The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07

Vienna, May 28, 1810.

It is Beethoven of whom I want to speak now, and in whom I have forgotten the world and thee. I may not be qualified to judge, but I am not mistaken when I say (what perhaps no one now realizes or believes) that he is far in advance of the culture of all mankind, and I wonder whether we can ever catch up with him! I doubt it. I only hope that he may live until the mighty and sublime enigma that lies in his soul may have reached its highest and ripest perfection. May he reach his highest ideal, for then he will surely leave in our hands the key to a divine knowledge which will bring us one step nearer true bliss!

To thee I may confess that I believe in a divine magic which is the element of spiritual nature, and this magic Beethoven employs in his music. All he can teach thee about it is pure magic; every combination of sounds is a phase of a higher existence, and for this reason Beethoven feels that he is the founder of a new sensuous basis in the spiritual life. Thou wilt probably be able to feel intuitively what I am trying to say, and that it is true. Who could replace this spirit? From whom could we expect anything equivalent to it? All human activity passes to and fro before him like clockwork; he alone creates freely from his inmost self the undreamed of, the untreated. What would intercourse with the outside world profit this man, who is at his sacred work before sunrise and scarcely looks about him before sunset, who forgets bodily nourishment, and who is borne in his flight by the stream of inspiration past the shores of superficial, everyday life. He himself said to me, "Whenever I open my eyes I cannot but sigh, for all I see is counter to my religion and I must despise the world which does not comprehend that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. It is the wine which inspires new creations, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for men and intoxicates their spirit! * * * I have no friend and must ever be alone, but I know that God is nearer to me in my art than to others, and I commune with him without fear; I have always recognized Him and understood Him. Nor have I any fears for my music; it can meet no evil fate, for he to whom it makes itself intelligible will be freed from all misery with which others are burdened."

All this Beethoven said to me the first time I saw him, and I was penetrated with a feeling of reverence when he expressed himself to me with such friendly candor, since I must have seemed very unimportant to him. Besides, I was astonished, for I had been told that he was exceedingly reticent and avoided conversation with any one; in fact, they were afraid to introduce me to him, so I had to look him up alone. He has three dwellings in which he alternately conceals himself—one in the country, one in the city, and the third on the bastion, in the third story of which I found him. I entered unannounced and mentioned my name. He was seated at the piano and was quite amiable. He inquired whether I did not wish to hear a song that he had just composed. Then he sang, in a shrill and piercing voice, so that the plaintiveness reacted upon the listener, "Knowest thou the land?" "It is beautiful, isn't it, very beautiful!" he cried, enraptured; "I'll sing it again;" and was delighted at my ready applause. "Most people are stirred by something good, but they are not artistic natures; artists are fiery—they do not weep." Then he sang one of thy songs that he had composed lately, "Dry not, Tears of Eternal Love."

Yesterday I went for a walk with him through a beautiful garden at Schönbrunn that was in full blossom; all the hothouses were open and the fragrance was overpowering. Beethoven stopped in the burning sun and said, "Goethe's poems exercise a great power over me, not alone through their content, but also through their rhythm, and I am incited and moved to compose by his language, which is built up as if by the aid of spirits into a sublime structure that bears within it the mystery of harmonies. Then from the focus of my inspiration I must let the melody stream forth in every direction; I pursue it, passionately overtake it again, see it escaping me a second time and disappearing in a host of varying emotions; soon I seize it with renewed ardor; I can no longer separate myself from it, but with impetuous rapture I must reproduce it in all modulations, and, in the final moment, I triumph over the musical idea—and that, you see, is a symphony! Yes, music is truly the mediator between the spiritual and the sensuous world. I should like to discuss this with Goethe; I wonder whether he would understand me! Melody is the sensuous life of poetry. Does not the spiritual content of a poem become sensuous feeling through melody? Do we not in the song of Mignon feel her whole sensuous mood through melody, and does not this sensation incite one in turn to new creations? Then the spirit longs to expand to boundless universality where everything together forms a channel for the feelings that spring from the simple musical thought and that otherwise would die away unnoted. This is harmony; this is expressed in my symphonies; the blending of manifold forms rolls on to the goal in a single channel. At such moments one feels that something eternal, infinite, something that can never be wholly comprehended, lies in all things spiritual; and although I always have the feeling of success in my compositions, yet with the last stroke of the drum with which I have driven home my own enjoyment, my musical conviction, to my hearers, I feel an eternal hunger to begin anew, like a child, what a moment before seemed to me to have been exhausted.

