Part 7

In his periodical, _Deutsche Litteratur_, he began, in 1819, an attack upon Goethe, which he carried on with insane conceit and immovable faith in the justice of his cause. He first tried to undermine the admiration of the reading world for Goethe's originality, examined his works with the aim of discovering imitations or plagiarisms, and demonstrated the existence of foreign influence everywhere throughout them.

In his first connected work on the history of literature, _Die deutsche Litteratur_, which was published in 1828, in two parts, he calmly accuses Goethe of having flattered all the prejudices and vanities of his time. He declares him to be possessed of nothing more than great descriptive ability, great "talent," which is a thing unattended by inward conviction, "a hetaira, who is at every one's beck and call." Goethe has always, he declares, swum with the stream, and on its surface, like a cork; he has ministered to every weakness and folly that happened to be in fashion; under the fair mask of his works a refinement of sensuality lies concealed; these works are the blossom of that materialism which prevails in the modern world. Goethe has no genius, but a very high degree of "the talent for making his readers his accomplices," &c, &c.[2] Heine, who was uncritical enough in his review of the book to praise both it and its author--praise which he was soon to regret--would have nothing to say to Menzel's doctrine that Goethe's gift was not genius, only talent. He expresses the opinion that this doctrine will be accepted by few, "and even these few will confess that Goethe at times had the talent to be a genius."[3]

Menzel continued the cannonade in his numerous contributions to periodicals, and in a new, very much enlarged, edition of his work on German literature. He convicts Goethe of three distinct kinds of personal vanity and six kinds of voluptuousness ("dreierlei Eitelkeiten und sechserlei Wollüsteleien"). He analyses his works, great and small, one by one, measures them by his own patriotic standard, and declares them to be despicable. _Clavigo_ he condemns, because Goethe makes Clavigo desert Marie. That he afterwards makes him die by the hand of her brother goes for nothing, in fact is only an additional cause of offence to Menzel, who knows that in real life Clavigo lived on happily, which make his death on the stage a mere _coup de théâtre._[4] To find sufficient immorality in the play, the critic must, we observe, take advantage of his knowledge of circumstances that do not concern it. _Tasso_ is to him Goethe's _Höflingsbekenntniss_ ("Confessions of a Courtier"), in which he betrays the vanity of the _parvenu_, to whom the high rank of a woman is an irresistible attraction.[5] The reader will have no difficulty in imagining for himself all the moral reflections for which Menzel finds occasion in _Die Mitschuldigen_, in _Die Geschwister_, where "voluptuousness casts sidelong glances at the pretty sister," in _Stella_, where it craves the excitement of bigamy ("nach dem Reiz der Bigamie gelüstet") and in the _Mann von fünfzig Jahren_, which is the special object of his indignation. Even _Wilhelm Meister_ is to Menzel only an expression of the shamefully light esteem in which Goethe held true virtue, and the strong attraction which the outward conditions of rank possessed for him.[6] _Die Wahlverwandschaften_ he regards as the type of "the novel of adultery," which takes for its theme the desire of voluptuousness after untried sensations ("die Wollüstelei, die das Fremde begehrt"). _Die Braut von Korinth_ is simply the expression of the voluptuousness whose desire is set on corpses, "die sogar noch in den Schauern des Grabes, in der Buhlerei mit schönen Gespenstern einen _haut goût_ des Genusses findet"--(which even amidst the horrors of the grave finds a _haut goût_ of sensual enjoyment in intercourse with beautiful spectres).

Where it is impossible to bring an accusation of immorality, Menzel returns to his accusation of want of originality. It is not only its glorification of middle-class Philistinism that stamps _Hermann und Dorothea_ as an inferior work, but also the direct imitation of Voss's _Luise_. According to Menzel, Goethe showed real originality only in _Faust_ and _Wilhelm Meister_, because in these two works he copied himself. In his youth he borrowed from Moliere and Beaumarchais, from Shakespeare and Lessing, and his later iambic tragedies are "the fruits of his rivalry with Schiller." Added to all this, he was, God knows, no patriot.

