The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05

Indeed, there is something of the peasant nature in all of Uhland's verse. Sturdy reserve characterizes it—that reserve which forbids the peasant to show his feelings under the stress of the greatest emotion. Uhland does not carry his feelings to market; like Schiller, he is not a love poet. There is no display, no self-analysis, no self-exaltation, no amalgamation of self with nature. Uhland as a poet is not interested in his own psychology, but in the impinging world and in the tender past. When Goethe said that Uhland was primarily a balladist, he was right, for the ballad presupposes just that permeation of the object by the emotion that satisfies the unquestionable lyric gift possessed by Uhland, without in any way destroying the essentially narrative objectivity of his style.

Uhland's greatest fame rests, then, on his ballads. The difference between these and those of Goethe and Schiller is not merely in the so-called "castle-Romanticism" of Uhland, not in a lingering sentimentality in some of the poorer ones, but in Uhland's ability at will to catch the folk-tone. Sometimes this folk-tone is a question of certain technical tricks, such as the abrupt shift of scene, repetition, varying series of scenes or words, archaized language; but it is just as often in the mood which Uhland throws over the whole. He thus can catch the inner form and essential mood of the popular ballad in a way that not even Goethe does in his Erlking. Uhland's ballads and romances vary greatly in quality; none, perhaps, has the grandiose dramatic and ethical note of Schiller's The Cranes of Ibycus and none the power of revealing the hidden forces of nature in anthropomorphic and demoniac form as Goethe does in his Erlking and The Fisher. But Uhland's poems are more varied in treatment, even though he cannot be said to have brought any new forms and themes into German verse. There is much talk of poets and poetry in his verse and much of the tender melancholy of parting lovers, of separation and death. There are also some very healthy bacchic notes. Often the ballads are a mere presentation of a scene, with neither plot nor moral; once in a while, too, Uhland shows a humorous touch. But various as are his themes and treatments, the treatment is always nicely adapted to the theme.

It is difficult to imagine a better suiting of form and content than in The Singer's Curse. The management of the vowel sequences is truly wonderful and the rhymes carry the emotional words with a fine virtuosity. The Luck of Edenhall, a variation of a Scottish theme and also of the Biblical "Mene tekel," displays without sermonizing the greatest ethical vigor. It has far more dramatic energy than either Byron's or Heine's "Belshazzar" poems, with fully as much dismal foreboding. Taillefer, which has been called "the sparkling queen" of Uhland's ballads, has fresh vigor but lacks the power of handling the moral forces of the universe with as much dramatic vividness. It has a naïve joy of life not elsewhere found in Uhland's ballads.

Uhland was the greatest poet of the "Suabian School," a group of young men who objected to being denominated a school. Among them was William Hauff (1802-27), who is known for several lyrics, a number of excellent short stories, and a historical novel, Lichtenstein (1826), in the manner of Scott. His Trooper's Song is a variation of an old theme and is of great metrical interest in that here, as in Uhland, one may observe how the subtle handling of rhythm, the lengthening or shortening of a line, or the shift of stress, brings with it a corresponding shift of emotion. Lichtenstein is the story of the struggle of Ulrich of Würtemberg against the Suabian League and gives us a Romantic picture of the Duke which is not justified by the facts. It was, however, an attempt to vitalize history and owes its origin to the Romantic longing for fatherland. Its immediate impulse among Scott's novels was Quentin Durward and, like Quentin Durward, it has a double plot—the sentimental young lovers and the romantic ruler. It also shows all the pageantry of Romanticism and the naïve technique of the beginning of an art-form in the early stages of a new literary movement.

Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) was prevented from taking part in the Wars of Liberation by poor health, but added his Sonnets in Harness to the poetry of the period. These sonnets had no such stirring effect as the poems of Körner, not only because of their literary form, but because, in spite of their unquestioned belligerency, they had not the tone of religious conviction against the enemy which characterized the verses of Arndt and the rest. Other poems, like Körner's Spirit, show how deeply Rückert felt himself in sympathy with his times; his reward has been to have added a very large number of poems to the every-day repertory of Germany. His Barbarossa is found in almost every reading book.

