Part 5

When the February revolution came, Baron d’Eckstein was very active. His friend Lamartine was then in the ascendant, and through him he knew all that was going on. No revolution, I believe, was ever made with so little preparation. There was no conspiracy of any kind. A night or two before the contemplated banquet to Ledru Rollin, Lamartine was asked by his friends, Eckstein being present, whether he would accept office under the Duchesse d’Orléans, provided she was proclaimed Regent in the Chamber. He laughed as if it were an idle dream, outside the sphere of practical politics, as we now say, but he accepted. The Duchesse and her friends counted on him, and his prestige at that time was so great that he might have carried anything. But no one knows his own prestige, and when the moment came, when the Duchesse d’Orléans was present in the Chamber and Lamartine was expected to speak, there was confusion and fright; some shots had been fired in the Assembly, the name of the Republic had been shouted, the Deputies broke up, and the Duchesse had to fly. Never was kingdom lost with so little excuse. I saw the whole so-called revolution from my windows at the corner of the Rue Royale and the Boulevard de la Madeleine. I may have to describe what I saw at some other time. At present I am thinking of the poet-statesman only, of Lamartine and his brilliant speech from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville.

Whatever Lamartine was, a poet, a dreamer, an aristocrat, he had the spirit of _noblesse_ in him, and that spirit prevailed at the time. It was due to him, I believe, that capital punishment was then abolished once for all for political offences. Sinister elements came to the surface, but they had soon to hide again. I remember another speaker at the Hôtel de Ville, speaking after Lamartine in support of the abolition of every kind of title and privilege, and, before all, for the abolition of the nobility. He was eloquent, he was furious, and after he had summed up all the crimes committed by the French nobility and laughed at those who had grown rich and powerful by the misdeeds of their noble ancestors, he finished up in a loud voice, “Soyons ancêtres nous-mêmes,” a sentiment loudly applauded by the unwashed multitudes who aspired to take the place of the _ancêtres_ whom they had just heard execrated from the balcony of their terrible Hôtel de Ville.

All the walls in the streets where I lived were then chalked with the mysterious words, _Liberté_, _Egalité_, _Fraternité_. Not far from my house there was a tobacconist’s shop, called _Aux trois blagues_, with three tobacco pouches painted over the window. My friend, the tobacconist, was an _aristo_, so he left the _trois blagues_ and simply wrote underneath, _Liberté_, _Egalité_, _Fraternité_.

But I must not forget another poet, the greatest German poet I have ever known, and of whom I saw a great deal at Berlin before I migrated to Paris, I mean Rückert. It is strange how little his poems are known in England and France. He has never had an apostle, nor would a mere herald do him much service. He was a poet somewhat like Wordsworth, who must be laid siege to, not till he surrenders, but till we surrender to him. If he is known at all in England, it is through his lyric poems, which have been set to music, as they deserved to be, by Schumann. Who has not heard “Du, meine Seele, du, mein Herz,” one of the grandest songs of our age? But, alas! either the words are murdered in a translation which would break the heart both of the poet and the composer, or the German words are often pronounced so badly that no one can tell whether they are English or German or Sanskrit. Rückert was one of the richest poets. There is hardly a branch of poetry which he has not cultivated. I say cultivated on purpose, for his poetry was always a work of art, sometimes almost of artifice. He was not equally successful in all his poetical compositions: particularly towards the end of his life he disappointed many of his admirers by his dramatic attempts. He is like Wordsworth in this respect also, that one cannot enjoy all he writes, yet in the end one comes to enjoy much that has been put aside at first, because it comes from him.

I may be prejudiced, yet a poet whose verses Goethe repeated on his deathbed is not likely to be overrated by me. These are the verses which, we are told, Goethe murmured before he exclaimed, “More light, more light!” and passed away:—

UM MITTERNACHT.

Um Mitternacht Hab’ ich gewacht Und aufgeblickt zum Himmel, Kein Stern am Sterngewimmel Hat mir gelacht Um Mitternacht.

Um Mitternacht Hab’ ich gedacht Hinaus in dunkle Schranken; Es hat kein Lichtgedanken Mir Trost gebracht Um Mitternacht.

Um Mitternacht Nahm ich in Acht Die Schläge meines Herzens; Ein einz’ger Puls des Schmerzens War angefacht Um Mitternacht.

