death Should come behind and take away my breath, I should not rise as one who sorroweth:

For I should pass, but all the world would be Full of desire and young delight and glee,-- And why should men be sad through loss of me?

The light is flying: in the silver blue The young moon shines from her bright window through: The mowers are all gone, and I go too.

RUDOLF VON GOTTSCHALL

(1823-)

[Illustration: R. VON GOTTSCHALL]

Rudolf Von Gottschall was born in Breslau, September 30th, 1823. He was the son of a Prussian artillery officer, and as a lad gave early evidence of extraordinary talent. His father was transferred to the Rhine, and young Gottschall was sent successively to the gymnasiums of Mainz and Coblenz. Even in his school days, and before he entered the university, he had through his cleverness attained a certain degree of eminence. His career at the University of Koenigsberg, whither he went to pursue the study of jurisprudence, was interrupted by the results attendant upon a youthful ebullition of the spirit of freedom. His sympathy with the revolutionary element was too boldly expressed, and when in 1842 he published 'Lieder der Gegenwart' (Songs of the Present), he found it necessary to leave the university in order to avert impending consequences. In the following year he published 'Censurfluechtlinge' (Fugitives from the Censor), a poem of a kind not in the least likely to conciliate the authorities. He remained for a time with Count Reichenbach in Silesia, and then went to Berlin, where he was allowed to complete his studies. He was however refused the privilege of becoming a university docent, although he had regularly taken his degree of _Dr. Juris_.

He now devoted himself wholly to poetry and general literature. For a while he held the position of stage manager in the theatre of Koenigsberg, and during this period produced the dramas 'Der Blinde von Alcala' (The Blind Man of Alcala: 1846), and 'Lord Byron in Italien' (Lord Byron in Italy: 1848). After leaving Koenigsberg he frequently changed his residence, living in Hamburg and Breslau, and later in Posen, where in 1852 he was editor of a newspaper. In 1853 he went to Italy, and after his return he settled in Leipzig. Here he definitely established himself, and undertook the editing of Blaetter fuer Litterarische Unterhaltung (Leaves for Literary Amusement), and also of the monthly periodical Unsere Zeit (Our Time). He wrote profusely, and exerted an appreciable influence upon contemporary literature. He was ennobled by the Emperor in 1877.

As a poet and man of letters, Gottschall possesses unusual gifts, and is a writer of most extraordinary activity. His fecundity is astonishing, and the amount of his published work fills many volumes. His versatility is no less remarkable than his productiveness. Dramatist and critic, novelist and poet,--in all his various fields he is never mediocre. Chief among his dramatic works are the tragedies 'Katharina Howard'; 'King Carl XII.'; 'Bernhard of Weimar'; 'Amy Robsart'; 'Arabella Stuart'; and the excellent comedy 'Pitt and Fox.' Of narrative poems the best known are 'Die Goettin, ein Hohes Lied vom Weibe' (The Goddess, a Song of Praise of Woman), 1852; 'Carlo Zeno,' 1854; and 'Sebastopol,' 1856.

He has published numerous volumes of verses which take a worthy rank in the poetry of the time. His first 'Gedichte' (Poems) appeared in 1849; 'Neue Gedichte' (New Poems) in 1858; 'Kriegslieder'(War Songs) in 1870; and 'Janus' and 'Kriegs und Friedens Gedichte' (Poems of War and Peace) in 1873. In his novels he is no less successful, and of these may be mentioned--'Im Banne des Schwarzen Adlers' (In the Ban of the Black Eagle: 1876); 'Welke Blaetter' (Withered Leaves: 1878); and 'Das Goldene Kalb' (The Golden Calf: 1880).

It is however chiefly as critic that his power has been most widely exerted, and prominent among the noteworthy productions of later years stand his admirable 'Portraets und Studien' (Portraits and Studies: 1870-71); and 'Die Deutsche Nationallitteratur in der Ersten Haelfte des 19. Jahrhunderts' (The German National Literature in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: 1855), continued to the present time in 1892, when the whole appeared as 'The German National Literature of the Nineteenth Century.'

HEINRICH HEINE

From 'Portraits and Studies'

About no recent poet has so much been said and sung as about Heinrich Heine. The youngest writer, who for the first time tries his pen, does not neglect to sketch with uncertain outlines the portrait of this poet; and the oldest sour-tempered professor of literature, who turns his back upon the efforts of the present with the most distinguished disapproval, lets fall on the picture a few rays of light, in order to prove the degeneration of modern literature in the Mephistophelean features of this its chief. Heine's songs are everywhere at home. They are to be found upon the music rack of the piano, in the school-books, in the slender libraries of minor officers and young clerks. However difficult it may be to compile an _editio castigata_ of his poems, every age, every generation has selected from among them that which has delighted it. Citations from Heine, winged words in verse and prose, buzz through the air of the century like a swarm of insects: splendid butterflies with gayly glistening wings, beautiful day moths and ghostly night moths, tormenting gnats, and bees armed with evil stings. Heine's works are canonical books for the intellectual, who season their judgments with citations from this poet, model their conversation on his style, interpret him, expand the germ cell of his wit to a whole fabric of clever developments. Even if he is not a companion on the way through life, like great German poets, and smaller Brahmins who for every day of our house-and-life calendar give us an aphorism on the road, there are nevertheless, in the lives of most modern men, moods with which Heine's verse harmonize with wondrous sympathy; moments in which the intimacy with this poet is greater than the friendship, even if this be of longer duration, with our classic poets.