"Speak to Goethe of me; and tell him to hear my symphonies. Then he will agree with me that music is the sole incorporeal entrance into a higher world of knowledge which, to be sure, embraces man, but which he, on the other hand, can never embrace. Rhythm of the spirit is necessary to comprehend music in its essence; music imparts presentiments, inspirations of divine science, and what the spirit experiences of the sensuous in it is the embodiment of spiritual knowledge. Although the spirits live upon music as man lives upon air, it is a very different matter to comprehend it with the spirit. But the more the soul draws its sensuous nourishment from it, the riper the spirit becomes for a happy mutual understanding.

"But few ever attain this understanding, for just as thousands marry for love and yet love is never once revealed to them, although they all pursue the trade of love, so do thousands hold communion with music and yet do not possess its revelation. For music also has as its foundation the sublime tokens of the moral sense, just as every art does; every genuine invention indicates moral progress. To subject oneself to its inscrutable laws, to curb and guide one's spirit by means of these laws, so that it will pour forth the revelations of music—this is the isolating principle of art. To be dissolved by its revelation—that is the surrender to the divine, which quietly exercises its mastery over the delirium of unbridled forces and thus imparts the greatest efficacy to the imagination. Thus art always represents divinity, and the human relationship to art constitutes religion. Whatever we acquire through art comes from God; it is a divine inspiration, which sets up an attainable goal for human capacities.

"We do not know whence our knowledge comes; the firmly inclosed seed requires the warm, moist, electric soil to sprout, to think, to express itself. Music is the electric soil in which the soul lives, thinks, invents. Philosophy is a precipitation of its electric spirit, and the need that philosophy feels of basing everything on an ultimate principle is in turn relieved by music. Although the spirit is not master of what it creates through the mediation of music, yet it experiences ecstasy in this creation. In this way every genuine creation of art is independent, mightier than the artist himself, and through its expression it returns to its divine source; it is concerned with man only insomuch as it bears witness to divine mediation in him.

"Music gives the spirit its relation to harmony. A thought, even when isolated, still senses the totality of relationship in the spirit; thus every thought in music is most intimately and inseparably related to the totality of harmony, which is unity. Everything electric stimulates the spirit to fluent, precipitous, musical creation. I myself am of an electrical nature." * * *

He took me to a grand rehearsal with full orchestra, and I sat back in a box all alone in the large, unlighted hall, and saw this mighty spirit wield his authority. Oh, Goethe I No emperor, no king, is so conscious of his power, so conscious that all power radiates from him, as this same Beethoven is, who only now in the garden was searching for the source of his inspiration. If I understood him as I feel him, I should be omniscient. There he stood, so firmly resolved, his gestures and features expressing the perfection of his creation, anticipating every error, every misconception; every breath obeyed his will, and everything was set into the most rational activity by the superb presence of his spirit. One might well prophesy that such a spirit will reappear in a later reincarnation as ruler of the universe!

November 4, 1810.

Dost thou want me to tell thee of bygone days, how, when thy spirit was revealed to me, I gained control over my own spirit in order the more perfectly to embrace and love thine? And why should I not become dizzy with ecstasy? Is the prospect of a fall so fearful after all? Just as the precious jewel, touched by a single ray of light, reflects a thousand colors, so also thy beauty, illumined only by the ray of my enthusiasm, will be enriched a thousandfold.