The cycle Love's Spring is an imperishable monument to his love for Louisa Wiethaus. But too many of the poems are dedicated to her and too many inconsequential moods relating to her are recorded. In spite of this, Rückert has resolved the discord between every-day life and poetry with the simplest poetic apparatus. Rückert has also enriched the German language with a mass of gnomic poetry, to the writing of which he was led by his Oriental studies. This gnomic poetry (The Wisdom of the Brahman) has been aptly said to recall at times the ripeness of the mature Goethe and at other times—Polonius. Rückert was one of the first to introduce the Orient and its verse-forms into German literature. Here the influence of Friedrich Schlegel is unmistakable. He was also a master in the reproduction of the complicated metres of the East and South. Though many of these verse-forms have refused to become indigenous in Germany, a large number of new words invented by Rückert have had poetical vogue, and even where the new formations were too bold or too recherché, they accustomed German ears to a new idea-presentation through sound. Rückert, like the average Romanticist, lacked moderation in his production, and was utterly without critical faculty in respect to his own verse. Much that he has written has perished, but some of his work—both original and translation—is a permanent part of the best of German lyric verse.

More individual than Rückert is Adalbert von Chamisso (1781-1838). Though he was born in the Champagne in France, and was therefore a fellow-countryman of Joinville and La Fontaine, he became a German by education and preference, and his name is inseparably linked with German scholarship and letters. It is remarkable that Chamisso began to write German only after 1801 and is reported never to have spoken it perfectly; yet his verse ranks with the best products of Germany in fluency and in form. Much of it, especially that with woman's love as its theme, is extremely German in thought and feeling, though perhaps French in its keenness of analysis. So German is Chamisso felt to be that at his best he is ranked with Goethe and Heine.

When the boy Chamisso was nine years old, the family was driven from France but was later allowed to return, though Adalbert never went back permanently. Thus it was that during the years 1806-13, the young expatriate led a life of the greatest mental torment; France no longer meant anything to him, and in Germany he felt himself a stranger and an outcast. Always awkward personally, and of a nervous temperament, he found it difficult to adjust himself to surrounding conditions. His scholarly zeal, however, and his ability to sit for hours in close study, show how completely his mentality was adjustable to the German manner. In Berlin he was accepted by the younger Romantic group and was a member of the famous North Star Club with Arnim and his set. In 1815-18 he made a trip around the world, and in later years devoted himself especially to the study of botany.

Only the poetry of Chamisso's later period is of supreme consequence. As a man in the fifties, he wrote some of his most beautiful verse. He was a naïve poet, but a poet of many moods. His love poetry is the poetry of longing, and ranks with that of Brentano in its ability to suggest states of feeling. Among his best poems are his verse-tales, such as The Women of Weinsberg, where his narrative genius ranks with that of his fellow-countryman, La Fontaine. Especially good are his poems in terzines. These mark the real introduction of this metre into Germany. The best of these, Salas y Gomez, has the additional advantage of real experience, for the material observation at the basis of it is derived from his tour of circumnavigation. His poems in this metre are often genre poems, pure prose in part, but frequently of a drastic humor that ranks with that of the best of the old French fabliaux. His realism is, however, never common, and, in such poems as The Old Washerwoman, to quote Goethe's Tasso, "he often ennobles what seems vulgar to us."

Chamisso is Romantic in his interest in translations, in early reminiscences of Uhland's "castle-Romanticism," and in his poetry of indefinite longing, but his admiration for Napoleon and his tendency toward realism point the way which all Romanticism naturally took—the way leading through Heine to Young Germany on the one hand and through Tieck's novelettes to realistic prose on the other.