It is apparently idle to attempt to say anything new of so much discussed a singer of modern times, since testimony favorable and unfavorable has been drained to exhaustion by friend and foe. Who does not know Heine,--or rather, who does not believe that he knows him? for, as is immediately to be added, acquaintance with this poet extends really only to a few of his songs, and to the complete picture which is delivered over ready-made from one history of literature into another. Nothing, however, is more perilous and more fatal than literary tradition! Not merely decrees and laws pass along by inheritance, like a constitutional infirmity, but literary judgments too. They form at last a subject of instruction like any other; a dead piece of furniture in the spiritual housekeeping, which, like everything that has been learned, is set as completed to one side. We know enough of this sort of fixed pictures, which at last pass along onward as the fixed ideas of a whole epoch, until a later unprejudiced investigation dissolves this rigid-grown wisdom, sets it to flowing, and forms out of a new mixture of its elements a new and more truthful portrait.

It is not to be affirmed however that Heine's picture, as it stands fixed and finished in the literature and the opinion of the present, is mistaken and withdrawn. It is dead, like every picture; there is lacking the living, changing play of features. We have of Heine only one picture before us; of our great poets several. Goethe in his "storm and stress," in Frankfurt, Strassburg, and Wetzlar,--the ardent lover of a Friedrike of Sesenheim, the handsome, joyous youth, is different in our minds from the stiff and formal Weimar minister; the youthful Apollo different from the Olympic Jupiter. There lies a young development between, that we feel and are curious to know. It is similar with Schiller. The poet of the 'Robbers' with its motto _In tyrannos_, the fugitive from the military school; and the Jena professor, the Weimar court councilor who wrote 'The Homage of the Arts,'--are two different portraits.

But Heine is to our view always the same, always the representative of humor with "a laughing tear" in his escutcheon, always the poetic anomaly, coquetting with his pain and scoffing it away. Young or old, well or ill, we do not know him different.

And yet this poet too had a development, upon which at different times different influences worked....

The first epoch in this course of development may be called the "youthful"; the 'Travel Pictures' and the lyrics contained in it form its brilliant conclusion. This is no storm-and-stress period in the way that, as Schiller and Goethe passed through it, completed works first issued under its clarifying influence. On the contrary, it is characteristic of Heine that we have to thank this youthful epoch for his best and most peculiarly national poems. The wantonness and the sorrows of this youth, in their piquant mixture, created these songs permeated by the breath of original talent, whose physiognomy, more than all that follow later, bears the mark of the kind and manner peculiar to Heine, and which for a long time exercised in our literature through a countless host of imitators an almost epidemic effect. But these lyric pearls, which in their purity and their crystalline polish are a lasting adornment of his poet's crown, and belong to the lyric treasures of our national literature, were also gathered in his first youthful epoch, when he still dived down into the depths of life in the diving-bell of romanticism.

Although Heinrich Heine asserted of himself that he belonged to the "first men of the century," since he was born in the middle of New Year's night, 1800, more exact investigation has nevertheless shown that truth is here sacrificed to a witticism. Heine is still a child of the eighteenth century, by whose most predominant thoughts his work too is influenced, and with whose European coryphaeus, Voltaire, he has an undeniable relationship. He was born, as Strodtmann proves, on the 13th of December, 1799, in Duesseldorf, His father was a plain cloth-merchant; his mother, of the family Von Geldern, the daughter of a physician of repute. The opinion, however, that Heine was the fruit of a Jewish-Christian marriage, is erroneous. The family Von Geldern belonged to the orthodox Jewish confession. One of its early members, according to family tradition, although he was a Jew, had received the patent of nobility from one of the prince electors of Juelich-Kleve-Berg, on account of a service accorded him. As, moreover, Schiller's and Goethe's mothers worked upon their sons an appreciable educational influence, so was this also the case with Heine's mother, who is described as a pupil of Rousseau and an adorer of Goethe's elegies, and thus reached far out beyond the measure of the bourgeois conditions in which she lived....

That which however worked upon his youthful spirit, upon his whole poetical manner, was the French sovereignty in the Rhine-lands at the time of his childhood and youth. The Grand Duchy of Berg, to which Duesseldorf belonged, was ruled in the French manner; a manner which, apart from the violent conscriptions, when compared with the Roman imperial periwig style had great advantages, and in particular granted to Jews complete equal rights with Christians, since the revolutionary principle of equality had outlived the destruction of freedom. Thus the Jews in Duesseldorf in their greater part were French sympathizers, and Heine's father too was an ardent adherent of the new regime. This as a matter of course could not remain without influence upon the son, so much the less as he had French instruction at the lyceum. A vein of the lively French blood is unmistakable in his works. It drew him later on to Paris, where he made the martyr stations of his last years. And of all recent German poets, Heinrich Heine is the best known in France, better known even than our classic poets; for the French feel this vein of related blood....