It is only when everything is comprehended that the Something can prove its full worth, and so thou wilt understand when I tell thee that the bed in which thy mother brought thee into the world had blue checkered hangings. She was eighteen years old at the time, and had been married a year. In this connection she remarked that thou wouldst remain forever young and that thy heart would never grow old, since thou hadst received thy mother's youth into the bargain. Thou didst ponder the matter for three days before thou didst decide to come into the world, and thy mother was in great pain. Angry that necessity had driven thee from thy nature-abode and because of the bungling of the nurse, thou didst arrive quite black and with no signs of life. They laid thee in a so-called butcher's tray and bathed thee in wine, quite despairing of thy life. Thy grandmother stood behind the bed, and when thou didst open thine eyes she cried out, "Frau Rat, he lives!" "Then my maternal heart awoke and it has lived in unceasing enthusiasm to this very hour," said thy mother to me in her seventy-fifth year. Thy grandfather, one of the most honored citizens of Frankfurt and at that time syndic, always applied good as well as bad fortune to the welfare of the city, and so thy difficult birth resulted in an accoucher being appointed for the poor. "Even in his cradle he was a blessing to mankind," said thy mother. She gave thee her breast but thou couldst not be induced to take nourishment, and so a nurse was procured for thee. "Since he drank from her with such appetite and comfort and we discovered that I had no milk," she said, "we soon noticed that he was wiser than all of us when he wouldn't take nourishment from me."

Now that thou art born at last I can pause a little; now that thou art in the world, each moment is dear enough to me to linger over it, and I have no desire to call up the second moment, since it will drive me away from the first. "Where'er thou art are love and goodness, where'er thou art is nature too." Now I shall wait till thou writest me again, "Pray go on with thy story." Then I shall first ask, "Well, where did we leave off?" and then I shall tell thee of thy grandparents, thy dreams, thy beauty, pride, love, etc. Amen.

"Frau Rat, he lives!" These words always thrilled me through and through whenever thy mother uttered them in exultant tones. Of thy birth we may well say:

  The sword that threatens danger    Hangs often by a thread;  But the blessing of eternity    On us one gracious glance may shed.

Extract from a letter written in 1822, ten years after the breach in their relations.

To give perfect expression to thee would probably be the most powerful seal of my love, indeed, being a creation of divine nature, it would prove my affinity to thee. It would be an enigma solved, like unto a long restrained mountain torrent which at last penetrates to the light, enduring the tremendous fall in voluptuous rapture, at a moment of life through which and after which a higher existence begins.

Thou destroyer, who hast taken my free will from me; thou creator, who hast produced within me the sensation of awakening, who hast convulsed me with a thousand electric sparks from the realm of sacred nature! Through thee I learned to love the curling of the tender vine, and the tears of my longing have fallen on its frost-kissed fruits; for thy sake I have kissed the young grass, for thy sake offered my open bosom to the dew; for thy sake I have listened intently when the butterfly and the bee swarmed about me, for I wanted to feel thee in the sacred sphere of thy enjoyments. Oh, thou; toy in disguise with thy beloved—could I help, after I had divined thy secret, becoming intoxicated with love for thee?

Canst thou divine the thrills that shook me when the trees poured down their fragrance and their blossoms upon me? For I thought and felt and firmly believed that it was thy caressing of nature, thy enjoyment of her beauty, that it was her yearning, her surrender to thee, that loosened these blossoms from their trembling boughs and sent them gently whirling into my lap.

BETTINA.

KARL LEBRECHT IMMERMANN

IMMERMANN AND HIS DRAMA "MERLIN"

BY MARTIN SCHÜTZE, PH.D. Associate Professor of German Literature, University of Chicago

Karl Lebrecht Immermann was born in Magdeburg, in April, 1796. His father, who held a good position in the Civil Service, was a very severe and domineering man; his mother, imaginative and over-indulgent. Karl's childhood and early youth were uneventful. After passing through the regular course of preparatory education in a "Gymnasium," he entered, in 1813, the University of Halle. During his first year there, Germany rose up to throw off the yoke of Napoleon, and the King of Prussia issued a proclamation calling the nation to arms, to which the people responded with unprecedented unanimity and enthusiasm. Schoolboys and bearded men, laborers and professional men, merchants and soldiers, united in one patriotic purpose. The regular army was everywhere supplemented by volunteer organizations. An epoch began which in its enthusiasm, its idealism, the force and richness of its inspiration, and its overwhelming impetus deserved, more than any other in modern history, its title: "The Spring of Nations."