As a matter of fact, the work for which Chamisso is best known, a work which has become international in popularity, Peter Schlemihl (1813), is an early bit of such realistic prose. The tale of the man who sells his shadow to the devil for the sake of the sack of Fortunatus has become in Chamisso's hands a genuine folk-fairy-tale in key-note and style. At the same time it is thoroughly Romantic in subject-matter and treatment. The word Schlemihl is a Hebrew word variously interpreted as "Lover of God," or as "awkward fellow." If it mean the former, Schlemihl then becomes a Theophilus, that medieval Faust who also made a compact with the devil; if the latter, one who breaks his finger when sticking it into a custard pie; then Schlemihl is Chamisso himself, "that dean of Schlemihls," feeling himself at a loss in any environment. He may be the man without a country, he may be the man who draws attention to himself by selling what seems of little value to him, but which afterward proves indispensable for the right conduct of life. The story in this way brings forward a bit of popular ethics, or, rather, it examines an ethical note from the popular point of view. Like Hoffmann, Chamisso takes his reader into the midst of current life, but, unlike Hoffmann, his moods are not the dissolving views which leave the reader in doubt as to whether the whole is a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. Schlemihl is genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes leading up to its climax. It does not make mood—it has mood.

The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are the products of Romantic scholarship; they represent the highest type of scholarly attainment and of scholarly personality. They are always thought of together, for they shared all possessions alike and were not drawn apart by the fact that William married and Jacob remained a bachelor. Their fidelity to each other is touching, and no more lovable story is told than that of Jacob's breaking down in a lecture and crying, "My brother is so sick!"

Jacob (1785-1863) was the philologist, the inductive gatherer of scientific material, the close logical deducer of facts. He "presented Germany with its mythology, with its history of legal antiquities, with its grammar and its history of language." He is the author of Grimm's law of consonant permutation which laid the foundations of modern philological science and is the founder of philological science in general.

Wilhelm (1786-1859), no less exact a scientist, was more a Romantic nature, with a greater power of synthesis under poetic stress. The two brothers began their collecting activities under the influence of Arnim, and their work with folk-tales in prose corresponds to The Boy's Magic Horn in verse. It was Wilhelm who gave Grimms' Fairy Tales their artistic form. He remolded, joined, separated—in fact, wrought the crude materials into such shape that this work has penetrated into every land and has become a household word for young and old. The various early editions show the progress in the method of Wilhelm. The first edition (1812) reproduces more exactly what the brothers heard; the later ones show that Wilhelm consciously attempted to give artistic form to the tales. That his method was justified the history of the stories proves; they are not only material for ethnological study, but are dear to all hearts. The stories have the genuine folk-tone; they are true products of the folk-imagination, with all the logic of that imagination. All phases of life are touched and the interest never flags. The spirit of nature has been kept.

The Romanticists were not successful in the drama. Kleist, the greatest dramatist of the period, was not primarily a Romantic poet. The Schlegels wrote frosty plays and Tieck attempted dramatic production. It was left for the most bizarre of the Romantic group to write the play of greatest power in it and to set a dramatic fashion which for more than a decade carried all before it.

Zacharias Werner (1768-1823), after a life of wild sensual excesses, finally found refuge in the Roman Church and as a popular and sensational preacher aroused Vienna with drastic sermons and clownish antics. Of his various plays, The Sons of the Valley (1803) and the Cross on the Baltic (1806) deserve mention for their religious and mystic subject-matter, for which Werner himself has attempted an explanation, though without adding to their understanding. Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Power (1807) is a pageant play of great interest. Its recantation, The Power of Weakness, was written after Werner's conversion. More important than these is his so-called "fate tragedy," The 24th of February (1810 per formed in Weimar; published 1815). This day was a day of terror to Werner, for on it he lost in the same year his mother and his most intimate friend. He therefore in the play invests the day with a fatal significance, and on it a malignant fate has especial power over the fortunes of the persons of the drama; there is also a fatal requisite and a general atmosphere of fatalism. The play started a whole series; some of these were crude and weak imitations, others, like Grillparzer's The Ancestress, were of great power. These plays were conditioned by something in the air. Perhaps Napoleon, the man of fate, ruling the minds and destinies of a whole continent, had something to do with the philosophical background. Werner caught the fatalistic spirit, gave it concise and logical form, and succeeded in producing a play which has both atmosphere and logic of development. In all of these plays, in so far as they are good, the effect is produced by the recognition scenes which hold the reader rapt to the end. But the weak and vulgar imitations of the category outnumbered the powerful plays in the genre, and the well-merited death-blow was given them by Platen's The Fateful Fork (1826).