Um Mitternacht Kämpft’ ich die Schlacht O Menschheit, deiner Leiden; Nicht konnt’ ich sie entscheiden Mit meiner Macht Um Mitternacht.

Um Mitternacht Hab’ ich die Macht In deine Hand gegeben: Herr über Tod und Leben, Du hältst die Wacht Um Mitternacht.

If I had a strong personal liking for Rückert it might be excused. He was really an Eastern poet, rich in colour, but equally rich in thought.

The first poems of his I knew in my youth were his “Oestliche Rosen.” My father reviewed them (“Vermischte Schriften,” vol. v., p. 290). He declared he might have judged them by one letter, the letter K, which in Roman times meant condemnation, but which in Rückert’s case would give to his “Oestliche Rosen” their right title of “Köstliche Rosen.” One of Rückert’s greatest works, a real treasury of meditative thought and mature wisdom, was his “Weisheit des Brahmanen,” and this also appealed, no doubt, strongly to my own personal tastes. His translations of Oriental poetry, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, are perfect masterpieces. They often take away one’s breath by the extraordinary faithfulness and marvellous reproduction in German of plays on words and jingle of rhymes that seemed to be possible once, and once only, whether in Persian, Arabic, or Sanskrit. I may have been influenced by all this, and still more by my personal regard for the poet, but for all that I should strongly advise all who care for poetry, and for German poetry, to judge for themselves, and not to be disheartened if they do not strike gold on the first pages they open.

To know Rückert personally was a treat. I had heard much about him before I made his acquaintance, when I was a student at Berlin. The Duchess of Anhalt-Dessau, my own peculiar duchess, had in her youth been much admired by the Crown Prince of Prussia, afterwards Frederick William IV. She was herself a Prussian princess, a daughter of Prince Frederick Ludwig Karl of Prussia, who died 1796, and of a Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who after the death of her husband married the Duke of Cumberland, and became Queen of Hanover. This princess, a lady of great natural gifts, highly cultivated and well read, was personally acquainted with some of the most distinguished men in Germany. Even in the narrow sphere in which she had learnt to move and act in Dessau, she did much good in trying to discover young men of talent, and assisting them in their studies. She had always been very gracious to me, and even as a boy I was often invited to play with her _à quatre mains_ at the Castle. I saw her for the last time after I had begun my Oriental studies at Leipzig, and before I went to Berlin. She told me then that she herself had known a little Sanskrit, that she and the young Crown Prince of Prussia had learnt the Sanskrit alphabet, and had corresponded in it, to the great annoyance of people who opened or read all letters that were not meant for them. “When you go to Berlin,” she said, “you must see Rückert, but do not be frightened. I was myself most anxious to see him. The King invited him to dinner, together with a number of his illustrious ménagerie. I asked the King where Rückert was sitting, the poet of ‘Frauenliebe’ and ‘Liebesfrühling.’ ‘Look there,’ the King said. ‘That broad-shouldered boor with his elbows on the table, eating a hunk of bread, that is your poet!’ And a _désillusionnement_ it was,” she said. “Still, I was proud to have seen him and to have talked to him.” So I was prepared.

Frederick William IV. had tried hard to attract a number of the most eminent men in Germany to Berlin. Berlin by itself is not attractive, and it seemed as if the men who were then best known in Germany had chosen the South, rather than the North, for their residence. The Brothers Grimm Schelling, Cornelius and many more were tempted to Berlin by large salaries, and among them was Rückert also, not so much the Oriental scholar as the poet. He went to Berlin, after long hesitation and misgivings, and announced lectures on Arabic, Persian, and other Oriental languages. But he could not brook the restraints of official life. He had a little _Landgut_, Neusess, near Coburg, and thither he felt so strongly drawn during the summer that he soon appealed to the Minister of Public Instruction for leave of absence during each summer. This was most graciously granted by the King, but soon after followed a petition for leave of absence during a particularly severe winter. This too was granted, though the Minister ventured to say: “But, my dear Professor, if you are always absent during the summer semester, and now ask for leave of absence during the winter semester also, when do you mean to lecture?” Nor was this all. When I called on the Professor to enter my name for his lectures on the “Gulistan,” a Persian poem, he received me very coldly. He was indeed the broad-shouldered giant whom the Duchess had described to me. He wore a long dressing-gown, and his hair, parted in the middle, was hanging wildly about his temples.