Immermann's sensitive and responsive nature thrilled with the general impulse, and he asked his father to let him join the army, but was told, peremptorily, not to interrupt the first year of his studies. He submitted, and plunged into the study of the literature of the Romanticists, which, in its remoteness from actuality, offered distraction from his disappointment. During this time he fell ill of typhoid fever, from which he did not fully recover until the campaign had victoriously ended in the battle of Leipzig. He joined, however, after Napoleon's escape from Elba, the second campaign, in which he took part in two battles. At the end of the war, having retired as an officer of the reserves, he returned to Halle to finish his study of the law.

He found a new spirit dominant among the students. This spirit, characterized by a strongly democratic desire for national unity, pride of race, and impatience with external and conventional restraints, had a rich network of roots in the immediate past: in the individualism and the humanism of the Storm and Stress Movement and the Classic Era of the eighteenth century; in the subjective idealism of the Romantic school; in the nationalism of Klopstock, Herder, Schiller, and Fichte, and in the self-reliant transcendentalism of Kant's philosophy and Schleiermacher's theology. This spirit had received its political direction principally through the genius of the Baron von Stein, the Prussian statesman, whose aim was the restoration of German national unity. He believed that the political unity of Germany must rest on the soundness of the common people, rather than on the pretensions of the aristocracy whose corruption he held responsible for the decadence of the nation. Following the example of Frederick the Great, he tried to foster the simple virtues of the common man. He was, however, opposed to radicalism, seeing permanent progress only in order, self-discipline, and moderation. His leading idea, which was shared by such men as Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Niebuhr, and others, was that the principal task of the time was to arouse the whole nation to independent political thinking and activity, in order to develop self-confidence, courage, and devotion to a great unselfish ideal. These ideas became a national ideal, an active passion, under the pressure and stress of the Napoleonic usurpation and in the heat and fervor of war and victory.

It was unavoidable that this spirit produced among the younger men, and especially among the university students, traditionally unaccustomed to patience with restraints, many excesses, absurdities and follies. An extreme and tyrannical nativism, a tasteless archaism in dress, manner, and speech, an intolerant and aggressive democratic propaganda offended and bullied the more conservative. This spirit spread particularly through the agencies of the student fraternities called "Burschenschaften," and the athletic associations, the "Turners," advocated and fostered by Jahn.

Immermann became the mouthpiece of the conservatives among the students, and he went so far as to publish some pamphlets denouncing specific acts of violence of the leading radical fraternity, the "Teutonia." When the university authorities, who to a considerable extent sympathized with the radicals, neglected to act, Immermann addressed a complaint to the King. This move resulted in the dissolution of the accused fraternity and in governmental hostility to all fraternities, and brought the hatred and contempt of the radicals on Immermann.

Immermann acted undoubtedly from sincere motives, yet deserved much of the condemnation he suffered. He had not sufficient vision to penetrate through the objectionable and tasteless externalities of the liberal movement—with which he was unfairly preoccupied even at the time of Die Epigonen, a score of years later—to the greater and enduring core of the aspirations of the modern age. The petty things were too near to his eye and obscured the greater things which were further removed. He thought he upheld a higher principle of morality by applying the principles of von Stein to a new situation; but be failed to see the new, larger morality imbedded in much confusion. History has reversed his judgment.

After completing his studies he received a government appointment in the provincial capital of Westphalia, Muenster. Here, in this conservative old town, began one of the most extraordinary relations between man and woman in modern German literary history. Immermann fell in love with Countess Elisa von Luetzow-Ahlefeldt, wife of the famous old commander of volunteers, Brigadier-General von Luetzow. Elisa, an extremely gifted and spirited woman, had formed a circle of interesting people, in which her husband, a dashing soldier but a man of uninteresting mentality, played a very subordinate part. Immermann and Elisa struggled along against the tyranny of the affinity that drew them together. Immermann wrote a number of dramas, highly romantic, in which the passion and strife within him found varied expression. The play which made him known beyond his immediate circle, was Cardenio and Celinde, the conflict of which was suggested by his own.