E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a thoroughly Romantic person. Like his fellow-Königsberger, Werner, he went through a period of wildest dissipation, and all his life was easily influenced by alcohol. He was a painter, a writer, and a musician. His ability in the pictorial arts was mainly in caricature and his career as a composer is typically Romantic; though he never but once completed a composition, that he started, he was thoroughly at home in the theory of the art. Like all Romanticists, Hoffmann was interested in and tried all phases of life and refused to recognize the boundaries between the various parts of existence, between the arts, and between reality and unreality. Hoffmann, with all his North German power of reasoning and his zeal and conscientiousness in public office, was emphatically that Romanticist associated with the night-sides of literature and life. There is something uncanny both in the man and his writings. His power of putting the scene of his most unreal stories in the midst of well-known places, his ability to shift the reader from the real to the unreal and vice versa, make some of his stories seem like phantasmagorias.

In all of Hoffmann's stories there is some unpleasant, bizarre character; this is the author's satire on his own strange personality. There is none of Poe's objectivity in Hoffmann, but he uses his subjectivity in a peculiarly Romantic fashion. It is his idea to raise the reader above the every-day point of view, to flee from this to a magic world where the unusual shall take the place of the real and where wonder shall rule. So there are in Hoffmann's stories a series of characters who are really doubles. To the uninitiated they seem every-day creatures; to those who know, they are fairies or beings from the supernatural world. Such characters are found at their best in The Golden Pot.

Hoffmann has influenced both French and English literatures more than any other Romantic poet. Hawthorne and Poe read him, and he was felt by the French to be one of the first Germans whom they understood. It was not merely that his clear reason appealed to the French, but that they saw in him one endowed as with a sixth sense. He has a fineness of observation, especially for the ridiculous sides of humanity, together with a tenderness of spirit, that was new in German literature as such men as Sainte-Beuve and Gautier saw it. The soul at war with itself, uncovering its most secret thoughts, the "malheur d'être poète," coupled with wit, taste, gaiety, and the comedy spirit—all these the French found in Hoffmann as in no other German. Poe was also influenced by Hoffmann, but Poe's whole world is the supernatural, and where Hoffmann slips with fantastic but logical changes from the real to the unreal, Poe's metempsychosis is the real in his world and he has a deeper insight into the world of terror. The difference between Hawthorne and Hoffmann is even more striking, for in the American the supernatural is the embodiment of the Puritan New England conscience. In Hoffmann there is no such elevation of the moral world to the rank of an atmosphere.

In Hoffmann there is no out-of-doors, no lyric love; some of his characters are frankly insane. The musical takes on a supreme significance among the sensations, and music seemed the only art which was able to draw the soul of the man from his earth-bound habitation. Only in music did Hoffmann find the ability to make the Romantic escape from the homelessness of this existence to the all-embracing world of the unreal. But too often in his works does the unreal fail to satisfy the reader. There is an effort felt, an effect sought for, and, while the amalgamation of the two worlds is perfect, the world to which Hoffmann is able to take us proves to be without the cogency which our imaginations expect. Here Hoffmann fails. His world of the imagination cannot always be taken seriously.