“Why do you want to learn Persian?” he said. I humbly explained my reason. “It is no use your learning Persian,” he continued, “if you do not know Arabic.” To this I was able to reply that I had studied Arabic for a year under Professor Fleischer at Leipzig. However, the Professor was not to be foiled. He wanted to get away to Neusess, but at the same time to be able to satisfy the Minister that he had done his duty in offering to lecture. “You know,” he said, “_tres faciunt collegium_. I cannot lecture for one.” This was unanswerable, according to German academical etiquette. So I bowed, and went into the highways and hedges to secure the help of two _commilitones_. Accompanied by them, I invaded the Professor once more in his den. All three of us told him that we were most anxious to learn Persian.

One of them actually did wish to learn Persian, and became afterwards a very distinguished scholar. He was then called Paul Bötticher, but he is best known by his later name, Paul de Lagarde, a man of extraordinary power of work and an enormous accumulation of knowledge. When Rückert saw there was no escape, he yielded, at first not with a very good grace; but he soon became most delightful. We were really working together, and when he found out that I was the son of his old friend Wilhelm Müller, nothing could exceed his kindness to me. At first he often confessed to his pupils that he had forgotten his Persian, but with every week it seemed to come back to him. Nothing more was said about Neusess, and the fields and meadows and woods that he had to desert for our sakes. Whatever may have been said about Rückert as a professor, he was more useful in his informal teaching than many learned professors who year after year read their lectures to large admiring audiences.

“I cannot teach you Persian,” he used to say, “I can only tell you and show you how to learn it. I learnt everything I know by myself, and so can you. We will work together, but that is all I can do.” It was astounding to see how this giant had worked, all by himself. No one at that time thought, for instance, of studying Tamil. He showed me a copy of a complete Tamil, or was it Telugu, dictionary in folio, which he had copied and largely added to. He had studied Chinese too. He was far advanced in Sanskrit and Zend, and in Arabic and Persian he had probably read more, though in his own way, than many a learned professor. Such an honest student as Rückert was could do more good to his pupils in one hour than others by a whole semester of lecturing. And this is the secret of the success of German professors. They take their pupils into their work-shops, they do not keep them standing and gaping at the show-window. Thus the immense advantage which English Universities enjoy in being able to combine professorial with tutorial teaching, is made up for to a certain extent by the devotion of the German professors, who give up their time in their seminaries and so-called societies for the benefit of students who want to learn how to work, and do not wish to be simply crammed for examinations. They make friends of their pupils, their pupils are proud to do much of the drudgery work for them, while they remain for life their grateful pupils and afterwards their loyal colleagues. After term was over, there was, of course, no holding Rückert in Berlin, but he invited me to see him at Neusess, which a few years afterwards I did.

There I found the old man working in his farmyard like a real peasant, pitchforking manure into his cart, and carting it off to the fields. He was delighted to see me, and when he had washed his hands he came into his study to shake hands, and to talk about the work on which I was then engaged. Rückert was a scholar with whom one could discuss any question quite freely. Even if one had to differ from him, he was never offended by contradiction. When we could not agree he used to say: “We will leave this for the present, and discuss it another time.” He told me, among other things, how my father had saved his life.

The two young men were travelling together on foot in Italy. Italy was at that time, in the beginning of the century, the cynosure of every German student, and of every German poet. Goethe had described it, and they all wanted to follow in Goethe’s footsteps, and pass their “Wanderjahre” in the “Land wo die Citronen blühn!” How they did it with a few thalers in their pockets we can hardly understand, but it was done.

Rückert and my father were travelling on foot, and they had often to sleep in the poorest _osterias_. In these wretched hovels they got more than they had bargained for, and one fine morning, after getting out into the fresh air, they saw a lake, and my father jumped in to have a bath. Rückert could not resist, and followed. But he could not swim, the lake was deeper than he had thought, and he was on the point of drowning when my father swam towards him and rescued him. “I wrote my first epic poem then, in the style of Camoens,” said Rückert, with a loud chuckle, “and I called it the ‘Lousiade,’ but it has never been published.” After this visit I lost sight of Rückert, as of many of my German friends. But I still possess the manuscript of a metrical and rhymed version of the Sanskrit poem the “Meghadûta, the Cloud Messenger,” which I made and afterwards published (in 1847), and which contains a number of corrections and suggestions made by Rückert in pencil. “I translated it myself,” he said to me, “but I shall not publish my translation now.”