Elisa was finally divorced from Luetzow. Immermann was appointed a judge in Magdeburg, and later in Duesseldorf. He asked Elisa to marry him. She refused, but offered to live with him in free companionship. They joined their lives, pledging themselves not to enter other relations. They remained together until 1839, less than a year before Immermann's death, when he married a young girl of nineteen. Elisa left his house in sorrow and bitterness. Immermann characterized his relation to her thus in a letter to his fiancée, in 1839: "I loved the countess deeply and purely when I was kindled by her flame. But she took such a strange position toward me that I never could have a pure, genuine, enduring joy in this love. There were delights, but no quiet gladness. I always felt as if a splendid comet had appeared on the horizon, but never as if the dear warm God's sun had risen."

His life with Elisa in Duesseldorf was rich in friends and works. The sculptor Schadow, the founder of the art school there, the dramatists von Uechtritz and Michael Beer, brother of Meyerbeer, were among his friends. He had intimate relations with Mendelssohn during the years of the latter's stay in Duesseldorf. He tried to assist Grabbe, the erratic and unfortunate dramatist. During three years he was manager of the Duesseldorf theatre, trying many valuable and idealistic experiments. He died August 25, 1840.

The most important of his works are Das Trauerspiel in Tirol, 1826, treating of the tragic story of Andreas Hofer; Kaiser Friedrich II., 1827, a drama of the Hohenstaufen; the comic heroic epic, Tulifaentchen, 1830, a satiric version of an heroic Tom Thumb; Alexis, 1832, a trilogy setting forth the destruction of the reforms begun by Peter the Great; Merlin, 1832; and his two novels, Die Epigonen, 1836, and Münchhausen, 1838-9.

In Die Epigonen, one of the long list of representatives of the species of novels which began with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Immermann tried to present the development of a young man and a picture of the principal social forces of his period. But he was too imitative in following his great model, and too much confused by subjective preoccupations, to comprehend and to state clearly the substance of the matter.

Only two of his works have enduring value, his mystical tragedy Merlin, and the part of Münchhausen called "Der Oberhof" (The Upper Farm), which deals with the lives and types of the small freehold farmers. Immermann, following Baron von Stein, believed that the health and future of society, endangered by the corrupt and dissipated nobility, rested, on the sturdy, self-reliant, individualistic yet severely moral and patriotic, small peasant. In the main character of the story, the rugged, proud, inflexibly honorable old farmer, who has inherited the sword of Charles the Great, he has drawn one of the most living characters in early modern German fiction. The other figures, too, are full of life and reality. The story has, aside from its importance in the history of the German novel, an enduring value of its own.

Immermann, in spite of his unremitting endeavor, failed to attain literary or moral greatness. He lacked the fundamental and organic unity of great natures. He had more qualities of mind than most of his important contemporaries, but in not one of these qualities did he attain to the degree which assures distinction. In his Merlin he treated a conflict which was fundamentally similar to that of Grillparzer's Libussa. Yet Grillparzer, much more one-sided than he, possessed the true Romantic-mystic quality, whereas Immermann had to elaborate his symbolism with the patchwork of careful, allegoric analysis. He had a richer contact with social forces than Heine, yet his realizations of them were awkward and meagre, his humor wooden, his imagery derived. He had much greater intellectual force than Platen, yet he lacked the incisive and controlled critical sense of the latter. Having no one faculty to a distinguished degree, he constantly had to substitute the strained labor of one faculty for the spontaneous production of another. Predominantly rationalistic, he labored at the symbolistic vision of Romanticism; preëminently a man of prose, he endeavored all his life to be a great poet. He mistook the responsive excitement produced by the ideas and visions of others for authentic inspiration, the vivacity of a sociable and conversational gift for the creative force of genius, and the immobility of obvious and established conventional judgments for an extraordinary soundness and incisiveness of fundamental analysis.