Let us compare Börne's attacks on Goethe with Menzel's, and we shall find, in spite of similar extravagance of expression, this great difference, that Börne does not attempt to judge, still less to condemn Goethe's great works, nor does he condescend to accusations of sexual immorality; he invariably confines himself to attacking Goethe in his political relations. Saint-René Taillandier correctly observes that Börne gave expression to everything that was rankling in his heart when he took as motto for his review of Bettina's _Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde_ ("Goethe's Correspondence with a Child"), these words from _Prometheus_:

"Ich dich ehren? Wofür? Hast du die Schmerzen gelindert Je des Beladenen? Hast du die Thränen gestillet Je des Geängsteten?"[7]

Though he could only appreciate those of Goethe's works in which the fire of youth was perceptible, his attacks are not based on contempt for the other works, but on the fact that Goethe, so highly favoured in the matter of ability and of social position, never thought of devoting that ability, that position, to the improvement of the existing conditions of life in Germany. It is easy to cull foolish passages conceived in Menzel's strain from Börne's works. In his Journal of 1830, for instance, he writes of Goethe's luck in having succeeded in imitating with his talent the handwriting of genius for sixty years without being detected; and in another place he calls Goethe the rhyming, Hegel the rhymeless, thrall.[8] But to understand these wild and regrettable outbursts, we must make ourselves acquainted with Börne's bill of accusation against both Goethe and Schiller.

He started from the premise (in all probability quite a false one) that Goethe, by making timely and energetic protest, could have prevented the Resolutions of Karlsbad, could have secured the liberty of the press and the other spiritual rights of which the reaction had deprived the German nation. In any case, whatever the results might have been, he was firmly convinced that it was Goethe's duty to have protested. Instead of this, what happens? "Geheimrath von Goethe, the Karlsbad poet," as Börne, knowing that he goes there every year to drink the waters, satirically nicknames him, subscribes himself _servant_ among other servants of his Prince ("wir sämmtlichen Diener"); confesses in his _Tag- und Jahres-Hefte_ that he wrote his stupid little play _Der Bürgergeneral_ (the whole plot of which hinges on the stealing of a pail of milk from the peasant Martin), with the intention of ridiculing the French Revolution; also confesses that, far from taking Fichte's part when that philosopher was accused of teaching atheism in the University of Jena, he was much annoyed at the vexation caused to the court by the outside interference which Fichte's utterances provoked.[9] Another cause of offence was the way in which, when Oken's _Isis_ was published, Goethe bewailed the peaceful times brought to an end by the establishment of the liberty of the press in Weimar, "the further consequences of which every right-thinking man with any knowledge of the world foresees with alarm and regret."[10] And the same feeling of disappointment and mortification was aroused in Börne when he read that Schiller, whom he highly esteemed, had at the very crisis of the French Revolution declared in his announcement of the new periodical _Die Horen_, that from this publication everything in the nature of criticism of the government, of religion, or of the political questions of the day, would be expressly and strictly excluded.[11]

We must bear all this in mind when we read Börne's flaming denunciations--ablaze with a passion for liberty that forgets to be just--of Schiller and of Goethe, his lament that in their correspondence these two greatest minds of Germany show themselves so small that nothing at all would be better ("so Nichts sind--nein weniger als Nichts, so wenig"), and that they actually are what he, the confirmed democrat, considers the worst thing possible, a pair of confirmed aristocrats. He sees in Schiller a worse aristocrat than Goethe, for Goethe's partiality is merely for the upper classes of society, whereas Schiller will associate with none but the _élite_ of humanity. It is Börne's belief that Goethe might have been the Hercules who should cleanse the Augean stables of his country; but he rather elected to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides, and to keep them for himself.[12] He compares him in his own mind with the great productive spirits of other countries; with Dante, who championed the cause of justice; with Alfieri, who preached liberty; with Montesquieu, who wrote the _Lettres Persanes_; with Voltaire, who dared everything and gave up all his other occupations to assist a persecuted man, or to vindicate the memory of one who had been unjustly condemned to death; with the republican Milton; with Byron, whose life was one struggle against tyranny, intelligent or unintelligent--and he summons him before the judgment seat of posterity. "That terrible, incorruptible judge will say to Goethe: A mighty mind was given to thee, didst thou ever employ it to oppose baseness? Heaven gave thee a tongue of fire, didst thou ever champion justice? Thou hadst a good sword, but it was drawn to defend thyself alone."[13]

