Part 29

In December 1799 the French occupied Mayence for the second time. When the news reached Coblentz, Görres wrote his wild song of triumph over the collapse of the Roman-German Empire: "At three o'clock in the afternoon of the 30th December 1799, the day of the crossing of the Maine, the Holy Roman Empire, of ever foolish memory, passed peacefully away at the advanced age of 955 years, 5 months, and 28 days; the cause of death was apoplexy and complete exhaustion, but the illustrious deceased departed in full consciousness and comforted with all the sacraments of the Church.... The deceased was born in Verdun, in June 842 (843). At the moment of his birth a comet (_Perrückenkomet_), pregnant with disaster, was flaming in the zenith. The boy was brought up at the courts of Charles the Simple, Louis the Child, and their successors.... But his inclination to a sedentary life, combined with an excess of religious ardour, weakened his already feeble constitution ... and at the age of about 250, at the time of the Crusades, he became quite imbecile," &c., &c.

Görres here strikes the note which we hear again a generation later in Börne's _Letters from Paris_.

He contemptuously opens and reads the will of the deceased, according to which the French Republic inherits the left bank of the Rhine, His Excellency, General Bonaparte, being appointed executor.

This was Görres' stormy youthful period. By the year 1800 he was beginning to withdraw from active politics, a visit to Paris having cured him of his sympathy with Frenchmen. But he was still an ardent progressionist, dreading nothing so much as a return to the past, which would mean a crushing tyranny (harsher after long abeyance and partly justified by existing circumstances), the rehabilitation of the priesthood, and combined political and religious reaction. The oppression of foreign rule aroused his patriotic feeling. At the university of Heidelberg he entered upon his Romantic period. He lectured on the nature of poetry and philosophy, waxed enthusiastic over the Nibelungenlied, studied ancient German history, poetry, and legend. He met his old schoolfellow, Clemens Brentano, became intimate with Arnim, and came into contact with Tieck and the brothers Schlegel and Grimm. It was at Heidelberg that he published his _Kindermythen_ ("Child Myths"), _Die Deutschen Volksbücher_ ("The National Literature of Germany"), and his collection of old German Volkslieder and Meisterlieder.

It was not only national feeling which the Romantic movement aroused in Görres; it induced an almost equally strong feeling of cosmopolitanism, under the influence of which he took up the study of Persian, a hitherto neglected language, and, almost unassisted, attained such proficiency in it that he was able to produce a tasteful prose translation of Firdusi's epic poetry.

In 1818 he went to Berlin as spokesman of a deputation from the town of Coblentz. He boldly urged the king to fulfil the promise of a constitution given at the time of the War of Liberation, and his daring was rewarded with disgrace and several years of exile.

Until 1824 Görres continued to be, to all intents and purposes, the Romantic German patriot. From that year until his death in 1848, he is the champion of the clerical reaction. In his _Deutschland und die Revolution_ (1820) the tendency to Catholicism is already distinct; in it he characterises the Reformation as "a second Fall." He became absorbed in the study of the history of the Middle Ages, and began to regard the Church as the only power capable of satisfactorily defending the liberty of the people from the encroachments of absolutism. Soon, under the influence of Brentano and Franz Baader, he became a believer in visions and bigotedly religious. Clemens Brentano was at this time, like Apollonius of Tyana in days of old, exercising a powerful influence upon a generation predisposed to theosophical extravagances; and Mme. de Krüdener was founding the Holy Alliance.

As early as 1826, Joseph de Maistre declares that Görres, as author of _Der Kampf der Kirchenfreiheit mit der Staatsgewalt in der Katholischen Schweiz_ ("The Struggle of the Church with State Despotism in Catholic Switzerland"), has championed the cause of the Church with both genius and justice, and yet more boldly and effectually than it has ever been done before. Such praise from such lips carries weight; it indicates, moreover, that we have reached the point at which German Romanticism passes into French, or rather, general European reaction.

