Part 21

The programme he proposes for the new literature is alarming in its vagueness. Its conception of life is to be founded on a harmonious union of sensuality and spirituality. He proclaims a new Hellenism, in which the sensual will be more permeated by spirit than in the case of the Greeks, and the spiritual more permeated by the sensual than in the case of the Christians. But before literature can be born again, life itself must be. Not till the life around them has become healthy and harmonious, can the young generation produce a true work of art.

There was, as we see, nothing new in these declamations and prophecies. Heine had already said the same thing in a hundred ways, comic or poetic; even Menzel in his first period had said the same with all the eloquence of the unsuccessful poet and violent partisan. Here it was expressed in the flowery language and with the rhetoric which seldom fails to produce its effect on immature minds.

The only novelty lay in the fact that now for the first time the exponent of these ideas was a representative of that young generation who regarded Heine as the great author of the age, and that now for the first time expression was given to the theory that prose was the literary form of the new age, and of more value than poetry. Wienbarg's æsthetic theories resolve themselves into glorification of Heine, whom he proclaims to be the great, the greatest prose author. Not till now, he declares, under the influence of French prose, has German prose really been formed. Schiller's style he calls the language of the parade, and Goethe's the language of the court. All the earlier great authors, even Jean Paul, lived, according to him, within a magic circle, far removed from the stir of the world. What distinguishes the prose of a Heine, a Börne, a Menzel, a Laube, from that of the earlier writers is, in his opinion, the want of tranquillity, of placidity (Behaglichkeit), but it is this want that gives it its superiority, the superiority of life. Heine especially is praised for having disdained "the passing fame" of a lyric poet in order to play upon the colossal, cosmic instrument which lies under the hands of a master of German prose.

First Mundt and then Laube, neither of whom was capable of writing a respectable verse, joined eagerly in this glorification of prose at the expense of poetry, the more willingly as by so doing they entered a protest against the Swabian school of poetry, the tardy offspring of Uhland's branch of Romanticism. Mundt positively elevated this cult of prose to the rank of the newest gospel. How little real ability Wienbarg possessed is clearly shown by his second work, _Zur neuesten Litteratur_, a collection of weak essays, in which the only thing we find to admire is his courageous fidelity to Heine at a time when envious rivals and moral doctrinaires had turned the tide of popular opinion against him.

Wienbarg had called the name Young Germany into existence, but as yet it designated no exactly specified group of authors. Strangely enough it was first applied to definite individuals in connection with a public denunciation and harsh legal proceedings.

The facts were as follows: A number of young authors had gradually brought themselves into notice, who were not exactly in league with each other, but whose common watchword was, spiritual emancipation. They all held aloof from Christianity and dreamed of a new, pantheistic religion for the new era. Many of them desired, under the name of "the emancipation of the flesh" or "rehabilitation of the flesh," the abolishment of the traditional code of morals, and more freedom in the conditions regulating the union and separation of the two sexes. Both the expression of this desire and the desire itself were, in the case of a man like Laube, unpleasantly epicurean, in the case of a man like Gutzkow, unnecessarily defiant and curiously morbid; with others again, such as Mundt, it took the form of championship of what he vaguely called the emancipation of woman, by which he merely meant more independence in home life and in marriage. By all these authors certain distinguished women were held in high honour--in France, George Sand, by whom they were strongly influenced; in Germany, Rahel, Bettina, Charlotte Stieglitz.