We cannot deny that Börne has pointed to real flaws in Goethe's greatness, and to real limitations in his nature, even though we know that some of his qualities were bought at the price of these defects, and that a certain limitation was inevitable if the many-sidedness of his genius was not to be its bane. It was not for him to do what Börne required of him. Still we must understand the proportion of justice there is in Börne's attacks, to be able to forgive him this violent and foolish expression of resentment against Goethe during those years when the hopes of the Liberals in the results of the Revolution of July were receiving their double death-blow, from the subjection of the French Government to the power of the great financiers, and from the suppression of the Polish revolt. He is now more bitter and violent than ever. He calls Goethe a prodigious _obstructive_ power, compares him to a cataract on the eye of Germany, and expresses the opinion that not until the old man of Weimar dies will German liberty be born. (Nov. 20, 1830.)[14]

It was on the 1st of October 1831, after whole days spent in despair over events which conveyed the impression, specially painful to this obstinately hopeful man, that France was lost and the reaction victorious, that his anger reached boiling-point. He took up Goethe's _Tag- und Jahres-hefte_, and was horrified by its author's "apathy." Goethe tells how, when he was with the army in Silesia in 1790, he wrote one or two epigrams, and how later, at the royal headquarters in Breslau, he lived the life of a hermit, completely engrossed in the study of comparative anatomy. He adds that what originally led to his taking up this study was his finding a half-cloven sheep's skull one evening in Venice on the sand-hills of the Lido.

"What!" writes Börne, "Goethe, a highly gifted man, a poet, in the best years of his manhood ... to be in the council of war, in the camp of the Titans, on the very spot where, forty years before, the audacious yet sublime war of kings against their peoples began, and to find no inspiration in these surroundings, to be moved to neither love nor hatred, neither prayer nor curse, to nothing but a few epigrams, which he himself does not consider worth offering the reader. And with the finest of regiments, the handsomest of officers passing in review before him, he finds nothing better to turn his attention to than comparative anatomy! And walking by the sea-shore in Venice--Venice, that _Arabian Night_ in stone and mortar, where everything is melody and colour, both nature and art, man and state, past and present, liberty and despotism; where even tyranny and murder merely clank like the chains in some gruesome ballad (the Bridge of Sighs and the Council of Ten are scenes from Tartarus)--Venice, towards which I turn my longing eyes, but cannot turn my steps, because the Austrian police lies in wait like a serpent at the city gates and repels with the terror of its poisonous gaze--there, after sunset, when the red glow of evening was spread over sea and land, and the waves of crimson light broke upon the man of stone, and imparted their colour to his eternal greyness; when, perhaps, the spirit of Werther came upon him, and he felt that he still had a heart, that there were human beings around him and a God above him; and the beat of his heart, the apparition of his dead youth terrified him, and he felt the hair standing up on his head--he behaved as usual, escaped from his terrors, avoided all disagreeable reflection, by creeping into a cloven sheep's skull and hiding there till night and coldness once more descended upon his heart! And I am to honour that man! to love that man! I would sooner throw myself in the dust at the feet of Vitzli-Putzli, sooner lick the spittle of the Dalai Lama!"

