Part 29

The earnest, impressive tone of the pamphlet, its appeal to the people's sense of justice and self-respect, aroused a keen desire to know the name of the anonymous author. He himself had sent his book to the king, with his name written on the title page: Dr. Johann Jacoby, physician in Königsberg. The king at once ordered criminal proceedings to be instituted against him. It appeared that he was a man of means, and a very highly esteemed physician. In 1831, during the first and most violent epidemic of cholera in Poland, he had gone there to study the disease. At a later period he had had a protracted quarrel with a Warsaw doctor, a regular quack, who, when the cholera broke out again in 1837, advertised his discovery of an infallible remedy for "this trivial, easily curable disease." Jacoby wrote a short scientific article in disparagement of this man. The quack wrote an answer full of insulting imputations, which he published in the Berlin newspapers. By the help of influential friends he not only managed to secure the prohibition of the publication of Jacoby's retort, but also to defeat the latter's successive appeals to the Berlin censor's superior, to the highest council of censorship, to Rochow, the Secretary of State, and to the king himself. The publishers in Hamburg, Leipzig, Grimma, Basle, and Berne, one and all refused to print the documents throwing light on this affair. Any other man would now have given up the attempt to get his reply to an attack in a contemptible newspaper article published. Not so Jacoby. Month followed upon month. The manuscript travelled thousands of miles, and was published at last in Paris, under the title of _Contribution to a Future Historical Account of the Censorship of the Press in Prussia_.

Such was Jacoby's character. Here at last was found what Young Germany so sorely needed, what even Youngest Germany with its Herwegh had not produced, that first essential in public life--a man. At last the Germany of the Forties had found a strong political leader--not a statesman in the proper sense of the word, for time showed that he was incapable of accommodating himself to circumstances, that he could not be satisfied with aiming at the attainable; but a man of inflexible will, of absolute integrity, who with indomitable courage pressed onwards to his goal.

The Government organs, the libellous press, began a systematic attack upon him. There was nothing to lay hold of in his blameless personality, but he was of Jewish descent. In a little pamphlet published by the local magnates of a small town in the neighbourhood of Königsberg under the title of _Stimme treuer Unterthanen seiner Majestät des Königs von Preussen_ ("Voice of a Few Faithful Subjects of his Majesty the King of Prussia"), we read: "Not from German, not from Christian lips did these words proceed.... East-Prussia would be disgraced if her sons had expressed such sentiments.... The seed of Jacob did not hearken to the voice of God, did not acknowledge his only begotten son, but put him to death; therefore they were cast off for ever, and scattered abroad among the nations of the earth." Presently, however, in all the booksellers' windows the portrait of Jacoby was to be seen; his face, with its clear-cut features, was surrounded by four marks of interrogation; he held his pen like a lance poised for attack.

The significance of the man who thus made his appearance was felt by the poets, even by those with least strength of character, even by Dingelstedt, who was then preparing to barter his oppositionist principles for the title of _Hofrath_ (Privy Councillor). In Dingelstedt's fine collection of poems, _Nachtwächters Weltgang_, we find one with the heading: ????, evidently addressed to the King of Prussia:

"Du weisst, was das bedeuten will? Du wirst sie mir nicht streichen? Es sind ja nur unschuldige--vier kleine Fragezeichen. Die wurzeln tief, die ragen hoch; wie die gerühmten Eichen Des freien deutschen Volkes stehn vier kleine Fragezeichen. Du wolltest sie zwar nimmer sehn in deinen weiten Reichen, Doch drängen sie sich immer auf, vier kleine Fragezeichen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Und einst, wenn du gestorben bist, als Stempel dann und Aichen Stehn gross an deinem Monument--vier kleine Fragezeichen."[10]

[10] You know the meaning of these marks? You would never dream of erasing them--four innocent little marks of interrogation? Yet they strike deep root, they mount towards heaven, like the oak, the emblem of the great, free German nation. You have done your best to annihilate them throughout your wide realms, but they persistently appear again, these four little marks of interrogation.... In years to come, when you are dead, there will stand as sign and symbol on your monument--four little marks of interrogation.