They all talked much and loudly of the rights of youth, had all imbibed a certain faith in liberty from Hegel, and all owed their general political tendency to the Revolution of July. Their aim was to identify literature with life, as Hegel had reconciled idea with reality. They had no really profound sympathy with each other, and they soon went each his own way. They were widely enough separated as regarded their places of residence. Heine lived in Paris, Weinbarg at Kiel--entirely isolated; Gutzkow resided in South Germany, Mundt was in Berlin, Laube in Leipzig; and the distances separating these places were very considerable then. Laube was very soon in many ways an opponent of Gutzkow, and a cold, unpleasant critic of Mundt and Kühne. Mundt attacked Gutzkow. An accidental meeting between Laube and Gutzkow in the north of Italy in 1833 contributed to their estrangement rather than their reconcilement. There was no other community between these writers than that usually existing between men of the same age and calling; they were much less a political party than a literary coterie; nevertheless literature was not to them its own aim and end; they desired to devote themselves to the service of the spirit of the age.[1]

This was the reason why they did not occupy themselves with the pure forms of literary art, neither with epic nor with lyric poetry, and but sparingly with dramatic. They all idolised the "Zeitgeist" (spirit of the times), and did homage to it in journalism and fiction, in critical and argumentative essays, in fanciful descriptions of travel, after the pattern of Heine's and Prince Pückler-Muskau's, and at times in long-winded novels.

The most able of them all was undoubtedly Karl Gutzkow, born in Berlin in 1811, a man of a tireless, energetic, inquiring spirit, absorbed in the thousand problems of modern life, a cross between an analytical critic and a poet, but a man to whom nothing came of itself and who achieved nothing with ease. His personality had no charm, his youth no freshness, his prose no rhythm. But he was bold, inventive, intelligent, and enterprising. He had the gift of pathos, but not the lyric gift; his style was effective, but unmelodious. His mind was specially open to ideas, to all the thoughts and spiritual movements that were abroad at that day. By nature he belonged to the ungainly, but his literary enthusiasm was so genuine, his ambition so great, and his will so strong, that he gradually became an intellectual centre and diffused his influence in many directions. There was a time, about the year 1840, when a great part of what was best in German literature took its tone from him and his adherents.

We saw how it was the Revolution of July that awakened in him a desire to write. The following year, the great year of dismissals, imprisonments, and banishments in Prussia, put the pen into his hand. It was a time when every word underwent the strictest censorship; even the advertisements in the _Intelligenzblatt_ were carefully examined, in case they might contain some hidden political meaning.

Gutzkow began by publishing a newspaper, _Forum der Journallitteratur_. He had been brought up on the Hegelian idea of the progress of the world towards ever greater liberty. As Gottschall has expressed it: "There swam before his eyes a constant succession of political sunrises and world-liberating theories." His newspaper reached a circulation of seventy copies, and was then given up.

Wolfgang Menzel, at that time the acknowledged master of German criticism, had repeatedly invited Gutzkow to come to Stuttgart and assist him in the editorship of his _Litteraturblatt_, as he himself, having been elected a member of the Würtemberg Parliament, was no longer able to conduct it alone.

In spite of his hatred of Goethe, nay, partly because of it, Menzel, at this period of his career, was revered by the youth of Germany much as Katkóf and Ploug in their first periods were revered in Russia and Denmark. He, above all others, was to them the man of the day, the friend of liberty. One of Gutzkow's aims in his newspaper had been to defend Menzel, the man after his own heart, against the attacks of his enemies--and Menzel had many enemies, for as a reviewer he was disputatious, quarrelsome, and abusive. But he was, or seemed to be, a man of sincere convictions. He urged the necessity for a profounder conception of patriotism and of religion than was then in vogue, but at the same time he was an ardent Liberal in politics, and as such an admirer of Börne and Heine, who looked upon him as a trusty companion in arms; in Parliament he championed all progressive measures, amongst others the emancipation of the Jews.

Gutzkow, not yet much over twenty, short, slight, fair, and pale-faced, entered the presence of his lord and master, who was thirteen years older than himself, with a bashful reverence which he has compared to that of the student who appears before Mephistopheles-Faust in the first part of Goethe's drama. He saw a man with broad shoulders, a well developed chest, and dark hair, whose clean-shaven face reminded him of a Romish priest's. Round the mouth, with its ugly yellow teeth, a satiric smile played; the expression of the short-sighted eyes behind the spectacles was half defiant, half dignified. The man's temper seemed to be violent, his will inflexible. An expression of faun-like sensuality would come over his features when he talked of some erotic book, and yet Goethe's worldliness was as hateful to him as his indifference to politics, and he uncritically bowed the knee to men and phenomena that to his mind represented the mysterious. His character was a genuine priestly blend of irony and mysticism. He loved Voltaire, and enthusiastically admired Görres.