In 1827 Görres published a work which is of interest as forming a prelude to his _Mysticism_, namely, _Emanuel Swedenborg, his Visions and his Relations to the Church_.

In 1833 Clemens Brentano moved to Munich, where Görres had already settled. The old school friends met once more, and Brentano's influence over Görres was great. Brentano was now entirely given over to superstitious fanaticism. Even Schelling's new philosophy of revelation was not pious enough for him. Talking with some young theologians, he shouted: "It is of no use praising it to me! One drop of holy water is more precious to me than the whole of Schelling's philosophy." He had brought all his memoranda of Catharina Emmerich's visions and outpourings to Munich with him; he no longer needed the Gospels; from her he had learned more of Christ's sayings and journeyings than is to be found in the Scriptures. The saint had even revealed a map of Palestine to him. Görres was soon as firm a believer in miracles and myths as Brentano. Between 1836 and 1842 he wrote the four volumes of his _Mysticism_, the most insane book produced by German Romanticism.

The farther Görres penetrated into the mysteries of witchcraft and sorcery, the more fanciful and peculiar did he himself become. He believed that he was possessed by an evil spirit. On one occasion he complained that the devil, provoked by his interference in Satanic affairs, had stolen one of his manuscripts; it was, however, found some time afterwards in his bookcase.

When the religious disturbances broke out in Cologne, Görres came forward as the spokesman of the Ultramontanes in their dispute with the Prussian Ministry. His passionate diatribes against Protestantism were couched in Biblical language--his opponents were a brood of vipers, the Prussian State was possessed by an evil spirit, &c. This particular demon he describes as a horrible ghost, "whom it is honouring too much to call a spirit;" it is, he says, the ghost of the demon which in the Prussian army of our grandfathers' days handled the whip which flogged seven backs at a time.

Görres won the admiration of Count Montalembert, the leader of the French Catholics, by his polemical feats. In Catholic Germany he was regarded as a father of the Church, and called "the Catholic Luther." He succeeded in drawing the Bavarian Government into the movement; the opponents of the Protestant Prussian Government were allowed to publish their lucubrations unchecked in the Bavarian press, and it was Görres' hope that Bavaria, as an important Catholic power, would openly take up the contest.

No expression of politico-religious fanaticism was too outrageous for him. He went the length of declaring that the Government, by permitting mixed marriages, compelled the Catholic parent to bring up "twofold bastards"--and this in the face of the fact that the King of Bavaria was the son of a Protestant mother and had married a Protestant wife.

At the time of the violent dispute as to the authenticity of the coat of the Saviour preserved at Trèves, Görres was highly delighted with the success of a pilgrimage to Trèves, which was promptly organised, and in which the Rhinelanders, to the number of a million, took part, in order to annoy the Protestant Prussians. To him this pilgrimage was "the triumph of the victorious Church." The argument that the holy garment could not be genuine, seeing that several other places possessed similar coats, he dismissed with a reference to the miraculous multiplication of loaves recorded in the New Testament.[1]

The Romantic literary theory that manner is something absolutely independent of matter, was a theory put into practice in politics by Friedrich von Gentz. We called Kleist the German Mérimée; for several reasons Gentz might be called the German Talleyrand. In his mature years he might, like Metternich, have written under his own portrait: "Nur kein Pathos!" ("Anything except pathos!") He is the very embodiment of Romantic irony, the incarnate spirit of _Lucinde_. He does not, however, become a typical figure until he is over forty, at the time when a period of diplomatic activity succeeded to revolutionary upheavals and the Napoleonic wars, the time when the watchword was reaction, that is to say, quiet--quiet at any price, extinction of all the European conflagrations, and rest, profound rest for the sick, the weary, and the convalescent peoples; when consequently, as in a sick room, the great aim was to get rid as quietly as possible of disturbers of the peace and prevent all noise and uproar. "Gentz," says Gottschall, "understood how to give to the official publications that indescribable polish, that classic smoothness, that Olympian dignity which, untouched by the fate of mortals, allows no drop of nectar and ambrosia to be spilled from the cup of the gods, though blood may be flowing in torrents in the regions below. This distinguished manner of passing lightly over the small shocks by which nations were shattered into fragments, gave a complexion of mildness and grace to the despotic policy of the day. One heard only a puff, not a report; it was the noiseless slaughter of the air-gun."