Herwegh, too, sang Jacoby's praises, as if he had a prevision that this was a man who, placed face to face with the King of Prussia, would play a more manly part than he himself had done. And the prevision was correct In November 1848, when the king replied to the deputation that waited on him to demand a change of ministers: "I will not listen to any communication on this subject," it was Jacoby who stepped forward and said: "It is the great misfortune of kings, that they will not listen to the truth." Herwegh's poem, which has a J. as headings, begins:

"Und wieder ob den Landen Lag jüngst ein schwerer Bann: Da ist ein Mann erstanden, Ein ganzer, deutscher Mann. Ein deutscher und ein freier, Wer hätte das gedacht! Dass selbst die deutsche Leier Aus ihrem Schlaf erwacht."[11]

[11] Our country in these latter days lay under a heavy ban; but, behold! there arose to deliver her one who with truth could be called a man. A German, and a freeman--who could have dreamt it? who could have looked for this awakening of the German lyre?

The proceedings against Jacoby were carried on with extraordinary vigour. In less than four weeks he was brought up for examination twenty times; ninety-six witnesses gave evidence, shop-women, cooks, and school-children among the number. His real misdemeanour was merely a transgression of the press-laws, namely circumvention of censorship. But he was accused of instigation to disaffection--for which the punishment was two years' imprisonment and disfranchisement; of _lèse-majesté_--for which the punishment was four years' penal servitude; and of high treason--punishment, "death, with application of the most severe and deterrent pains and penalties."

It was in his native town, Königsberg, that Jacoby was brought to trial; but the court there declared itself incompetent to deal with the case, seeing that it was one of high treason, and passed it on to the Kammergericht in Berlin. The Kammergericht, aware that the charge of high treason was untenable, also declared itself unqualified, and sent it back. The king was obliged to issue an order in council, requiring the Königsberg court to proceed with the trial. It was altogether to Jacoby's advantage to be tried by his fellow-citizens; but he disdained the idea of an illegal acquittal, and obstinately demanded to be tried by the Kammergericht in Berlin, since he was accused of high treason. His wish had to be complied with. He was condemned to two and a half years' imprisonment with hard labour and disfranchisement. But three years later the highest court of appeal pronounced a full and free acquittal.

In the meantime all over Germany money was collected to present him with a civic wreath; subscriptions poured in; the names of eminent men headed the lists. Once more the Government was obliged to take action; the subscription lists were seized, the subscribers summoned, and a stop put to the whole proceeding. While the police and the censors were thus struggling to suppress the agitation for a free constitution, there was issued, on the 11th of August 1842, the most absurd regulation of which there is any record in the annals of an autocratically governed country--one of the country's own existing laws was added to the list of prohibited writings; it was forbidden to reprint the law of the 22nd of May 1815 (that relating to the institution of Estates of the Realm), because of its tendency to excite discontent.

In September 1842, those Prussians who had hoped to see their country under the new king shake itself free from its humiliating relations with the Emperor Nicholas, learned that Frederick William IV., in Platen's day the warm, if platonic, friend of Poland, the hater of Russian tactics, was preparing for a journey to Warsaw to meet the Czar. On the return journey the king stopped at Kalisch to inspect the monument erected there in memory of the meeting between the sovereigns of Russia and Prussia in 1813. A Russian officer, General Berg (the future castigator of Poland), translated the inscriptions for him. One of them was: "May the Almighty give His blessing to the alliance and friendship between Russia and Prussia, that it may advance the peace and prosperity of both countries and inspire fear in their common enemies!" On hearing this inscription read, the king hastened up the steps of the monument and in the dust upon its side wrote with his finger the word: Amen![12]

[12] Prutz: _Zehn Jahre_, i. pp. 237, 367, 516, &c.