Master and pupil agreed well at first, both in their social and in their business relations. Gutzkow, who lived now in one, now in another of the towns in the neighbourhood of Stuttgart, indefatigably reviewed the great parcels of books sent him by Menzel. He soon caught the brisk, sweeping journalistic style, and all went well. The youthful works which he himself published, naturally found a more than lenient critic in Menzel. Yet they were poor enough. _Briefe eines Narren an eine Närrin_ ("Letters from a Male to a Female Fool") are humorous effusions without originality, in a style which is partly an imitation of Jean Paul, partly of Heine; and _Maha Guru, the History of a God_, the description of the psychological condition of a Tibetan who is made Dalai-Lama and consequently worshipped as a divinity, is a piece of fantastic writing, now totally unreadable. Yet Menzel, when reviewing this latter book, chose from amongst the vignettes which alternately figured on the title-page of his review, a laurel wreath, and had Gutzkow's name twice printed within its circle.

Gutzkow's intention in _Maha Guru_ was to show how the god who is supposed to be incarnated in the Dalai-Lama is subordinated to the man in him, the false divinity being completely thrown into the shade by the true nobility, true divinity of the human being. But besides this, the book was intended to be a philosophical-satirical romance in the old style, representing home institutions in foreign guise. The Tibetan theocracy was intended to suggest the European hierarchy, the Tibetan polyandry the European emancipation of woman. The foreign scenery, which Gutzkow had never seen, the foreign customs, which were not described for their own sake, could not interest. The book was suggested to him by the story of the French atheist, Billaud-Varennes, who escaped the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, took refuge in America, and was there worshipped by the Indians as a god. His skill in catching, training, and stuffing birds made such an impression on them that they looked upon him as a second creator. But all this had little to do with Tibet, and the would-be gravity of Gutzkow's theme.

Up to this time Young Germany and its fathers had not seemed to Menzel to be sacrilegious scoffers or bad patriots. Gutzkow's irreligion so far had not disturbed the good relations between him and his master. Menzel himself praised Börne's _Letters from Paris_, which were attacked on all sides, as manly utterances, and excused their strong expressions as outbursts of feeling which must not be too roughly dealt with; he compared them to the glow-worms which shine so beautifully on mild summer nights, but which turn into poor little grey insects when seized by rough hands.

But it was inevitable that the tie between Gutzkow and Menzel should soon be loosed. From the first Gutzkow had received warnings not to involve himself too deeply with the Stuttgart author. Hegel himself, who took an interest in the young man, had said to him: "How can any one bind himself to a man like that?" The first disagreement between them was on the subject of Menzel's attitude to the South German lyric poets, the so-called Swabian school, followers of Uhland, a poet who not only enjoyed the fame which he most undoubtedly deserved, but a far greater. As a good Swabian, Menzel esteemed and supported these men--Gustav Schwab, Gustav Pfizer, Karl Mayer, &c.--as bulwarks of conventional piety and morality. But Gutzkow, with his keen sense of what was the life-idea of the time, Gutzkow, to whom literature was the church militant, had the greatest objection to such Sunday afternoon, gilt-edged poets, men who put into rhyme old, dead ballad themes, or their own petty, sentimental feelings, whilst they were cautiously watching over their interests as government servants aspiring to professorships or consistory counsellorships.