Certainly Börne ought to have honoured this man, and for the very reason for which he despises him. For perhaps at no time was he more clearly worthy of all honour. Börne, by his own showing, would, like the ordinary tourist in Venice, have spent himself in vague moonlight and sunset romancings on the subject of the Bridge of Sighs, the terrors of tyranny, the blessings of liberty, and all the melody and colour--Goethe gazed at his sheep's skull. What was there remarkable about it? It was split; and with his naked eye, that seeing eye which pierced into the deepest recesses of nature, into the innermost workshop of life, whence issue all its various forms, Goethe _saw_ the great truth, which he had already suspected, that all the bones of the skull were in reality metamorphosed vertebræ, thus making a discovery in the science of osteology that was closely connected with one he had already given to the world in his work on the _Metamorphosis of Plants_, and founding philosophic anatomy, as he had already founded philosophic botany. Börne did not perceive that this man, whose life-work is one of the foundation-stones in the edifice of the modern world, in this particular instance, with his intuition of the unity underlying all variety of form, in his divine simplicity, resembles one of the fathers of ancient science, a Thales or a Heraclitus.

Börne's attacks on Goethe do not come under the same category as Menzel's. They are never malicious, much less base. Though they certainly now and again hit some vulnerable spot in the great man, they throw more light on Börne's own nature than they do on Goethe's; and, even where they most clearly show the limitation of his intelligence, they witness to the purity of his character. They have been powerless to affect men's admiration for Goethe's genius. It would be as foolish to judge Goethe by the false political standard set up by Börne in 1830 as to judge Börne himself by the false German standard of 1870, which those do, who say of him, what he said of Goethe, that he was no true patriot. It was natural, nay inevitable, that Börne should undervalue Goethe. It is possible to understand his want of understanding without sharing his dislike. And it is possible to do full justice to the rush of his pathos, to the elasticity and keen sparkle of his wit, without forgetting, as our eyes light on the seething, flashing cascades of his prose, that there is a deep, calm, wide ocean, called Goethe.

[1] "Allerheiligen geht vor Allerseelen, die Propheten haben den Himmel eher als das Volk.--Die Religion des Alterthums war die Cristalmutter vieler glänzenden Götter, die christliche ist die Perlemutter eines einzigen aber unschätzbaren Gottes.--Das Erdenleben ist eine Bastonade.--Jede Kirchenglocke ist eine Taucherglocke, unter welcher man die Perle der Religion findet."

[2] Menzel: _Die deutsche Litteratur_, ii. pp. 205-222.

[3] Heine: _Sämmtliche Werke._ xiii. 265.

[4] "Der Dichter ... fühlt zwar, dass das Schicksal in's Mittel treten müsse, und lässt den Verräther durch eine rächende Bruderhand fallen; wie vielmehr muss uns dieser Theaterstreich indigniren, wenn wir wissen, dass der berühmte Liebhaber in der Wirklichkeit fortgelebt, um das Unglück zu beschreiben, welches er angerichtet."

The poet ... it is true, feels that destiny ought to intervene, and therefore the betrayer falls by the brother's avenging hand; but this _coup de théâtre_ only arouses more indignation in us, who know that in real life the famous lover lived on happily, to describe the misfortunes of which he had been the author.

[5] "Die Eitelkeit des Emporkömmlings, die in den Frauen zugleich das Vornehme, das Königliche, begehrt." _Translation_: The vanity of the _parvenu_, who is not attracted simply by women, but also by their position, their royal birth.

[6] "Geadelt zu werden, im Reichthum zugleich den _haut goût_ de Vornehmigkeit in behaglicher Sicherkeit zu geniessen, war ihm für dieses Leben das Höchste."

[7] _I_ honour thee? Wherefore? Hast thou ever lightened the burden of the heavy laden? ever stayed the tears of the distressed?

[8] "Welch ein beispielloses Glück musste sich zu dem seltenen Talent dieses Mannes gesellen, dass er sechzig Jahre lang die Handschrift des Genies nachahmen konnte und unentdeckt geblieben!... Goethe ist der gereimte Knecht, wie Hegel der ungereimte."

[9] "Fichtes Äusserungen über Gott und göttliche Dinge, über die man freilich besser ein tiefes Stillschweigen beobachtet." _Translation:_ Fichte's utterances on the subject of God and things divine, on which it is undoubtedly better to preserve unbroken silence.