To outward seeming, Legitimist principles were being vindicated; in point of fact, their vindicators were not Legitimists when their interests bade them be the reverse. In them Goethe's words were fulfilled: "None are so Legitimist as those who can legitimise themselves." The cause Gentz championed was a bad cause, but even the champion of a bad cause is interesting if possessed of remarkable talent. And Gentz was talented in an extraordinary degree. Varnhagen rightly said of him: "Never has the dust of German scholarship been stirred up with greater _éclat_; never has learning been displayed to such advantage."

Friedrich von Gentz was born in Breslau in 1764. Both his parents belonged to the middle classes; his future exalted position in society he owed entirely to his own ability. At the University of Königsberg he applied himself seriously to the study of Kant's philosophy, at the same time cultivating an enthusiastic Platonic friendship for an unhappy young married woman, Elisabeth Graun. In 1786 he went to Berlin, obtained a Government appointment, and made a _mariage de convenance_ with the daughter of a high official in the finance department. He plunged into a course of unbridled dissipation, and took part in all the foolish pleasures of a court "in which a repulsive assemblage of roués and bigoted women surrounded the old king, Frederick William II."

In the midst of such a life as this he was surprised by the French Revolution. Its first effect was to fire him with youthful enthusiasm. "If this revolution were to fail," he wrote, "I should deem it one of the greatest misfortunes which has befallen mankind. It is the first practical triumph of philosophy, the first example of a form of government founded upon principles and a coherent system. It is hope and comfort for our race, which is groaning under so many ancient evils. Should this revolution fail, these evils will be more irremediable than before. I can picture so clearly to myself how the silence of despair would acknowledge, in defiance of reason, that men can only be happy as slaves, and how all tyrants, great and small, would take advantage of this dreadful acknowledgment to avenge themselves for the terror caused them by the awakening of the French nation."

But the horrors which the French Revolution brought in its train soon caused him to change his mind. He suddenly became the ardent champion of the good old days. To combat the supremacy of public opinion and the follies of the masses became the object of his life. He was incapable of seeing in the French Revolution the necessary outcome of centuries of wrong and ferment; he declared the cause of its lawlessness to be "enlightenment," the inordinate cultivation of cold reason--a characteristically Romantic theory.

No doubt there was a species of real development at the root of this change. The "rights of humanity," which he had so warmly defended in his treatise _Ueber den Ursprung und die obersten Prinzipien des Rechts_ ("On the Origin and Main Principles of Rights"), now seemed to him only of importance to the statesman as "elementary preparatory studies." The theory of these rights appeared to him to stand in much the same relation to statecraft as the mathematical theory of projectiles does to bomb-throwing. And now, by slow degrees, he arrives at the narrow view that it is not the people, but the Government, which is the chief power in the state. He regards the co-operation of the people in legislation as a mere form; liberty has shrunk into willing, glad obedience.