During my stay in Paris, as I remarked, there was no time for poets or poetry. I had to sit up night after night to copy and collate Sanskrit MSS., and I shall never forget how often I screwed down my green-shaded lamp in the morning and saw the sun slowly rising over the Boulevard, and lighting up the arch of the Porte St. Martin. I lived _au cinquième_ in a corner house of the Boulevard de la Madeleine, in a house which exists no longer, or at all events has been very much changed, so that on my last visit I could not find my windows again.

LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS II

When I had settled in England in 1847, my literary acquaintances began afresh. I have had the good fortune of being on more or less intimate terms with such poets as Kingsley, Clough, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, and with poets in prose such as Froude, Ruskin, Carlyle, and I may add, in spite of the Atlantic, Emerson, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I knew other writers such as Macaulay, Arthur Helps, Arthur Stanley, Frederick Maurice, Dr. Martineau; I may add even the names of Faraday, Lyall, Sedgwick, Thirlwall, Grote, Whewell, Richard Owen, Darwin, Huxley, among my personal acquaintances or friends.

Kingsley was married to one of my wife’s aunts. She was one of six most remarkable sisters, all married except the eldest and, I believe, the most gifted, who had devoted her life to the education of her younger sisters. Besides Charles Kingsley, the husbands of the other sisters were Froude, the historian; Lord Wolverton, of high standing in the financial world as the head of the house of Glyn, and the valued adviser of Mr. Gladstone in his earlier financial reforms; R. Mertyns Bird, an illustrious name in the history of India as the organiser of the North-Western Provinces; and “S. G. O.”

How soon popularity vanishes! There was a time when everybody knew and spoke of “S. G. O.” He was Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, an influential writer on political and social subjects, a frequent contributor to _The Times_ during the Crimean War, a man of great force and independence of character. He was a giant in stature, and extremely attractive by his varied knowledge in different branches of physical science. He was a well-known microscopist, and when it was wanted, a doctor, a nurse, a surgeon, a dentist. However, he was not a poet, like his two brothers-in-law. He was an active clergyman, a sanitary reformer, a ready helper wherever poor people were ready to be helped. These five men, the husbands of five remarkable sisters—of whom one, Mrs. Bird, is still living at the age of ninety-six (she died this year), and not only living, but alive to all that is interesting in the world, and full of good works—represented a power in England. “S. G. O.” moved in a sphere of his own, and seldom came to Oxford. But Kingsley and Froude soon became my intimate friends.

If I call Froude a poet it is because, as I explained before, I do not consider rhyme as essential to poetry. But for really poetical power, for power of description, of making the facts of history alive, of laying bare the deepest thoughts of men and the most mysterious feelings of women, there was no poet or historian of our age who came near him. I knew him through all his phases. I knew him first when he was still a fellow of Exeter College. I was at that time often with him in his rooms in High Street, opposite to St. Mary’s Church, when he was busy writing novels, and I well remember passing an evening with him and trying to find the right name for a novel which afterwards appeared under the title of “Nemesis of Faith.” I saw him almost daily while his persecution at Oxford was going on, gaining strength every day. He had to give up his fellowship, on which he chiefly depended. I will not repeat the old story that his novel was publicly burnt in the quadrangle of Exeter College. The story is interesting as showing how quickly a myth can spring up even in our own lifetime, if only there is some likelihood in it, and something that pleases the popular taste. What really happened was, as I was informed at the time by Froude himself, no more than that one of the tutors (Dr. Sewell) spoke about the book at the end of one of his College Lectures. He warned the young men against the book, and asked whether anybody had read it. One of the undergraduates produced a copy which belonged to him. Dr. Sewell continued his sermonette, and warming with his subject, he finished by throwing the book, which did not belong to him, into the fire, at the same time stirring the coals to make them burn. Of what followed there are two versions. Dr. Sewell, when he had finished, asked his class, “Now, what have I done?” “You have burned my copy,” the owner of the book said in a sad voice, “and I shall have to buy a new one.” The other version of the reply was, “You have stirred the fire, sir.”