[10] L. Börne: _Gesamm. Schriften_, iii. 216, 217, 222.

[11] "Vorzüglich aber und unbedingt wird sich die Zeitschrift Alles verbieten, was sich auf Staatsreligion und politische Verfassung bezieht."

[12] Börne: iii. 536, 572.

[13] Ibid. 573.

[14] "Dieser Mann eines Jahrhunderts, hat eine ungeheure, _hindernde_ Kraft! er ist ein grauer Staar im deutschen Auge.... Seit ich fühle, habe ich Goethe gehasst; seit ich denke, weiss ich warum. (20 November 1830.) Es ist mir als würde mit Goethe die alte deutsche Zeit begraben; ich meine an dem Tage müsse die Freiheit geboren werden."

This man of a century possesses a prodigious _obstructive_ power! he is a cataract on the eye of Germany.... Ever since I could feel, I have hated Goethe; ever since I could think, I have known why. (20 November 1830.) I feel as if the old German era will be buried with Goethe, as if liberty must be born on that day.

IX

BÖRNE

It is in the first volumes of the _Letters from Paris_ that Börne reaches his high-water mark as an author. He was not capable of writing books, not even of writing essays and dissertations; for his explosions of emotion or thought there was no form so suitable as that of a letter. And these are real letters, not newspaper-articles, nor even newspaper correspondence, but letters written to a friend, without thought of publication until that friend took the initiative, and asked Börne's permission to make an experimental selection of passages which might be of interest to the general public.

The friend in question was Frau Jeannette Wohl, a lady who plays an important part in Börne's life, though perhaps not so important a part as he plays in hers. For upwards of twenty years, from 1816, when he made her acquaintance, till his death in 1837, he gave her his entire confidence, and rarely took any step without consulting her; and to her, during the same period, his career as an author, his health, his circumstances generally, were of more importance than all else.

When they saw each other for the first time, he was thirty and she thirty-three. She had been married to a rich man, with whom she had lived unhappily. After nursing him through a long illness, she got a divorce from him, refusing to accept any share of his fortune or to retain his name. When Börne and she lived in the same town, he read aloud to her everything that he wrote; when they were separated, she would at one time urge him to work, eager that he should win fame and independence; at another, fearing that he was too diligent, and that his health, at all times precarious, might suffer, she would beg him not to be too conscientious in the fulfilment of his engagements to the publishers, but to allow himself sufficient leisure and recreation.

Jealous of his honour, she underwent long periods of anxiety and irritation when it seemed to her that he was neglecting his duty to the public. Börne had taken payment in advance from the subscribers to _Die Wage_ for the second volume of that periodical, and then, after bringing out only five numbers, made a lengthy pause, partly because he was tired of the work, and partly because, being in pecuniary difficulties, he was anxious to find more remunerative employment. Her letters, which he always looked for with almost feverish eagerness, at this time keep _Die Wage_ before his eyes by every device which the ingenuity and perseverance of an anxious woman can suggest. She entreats and threatens, she scolds and teases, she sends him four long pages with nothing upon them except _Die Wage, Die Wage._

But she is often quite as anxious to distract and amuse him, to prevent him from over-exerting himself and to keep up his spirits. When he is taken seriously ill at a distance from her, she grieves that she is not able to look after him, has once actually made up her mind to hazard her reputation by going to him; she knows very well that if she does, people will no longer believe that what unites them is only friendship.

It was in reality a feeling midway between friendship and love, for which no name exists. After Jeannette's death there was found among her papers an ordinary _Gesindebüchlein der freien Stadt Frankfurt_,[1] on the cover of which Börne had written his name, with the usual particulars. On its first page stands:

Took service With whom? For how In what Left service long capacity? when?

15. Jan. 1818 Frau Wohl. For ever. As friend. On the day of his death.

There could be no more laconic expression of a voluntary lifelong devotion. And the last words were literally fulfilled, for it was on Jeannette's face that the dying man's last look rested, and to her that he spoke his last words: "You have given me much happiness."