Intercourse with Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the influence of the æsthetic ideas of the period on the need for harmony between private and public life, somewhat softened the severity of these principles, and the English constitution became Gentz's ideal. When Frederick William III. ascended the throne, he actually felt impelled to present a petition to his Majesty, in which, in eloquent language, he called upon him to concede liberty of the press--the very liberty which he described a few years later as the source of all evil. The loyal Goethe was astounded by this attempt "to coerce" the sovereign, and as the King took no notice of the appeal, Gentz at once let the matter drop, and did his best to bury it in oblivion. From this time onward he was in the pay of England; he did not exactly sell himself, but he accepted regular and considerable monetary rewards for his political activity in English interests. And Gentz needed money. He gambled for high stakes, and lived a life of perpetual dissipation and revelry with actresses and ballet-dancers. At times this was interrupted by fits of extreme sentimentality, when, as he writes, he lived "a pleasant, but still wild life" with his own wife. In April 1801 he notes in his diary: "Profound emotion over the death of a dog." During a visit to Weimar, where he met all the literary notabilities of the day, he became desperately enamoured of the poetess, Amalie von Imhoff, and made determined resolutions to lead a better life. But he had hardly returned to Berlin before he wrote: "Result of my Weimar resolutions --on December 23rd lost all I possessed at hazard." For a time he went on writing letters of six or eight sheets to Amalie von Imhoff; then he fell madly in love with the actress, Christel Eigensatz, and forgot everything else. "_Maintenant c'est le délire complet_," he writes in his diary. In the midst of all this, his wife leaves him and applies for a divorce. The evening she leaves, Gentz tries to forget the unpleasantness in playing _trente et quarante_. When Berlin had for many reasons become disagreeable, nay, impossible, he accepted the offer of an Austrian Government appointment in Vienna. Here he gradually surrendered all independence and became the tool of Metternich.

But before this happened, Gentz had had his period of greatness. The apathy with which the Viennese accommodated themselves to French supremacy, to defeats and humiliations without end, roused all that there was of energy and genius in him. The burning hatred of Napoleon by which he was inspired made him for a short time, during their misfortunes and deep depression, the Demosthenes of the German people. But it was only independence that he so passionately desired, not liberty. In Napoleon the whole Revolution seemed to him to be concentrated. Against him he would not have hesitated to employ even such a means as assassination. He strove with all his might to bring about a union between the German powers and to rouse the German people. But, true to his character, he appealed less to the people than to the chosen few in whose hands it seemed to him that the destiny of the people lay. His preface to the _Political Fragments_, his manifestoes and proclamations of war, are written with passionate vigour, in a fluent, magniloquent, and yet manly style, the rhetorical flourish of which is never in bad taste. Even the defeats of Ulm and Austerlitz did not crush him; but it was with deep dejection that he observed the miserable condition of affairs in Prussia before the battle of Jena. When Johannes von Müller, and others upon whom he had relied, allowed themselves to be flattered and won over by Napoleon, Gentz remained immovably firm. In the famous letter to Müller he makes scathing allusion to those "whose lives are an incessant capitulation." But when Austria gave up the struggle, and, as generally happens in such cases, frivolity and pleasure-seeking increased in proportion to the defeats and humiliations suffered by the country, Gentz too was soon so deeply entangled in the wild whirl of stupefying dissipations that, in his terrible pecuniary difficulties, he caught at an alliance with Metternich as a drowning man at a plank. The influence on a character like his of the man whom Talleyrand called the "weekly politician," because his range of vision never extended beyond that period, and whom a distinguished Russian called "varnished dust," was no happy one.

Henceforward Gentz's letters are full of complaints of "such mental lassitude, despondency, emptiness, and indifference" as he had hitherto neither known nor imagined, and which he aptly describes as a "sort of intellectual consumption." He calls himself "damnably blasé." "Believe me," he writes to Rahel, "I am damnably blasé. I have seen and enjoyed so much of the world that I am no longer influenced by its illusive grandeur and rewards." "Nothing delights me; I am cold, blasé, contemptuous, thoroughly persuaded of the folly of almost every one else, unduly certain of my own--not wisdom--but clear-sightedness, and inwardly devilish glad that the so-called great doings are coming to such a laughable end." So indifferent has he become, that Napoleon's downfall, which he had formerly so ardently desired, arouses no deeper feeling in him than this. "I have become terribly old and bad," he himself confesses with an amiable effrontery which reminds us of Friedrich Schlegel, and which never deserted him.