XXV

THE NEUTRAL LITERATURE

Nevertheless, Frederick William IV. was, and remained, the most intellectually gifted monarch of his day; his conversation gave evidence of both intelligence and imagination. It was a principle with him that all his feelings ought to be kingly; his published letters to Humboldt, written in amusing court jargon, are bright and clever; his sayings show quickness of apprehension, easily awakened compassion, ready wit.[1] Nor can it be said that he was out of touch with the German intellectual life and literature of the day; he showed favour to all the "good" writers, and disfavour to the "bad"; but it was not long before all Oppositionist writers were included in the latter class.

In the beginning of the reign, Humboldt's was the dominating literary influence at court. Alexander von Humboldt, now eighty, the most famous scientist of the day, and a man of world-wide celebrity, kept the king well posted up in all the latest intellectual and scientific movements. His brother Wilhelm's liberal political theories had fallen into complete disrepute; to his own he dared not give expression at court; holding both superstition and reaction in abhorrence, he was a silent witness of much that was repugnant to him, though he now and again spoke his mind.[2] Honoured by the king and his intimates as the ornament of the court and the pride of his country, he took advantage of his position to further the cause of science and to say an occasional helpful word for this or that persecuted author. Published letters show that, before 1848, the king treated Humboldt with a sort of playful familiarity, though there was no real, deep sympathy between the two men. After 1848, when the Kreuzzeitung party became all-powerful, Humboldt gave expression to his annoyance at having lost his influence, in such remarks as, "It is no longer possible to amuse the king;" or, "the king persists in wasting fruitless affection on persons whom he has taken into favour." Amiability was not his characteristic at court; he was often sarcastic, and became angry when Ranke's political opinions found more favour than his. He was disliked by many, amongst others by the queen, who disapproved of his attachment to Louis Philippe and his family. He was in the habit of reading aloud all varieties of literature, but never his own writings; most frequently he read the _Journal des Débats_, whilst the king sat planning landscapes and architectural drawings.

Another of those who read aloud to the royal family was Tieck, whom the king had brought to Berlin from Dresden. Though Tieck was considerably younger than Humboldt, court life was a burden to him because of his bodily infirmity. Shakespeare and Kleist were the authors he most frequently read from. The king ordered Tieck's own old fairy play, _Puss in Boots_, to be performed in Berlin, it was like the appearance of some antiquated spectre. At the king's instigation Tieck put the _Antigone_ of Sophocles on the stage, and Mendelssohn composed music for it. But Tieck was only one of literature's invalided soldiers. When the court dined in the garden of Sans Souci, he was afraid of draughts, even on the warmest days.

Another once famous author of the Romantic period whom the king called to Berlin was La Motte Fouqué. Though not much over sixty, this writer had completely outlived his reputation. His romances seemed to the younger generation to belong to a pre-historic period. People were tired of tales of chivalry and the service of love (_Minnedienst_) told in a conventionally childish style; his unhistorical conception of past times and his sanctimoniousness aroused derision. Had it not been for the king's support, he would have died in want and oblivion.

In 1841, chiefly on the recommendation of Varnhagen, the king invited to Berlin a great poet who did not belong to the Romantic school. This was Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866). Rückert was only fifty-three, but he did not belong to the period in which he lived; he was the expression in the literature of the day of that German universality which is unaffected by circumstances, of the gift of appropriation, absorption and imitation of the peculiarities of all other races. All his life long he shook poems out of his sleeve with a truly astonishing skill. As a young man he was initiated by Joseph von Hammer into the literatures of Arabia, Persia, and Turkey, and in 1826 he was appointed lecturer in Oriental languages at the University of Erlangen, but his duties as lecturer he constantly tried to evade.