When _Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann_ appeared, it became known how severely Goethe had judged his admirer Uhland's poetry. He would hear of nothing but the ballads, considering all the rest unworthy of notice. And a most contemptuously disparaging verdict upon the whole Swabian school, from Uhland to Pfizer, was presently published in _Goethe's Correspondence with Zelter_: he (Goethe) had never expected anything fresh or capable from that quarter; the fellows concealed their want of genius under the moral-religious-poetical beggar's cloak.[2]

After this Gutzkow took courage and proclaimed that to him also this antiquated pastoral and cloistral Romanticism was an abomination. In an essay entitled _Goethe, Uhland, und Prometheus_ he made a violent attack on those poets who sought and "found their creed in their certificates of baptism, their morals in conventionality, their principles in established custom, and their poetry in the poetry of other people." What have you to offer us? he cried. Evening walks in the setting sun. Where is your effort to keep pace with the times?

Meanwhile the reaction against the Revolution of July was in full progress everywhere. The policy of Prussia, as well as that of Austria, was controlled by Metternich; and when the youth of Germany began to understand on what side the power and the energy were, and probably would be for long to come, they went over to that side. Gutzkow says, that out of every hundred students at the University of Berlin at that time, ninety-seven were strong Conservatives; and every meeting with an old school or college companion, more especially if he happened to be a civil servant or an officer, left a most painful impression on his mind.

In such circumstances it often happens that high-spirited, able young men lose their heads and commit rash actions for which they are blamed all their lives.

Schleiermacher was dead, laid to rest with great ceremonial, mourned as a father of the Protestant Church, one of the saints of theology. It had long ago been said, and well said, of him, that his character answered to his name (Schleiermacher = veilmaker). By dint of ambiguities and uncertain utterances he had kept himself popular to the end of his days. No one had brought up against him that Romantic sin of his youth, the _Vertrauliche Briefe um Lucinde_ ("Confidential Letters on the Subject of Lucinde.")

But now Gutzkow, who erroneously concluded that this forgotten book would be omitted from the edition of Schleiermacher's works then in preparation, could not resist the temptation to republish it, and to defend himself and his friends against the perpetual accusations of godless immorality by showing that their erotic views, and even their doctrine of the rehabilitation of the flesh, had been held by that man of God who was the revered lord and master of the theologians.

This might have been a good tactical move if the youth, for he was still only twenty-three, had not written a foolish, boyish preface to the book. In it he addresses himself to the "watchmen of Zion," scoffs at their sanctimoniousness and spiritual coquetry, and thus adjures them:--"For one moment cast your priestly robes from you, forget that a man whom you still perpetually crucify was God, and listen to what happened once on a time elsewhere, in the world of liberty, youth, and fancy!"

What had happened was the publication of Schlegel's _Lucinde_, that lewd skeleton, which in Gutzkow's eyes is glorious and classic, and of Schleiermacher's letters about it, which in Gutzkow's estimation are divine. The Letters speak for themselves. They absurdly over-estimate _Lucinde_, but the genuine human feeling in them is beautiful and courageous. In Gutzkow's preface everything is emphasised in a disagreeably defiant manner. He avers that love is of the nature of genius, maintains that priestly action neither adds to nor takes from the sacredness of marriage, tauntingly declaims against the cold prose of the ordinary marriage, "the water-soup weddings, the sordid procreation of children and struggle for mouldy bread." He winds up flippantly with: "Now tell me truly, Rosalie! Is it not since you have worn spurs on your little silk boots, since I have taught you how to throw your cloak over your shoulder, since I have invented a new sort of inexpressibles for you, so that every one takes you to be my youngest, dearly loved brother, is it not since then that you know what I meant by: I love you?" And not content with this female wearer of breeches, who is the realisation of his idea of the emancipation of woman, Gutzkow last of all plays out an atheistic trump; "Where is Franz?--Come here, dear boy. I know they baptized you secretly. Who is God? What! you don't know, you innocent atheist, you philosophic child! Oh, if the world too had only not known about God, how much happier it would have been!"