It is about this time that he begins to be persistently haunted by the fear of death; he now regularly notes in his diary the exact degree to which the feeling is weighing upon him. His letters betray all the weaknesses of a nervous woman. The correspondence between him and Adam Müller is particularly ludicrous. We are never allowed to forget that they are both afraid of thunder. But even a letter is sometimes more than Gentz can bear. He writes to Müller: "Your letters shatter my tender nerves." His fear of death most frequently took the form of fear of being murdered. After the assassination of Kotzebue by Sand, his terror lest he also might fall a victim to the hatred of the Liberal youth of Germany reached such a climax that the sight of a sharp knife was sometimes enough, as he himself confesses, to bring on a fainting-fit. In 1814 he writes to Rahel: "Now, God be praised, all is at an end in Paris. I am, thank God, very well. I live sometimes at Baden, sometimes in Vienna, have sometimes brioches with exquisite butter for breakfast, sometimes other heavenly cakes. I have come into possession of furniture that makes my heart leap for joy, and I am far less afraid of death."

He now looks to Görres as the only person who can write, he himself being incapable of any kind of production. Yet at this very time he occupies such an exalted position in society that he can deny himself to crowned heads. On the 31st of October, 1814, he writes in his diary: "_Refusé le prince royal de Bavière, le roi de Danemark_," &c. He meets Talleyrand, and admires him excessively. To give this admiration a practical direction, the astute French diplomatist presents him with 24,000 florins in the name of the King of France. At the close of 1814 Gentz writes in his diary: "The aspect of public affairs is melancholy.... But, since I have nothing to reproach myself with, my accurate knowledge of the pitiful doings of all these petty beings who rule the world, so far from distressing, only serves to amuse me; I enjoy it all like a play given for my private delectation." Is not this like a speech of Jean Paul's Roquairol? Tired of life, whatever disturbs his peace is objectionable to him. It is now his object to maintain the existing condition of things at any price. In 1815, in argument with Görres, he actually defends the Peace of Paris. He was too sagacious and cold, too great a hater of phrases, not to sneer at the "Burschenschaften" (students' leagues), the agitation for a national German dress, the Teutoburgerwald enthusiasm, and others of the same description; nevertheless, the assassination of Kotzebue was made a pretext for forbidding the formation of patriotic societies, as further assassinations and crimes were feared. It was owing to Gentz's exertions that the universities were placed under control and that the press was gagged. Of the liberty of the press he now writes: "I hold to my opinion, that, to prevent abuse of the press, nothing should be printed for a certain number of years. This as the rule, with a very few exceptions permitted by a thoroughly competent court, would in a short time lead us back to God and the truth."

His utterances on the occasion of the Greek war of liberation prove that, in spite of his reactionary ardour, he had too much sense to believe, like Adam Müller and the rest, in the principle of legitimacy and the divine right of kings as revealed truths. He had written to Müller in 1818: "You are the only man in Germany of whom I say: He writes divinely when he chooses; and nothing in our audacious days astonishes and exasperates me more than the audacity of those who dare to measure themselves with you.... Your system is a completed, rounded whole. It would be vain to attack it from any side. One can only be entirely in it or entirely outside of it. If you can prove to us, make comprehensible to us, that all real knowledge, all true understanding of nature, all good laws and social regulations, nay, even history itself (as you somewhere assert), are, and can only be, communicated to us by divine revelation, then (as far as I am concerned at least) you have gained the day. As long as you do not succeed in doing this, we stand afar off, admire you, love you, but are separated from you by an impassable gulf." It must be remembered that Adam Müller had gone the length of asserting that the existence of the Holy Trinity sufficiently proves that any national economical system based upon one single principle must be a wrong system. It even proves to him the necessity of the "Dreifelderwirthschaft" (triennal rotation of crops). Now, when Greece revolts, Gentz writes that the principle of legitimacy, being the production of time, must be modified by time, and makes the following noteworthy assertion: "I have always been aware that, in spite of the majesty and power of my employers, and in spite of all the single victories gained by us, the spirit of the times would in the long-run prove stronger than we are; that the press, contemptible as it is in its excesses, would prove its superiority to all our wisdom; and that neither diplomatic art nor violence would be able to hold back the wheel of the world."