There is something about him which reminds us of Goethe in the Divan period, and something which he owes to the Schlegels and their indefatigable study and translation. The essay on philology, _Ueber das Wesen der Philologie_, which he wrote in 1811, shows the influence of Friedrich Schlegel's work on the wisdom of ancient India; for he starts from the idea of a "universal poetry," for which he considers the German language the most sympathetic vehicle. And universal, cosmopolitan poetry is exactly what this great master of style has given us. He, as the German patriot, makes his début with _Geharnischte Sonnette_ ("Armoured Sonnets"), polished and rather mannered verse. This book is followed by volume after volume of love-poems to various young women (five to six hundred poems). In the last and largest of these volumes, _Liebesfrühling_, inscribed to his fiancée, Louise Witthaus, feeling is predominant; everywhere else he is the didactic poet employing lyric forms, here he is the singer. But even here, set forms--as in the _Canzonets of the South_--stand in the way of the simple, natural outburst of feeling, and already Rückert's inclination to display his mastery over language shows itself in a hitherto unexampled free invention of new words and ease in interlacing within the limits of metre:

"Welche Heldenfreudigkeit der Liebe, Welche Stärke muthigen Entsagens, Welche himmlisch erdentschwungene Triebe, Welche Gottbegeistrung des Ertragens! Welche Sich-Erhebung, Sich-Erwiedrung, Sich-Entäussrung, völl'ge Hin-sich-gebung, Seelenaustausch, Ineinanderlebung!"

There is more of philological and technical than of purely poetical interest in such verse as this. But Rückert _was_ the philologist as poet. His predominating gift is the gift of language in its two developments--the capacity to learn languages and penetrate into their spirit, and the capacity, due to his profound penetration into the mysteries of his own language, to reproduce in German the best poetry written in other languages. He delighted in creating linguistic difficulties for himself to overcome. At one time we have him writing in the old German style that corresponded to his Albrecht Dürer curls, at another as a young officer of the time of Napoleon; now he is a Bedouin telling us Hariri's tales with marvellous skill, and again a Persian weaving his rhyme in the form of Ghazels or recreating the epic of Rustum and Sohrab. He appears before us as a Turk in caftan and turban, as a Chinaman with slippers and pig-tail; but most frequently and with most pleasure he sits as a Brahmin on the banks of the sacred Ganges, proclaiming in sonorous verse the thousand golden rules of a happy philosophy of life. It is said of Théophile Gautier that he was, intellectually speaking, equally at home in ancient Egypt, in the Russia of to-day, in Constantinople, and in Seville. This is only true to the extent that he was well acquainted with the climatic characteristics and the monuments of many foreign lands. It may be said with much profounder truth of Rückert, who comprehended the human beings through their literatures, understood their language and thought in their spirit. He never saw the foreign lands with his bodily eyes, therefore he has neither Gautier's colour, nor his power of graphic presentation; he views them all calmly, reflectively, with the eye of the mind, and gives us the mental pictures in an astonishing variety of metrical forms. Whoever desires to make acquaintance with excellent specimens of his art should read _Hariri's Makamehs_ (more particularly the division entitled _Jungfrau und Junge Frau_) or _Weisheit der Bramanen_.

These works had gained Rückert a wide circle of readers and admirers in Berlin; but the town, with its restlessness, was antipathetic to him. He was to lecture on Oriental languages at the university, and his first lectures were attended by a curious crowd; but this crowd soon dwindled down to an audience of two or three, and Rückert gave up going to the university. He sat in his room in the third flat of a house in the Behrenstrasse and wrote poems in which he expressed his detestation of Berlin and its agitated, modern life. Even the Berlin of the royal romanticist was too modern for these celebrities of past days.