From his youth springs, too, Heine's enthusiasm for the great Napoleon, which however he has never transmitted to the successors of the _idees Napoleoniennes_. The thirteen-year-old pupil of the gymnasium saw the Emperor in the year 1811, and then again in May 1812; and later on in the 'Book Legrand' of the 'Travel Pictures' he strikes up the following dithyrambic, which, as is always the case with Heine where the great Caesar is concerned, tones forth pure and full, with genuine poetic swing, without those dissonances in which his inmost feelings often flow. "What feelings came over me," he exclaims, "when I saw him himself, with my own highly favored eyes, him himself, Hosanna, the Emperor! It was in the avenue of the Court garden in Duesseldorf. As I pushed myself through the gaping people, I thought of his deeds and his battles, and my heart beat the general march--and nevertheless, I thought at the same time of the police regulation that no one under a penalty of five thalers should ride through the middle of the avenue. And the Emperor rode quietly through the middle of the avenue; no policeman opposed him. Behind him, his suite rode proudly on snorting horses and loaded with gold and jewels, the trumpets sounded, and the people shouted with a thousand voices, 'Long live the Emperor!'" To this enthusiasm for Napoleon, Heine not long afterward gave a poetic setting in the ballad 'The Two Grenadiers.'...

The Napoleonic remembrances of his youth, which retained that unfading freshness and enthusiasm that are wont to belong to all youthful remembrances, were of vital influence upon Heine's later position in literature; they formed a balance over against the romantic tendency, and hindered him from being drawn into it. Precisely in that epoch when the beautiful patriotism of the Wars of Liberation went over into the weaker feeling of the time of the restoration, and romanticism, grown over-devout, in part abandoned itself to externals, in part became a centre of reactionary efforts, Heine let this Napoleonic lightning play on the sultry heavens of literature, in the most daring opposition to the ruling disposition of the time and a school of poetry from which he himself had proceeded; while he declared war upon its followers. However greatly he imperiled his reputation as a German patriot through these hosannas offered to the hereditary enemy, just as little was it to be construed amiss that the remembrance of historical achievements, and of those principles of the Revolution which even the Napoleonic despotism must represent, were a salutary ventilation in the miasmic atmosphere of the continually decreasing circle which at that time described German literature. In the prose of Heine, which like Beranger glorified Caesar, slumbered the first germs of the political lyric, which led again out of the moonlit magic realm of romanticism into the sunny day of history.

A hopeless youthful love for a charming Hamburg maiden was the Muse of the Heine lyric, whose escutcheon has for a symbol "the laughing tear." With the simplicity of Herodotus the poet himself relates the fact, the experience, in the well-known poem with the final strophe:--

"It is an ancient story, But still 'tis ever new: To whomsoe'er it happens His heart is broken too."

We comprehend from biographical facts the inner genesis of the Heine lyric. Heine was in the position of Werther, but a Werther was for the nineteenth century an anomaly; a lyric of this sort in yellow nankeen breeches would have travestied itself. The content of the range of thought, the circle of world-shaping efforts, had so expanded itself since the French Revolution that a complete dissolution into sentimental extravagance had become an impossibility. The justification of the sentiment was not to be denied; but it must not be regarded as the highest, as the life-determining element. It needed a rectification which should again rescue the freedom of the spirit. Humor alone could accomplish Munchausen's feat, and draw itself by its own hair out of the morass. Heine expressed his feelings with genuine warmth; he formed them into drawn pictures and visions; but then he placed himself on the defensive against them. He is the modern Werther, who instead of loading his pistol with a ball, loads it with humor. Artistic harmony suffered under this triumph of spiritual freedom; but that which appeared in his imitators as voluntary quibbling came from Heine of inner necessity. The subject of his first songs is the necessary expression of a struggle between feeling and spirit, between the often visionary dream life of a sentiment and self-consciousness, soaring free out over the world, which adjudged absorption in a single feeling as one-sided and unjustified. Later on, to be sure, these subjects of youthful inspiration became in Heine himself a satiric-humoristic manner, which regarded as a model worked much evil in literature. In addition to personal necessity through one's own experience, there was for a genius such as Heine's also a literary necessity, which lay in the development of our literature in that epoch. It was the Indian Summer of romanticism, whose cobwebs at this time flew over the stubble of our poetry. The vigorous onset of the lyricists of the Wars of Liberation had again grown lame; people reveled in the album sentiments of Tiedge and Mahlmann; the spectres of Amadeus Hoffmann and the lovely high-born maidens of knight Fouque were regarded then as the noblest creations of German fantasy. Less chosen spirits, that is to say, the entire great reading public of the German nation, which ever felt toward its immortals a certain aversion, refreshed itself with the lukewarm water of the poetry of Clauren, from out of which, instead of the Venus Anadyomene, appear a Mimili and other maiden forms, pretty, but drawn with a stuffed-out plasticism. On the stage reigned the "fate tragedies" upon whose lyre the strings were wont to break even in the first scene, and whose ghosts slipped silently over all the German boards. In a word, spirits controlled the poetry of the time more than spirit.