No specially acute critical faculty is needed to detect the unreality in this student's braggadocio. The original of the Rosalie who was to follow Gutzkow about in page's dress was more probably the Kaled of Byron's _Lara_ than any Heidelberg or Berlin seamstress. It is easy to imagine what effect such a preface to such a book would produce on the general public and on orthodox journalism.

Only a drop was needed to fill the cup of public indignation, and that drop Gutzkow did not fail to add. In 1835 he wrote _Wally, die Zweiflerin_ ("The Sceptic"), which is an exceedingly weak story, with a positively burlesque crucial episode, but which nevertheless influenced the course of events more powerfully than any other German literary work of the day.

Strauss's _Life of Jesus_ had lately come out, and its resolution of the historical element in that life into myths, bold and fanciful to the verge of folly as the hypothesis was, had violently perturbed the thinking minds of Germany. Indignation was universal. A thousand-voiced cry of condemnation rose from the Eider to Switzerland. For many a year, in the public mind, there was a dark stain on the name of David Strauss.

The book was talked about everywhere, and Gutzkow one evening began to discuss its problem with a young girl to whom he was attached. "Don't let us talk about that," she said, "the very thought drives me mad!" These words made a strong impression on him.

Strauss's book itself had not satisfied him. Rationalist as he was, he felt the need for a historic Jesus, and betook himself to the study of Reimarus's old _Wolfenbüttel Fragments_, to which Lessing before him had devoted so much attention. He determined to publish a selection from these, but it was in vain that he applied with this intention to the most courageous of the German publishers, Campe. In spite of his bold political attitude, Campe dared not expose himself to the rancour of the Hamburg clergy, Pastor Goetze's successors in the cure of souls.

It was about this time that the noble Charlotte Stieglitz committed suicide. The impression produced by this tragic event combined itself in Gutzkow's mind with the impressions made by his young friend's remark and by Reimarus's Biblical criticism--and _Wally, the Sceptic_, was the result.

It is a childish book, this _Wally_, but it is innocent, honest, and artless. The heroine is a young lady moving in good society, who, in despair at not being able to overcome the religious doubts awakened in her mind by the man she loves, the sceptical, _blasé_ Cæsar, kills herself with a dagger.

Gutzkow had been unable to withstand the temptation of reminding the venerable lights and defenders of the Church, the dignitaries of all the different classes of the Order of the Red Eagle, that there had once lived men named Hume, Voltaire, Lessing, &c. There was something fascinating to a young man in the idea of reminding such grand folks of such forgotten existences. But it ought to have been done with talent. In Gutzkow's novel the plot was a mere excuse for ventilating theories, _Wally_ was a weak imitation of _Lélia_, the last novel which George Sand had published.

But its author was in the spring-tide of his youth. It seemed to him as if the whole world were growing young again. The glow of Hegel's sinking sun still illuminated the horizon, Bettina arose like a morning star, the ever-young wisdom of Rahel was scattered abroad over the earth after her death like fruitful dew, Lenau's and Rückert's early poems were like the song of the lark, Ruge's first critical articles and Feuerbach's first philosophic writings were like fresh spring breezes that cleared the air--the time seemed to him so sunny, so promising, so laden with fruit, that it was as it were symbolised by the two glorious summers of 1834 and 1835, with their rich harvests of corn and wine. And it was then he committed his first great youthful blunder.

He was not satisfied with embodying his religious heterodoxy in his book; he also proclaimed his moral heterodoxy, his defiance of the accepted code of sexual morality--a very clumsy and immature defiance. But the best idea of how very innocently Gutzkow interpreted that watchword, "the emancipation of the flesh," which he himself employs, is to be gained from the notorious scene in _Wally_, which was intended by the author to express his worship of beauty.

Wally loves Cæsar and is loved by him, but they cannot marry each other, because Wally has been obliged to betroth herself to the Sardinian ambassador. Cæsar entreats her that she will as it were symbolically celebrate a spiritual marriage with him by showing herself to him in all her naked beauty the night before her wedding. In an old German ballad, the heroine, Sigune, thus displays herself to Tchionatulander.