At a somewhat later date the king extended his patronage to Christian Scherenberg, whose poems, more especially the battle-pieces _Waterloo_ and _Abukir_, were much admired at court--the author himself had to read them aloud. Even as an octogenarian, Scherenberg retained his place as a favourite in Berlin society. He was born in 1798. His life had been a hard struggle. After the dissolution of his unhappy marriage, he lived, from 1833 to 1840, in rooms in a small house at the corner of the Bendlerstrasse, looking towards the Zoological Gardens, in such poverty that he could not afford to buy firewood, and had to send his children to gather sticks in the Gardens. He wrote poems, tragedies, and comedies, for which he could never find a publisher; nevertheless he was so successful in his attempts to keep up the appearance of a gentleman, that his relations in Stettin believed he had won fame under an assumed name, and begged him to "remove his mask" and let them into the secret. All that his pen brought him was what he received for composing begging letters and for copying; the rest of his living he gained by acting as tutor to the families of the gardeners who lived in the neighbourhood, giving lessons which, according to agreement, were paid for in potatoes. A pretty story is told by Fontane in his _Life of Scherenberg_. Great hopes had been entertained in the Bendlerstrasse that a certain long-deferred payment would be made at Easter in the shape of a juicy roast of veal; but in place of this, the pupil, in his innocent desire to give pleasure, appeared with a lark in a little green cage. On Easter morning, 1840, Scherenberg himself carried the cage out to an open field, set the lark free, and wrote the sweet poem, one verse of which runs:

"Du, Vöglein, singst, das ist das Deine, Hub leise ich zur Lerche an, Ich geb' dich frei, das ist das Meine, Ein Jeder bete, wie er kann."[3]

The poor, struggling poet let the lark go, but kept its little clay water-dish as a remembrance, promoting it to be his ink-pot.

At last his poems caught the fancy of the public, and the king, delighted with the originality and rugged energy of the battle-pieces, took their author into favour. The only thing connected with the time when he read aloud at court that Scherenberg could be persuaded to talk about, was the pleasure of the half-hour before the reading, spent in his friend Count Bismarck-Bohlen's room, where men joked and smoked, and afterwards drenched themselves with Eau de Cologne, because the king disliked the smell of tobacco. Many years later there was another potentate in Berlin at whose court Scherenberg was an attendant. This was Ferdinand Lassalle. At his house the poet met livelier companions, in whose society he not infrequently permitted himself to make fun of his royal and aristocratic patrons. It was in his nature to suit himself to his company; his court friends knew his weakness and excused him.

Another favourite at the Prussian court, as indeed at all the courts of Europe, was Prince Hermann Pückler-Muskau, who from time to time came to Berlin to visit the wife whom, though divorced from her, he still loved. He was a handsome man, aristocratic in appearance and manners, accomplished and versatile, a favourite with men because of his spirit and gaiety, irresistibly charming to women; the list of famous women who were devoted to him is a long one; it includes Sophie Gay, Henriette Sontag, Bettina, and Ida Hahn-Hahn. In much the same manner as the Prince de Ligne before him, Pückler-Muskau belonged, by right of his intellectual qualities, to the international aristocracy of Europe. His desire to shine did not lead him to over-estimate his powers, did not even preclude real modesty. He was a brilliant vagabond, a master of the art of living, and a skilled professional in one department of art strictly so-called, namely, landscape gardening. He was the first in Germany to desert the stiff, French style of laying out a garden, and to reinstate nature in her rights. His garden at Muskau soon became the model garden of Europe.

There were many strange episodes in his life. Nothing could be much stranger than the story of his marriage. He was in love at the same time with two young girls, daughters of Count von Pappenheim, whose wife was a daughter of Chancellor Hardenberg. This lady, who was forty, nine years older than Pückler, herself conceived such a violent passion for him that she infected him with it. She gave up everything to become his, and he married her, but with the proviso that he was to be at complete liberty to dispose of his affections as he chose. The marriage turned out happily. But after they had lived together for ten years the couple amicably arranged a divorce, in the hope that the prince might find and marry a rich heiress, and thereby repair his fallen fortunes. With this aim in view he first visits London, then travels about in Germany. He writes daily to his divorced wife, his Lucie, keeping her faithfully informed of the progress he makes and of the difficulties he encounters in his pursuit of an heiress. Unable to capture one, he returns to Lucie, and they again live lovingly together for some years. After this he travels for six years, returning at the end of that time with a beautiful little slave, named Machbuba, whom he instals at Muskau. With this arrangement the princess was not altogether satisfied, though she had made it a rule never to plague him with jealousy. At the age of seventy she still loved and worshipped him, and in his intercourse with her he was always personified kindness, frankness, and cordiality.