Count August von Platen-Hallermund (1796-1835) is characterized by the eternal Romantic homelessness; at every turn of his career this impresses one. Of ancient noble Franconian stock, he felt himself a foreigner in Bavaria which had acquired Franconia in the Napoleonic period. In his early life in the military academy at Munich he was never thoroughly at home, for his was not a military spirit and he was unable to follow his literary tastes. When finally he was enabled to study at Würzburg and Erlangen, even the friendship of Schelling could not compensate for the late beginning of a university career which was filled with the study of modern European and Oriental languages but which had the bitterest personal disappointments. Even in Italy, the land of every German poet's dreams, Platen never felt himself at home, and the pictures of him from his Italian life are of a tragic, lonesome figure. The discord between body and soul, that homelessness in one's own physical body which characterized Hoffmann and made him seem diabolical to so many, is also to be noted in Platen. Carried over to the moral world, it accounts for his ardent cultivation of friendship rather than love, and frees him from the bitter accusations of Heine, whose attack in The Baths of Lucca is one of the most scurrilous and venomous pasquils in all literary history. Finally, in the esthetic world, Platen seems largely un-German. His esthetics were of the Classical and Renaissance times; in an age of the breaking down of conventions and of literary revolutions, Platen held himself rigidly aristocratic; he clung to a canon of beauty in an age which was giving birth to realism.

Platen's poetry falls into two periods—the early German tentative period and the later or foreign period, the poems of which were mostly written in Italy and in imitation of, or adapted from, foreign metres. Platen is always represented as a master of form, and, since Jacob Grimm's characterization of him, has been accused of "marble coldness." That Platen handled difficult metres with virtuosity is not to be laid against him; it is to the advantage of German verse that such poems as his ghasels made indigenous, in part, the feeling for mere beauty in verse. German poets have too often gone the road of mere formlessness. Platen cultivated style, polished and revised his lines with as great care as did his arch-enemy Heine, and it is only a confession of lack of ear to refuse him the name of poet. No one who reads his Polish Songs can help feeling that they are the products of fire and inspiration.

It must be confessed, however, that there is in Platen a remarkable lack of inner experience. He went through life without ever having been shaken to the depths of his nature and was, unfortunately, not of so Olympian a calmness that, like Goethe, he could present the world in plastic repose and sublimity. With all his refinement and fervor he has left but few poems of lasting interest, and of these The Grave in the Busento is perhaps the best.

LUDWIG ACHIM VON ARNIM AND CLEMENS BRENTANO

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THE BOY'S MAGIC HORN7 (1806)

WERE I A LITTLE BIRD

  Were I a little bird,  And had two little wings,  I'd fly to thee;  But I must stay, because  That cannot be.  Though I be far from thee,  In sleep I dwell with thee,  Thy voice I hear.  But when I wake again,  Then all is drear.  Each nightly hour my heart  With thoughts of thee will start  When I'm alone;  For thou 'st a thousand times  Pledged me thine own.* * * * *

THE MOUNTAINEER

  Oh, would I were a falcon wild,    I should spread my wings and soar;  Then I should come a-swooping down    By a wealthy burgher's door.  In his house there dwells a maiden,    She is called fair Magdalene,  And a fairer brown-eyed damsel    All my days I have not seen.  On a Monday morning early,    Monday morning, they relate,  Magdalene was seen a-walking    Through the city's northern gate.  Then the maidens said: "Thy pardon—    Magdalene, where wouldst thou go?"  "Oh, into my father's garden,    Where I went the night, you know."  And when she to the garden came,    And straight into the garden ran,  There lay beneath the linden-tree    Asleep, a young and comely man.  "Wake up, young man, be stirring,    Oh rise, for time is dear,  I hear the keys a-rattling,    And mother will be here."  "Hearst thou her keys a-rattling,    And thy mother must be nigh,  Then o'er the heath this minute    Oh come with me, and fly!"  And as they wandered o'er the heath,    There for these twain was spread,  A shady linden-tree beneath,    A silken bridal-bed.  And three half hours together,    They lay upon the bed.  "Turn round, turn round, brown maiden;    Give me thy lips so red!"  "Thou sayst so much of turning round,    But naught of wedded troth,  I fear me I have slept away    My faith and honor both."  "And fearest thou, thou hast slept away    Thy faith and honor too,  I say I'll wed thee yet, my dear,    So thou shalt never rue."  Who was it sang this little lay,    And sang it o'er with cheer?  On St. Annenberg by the town,    It was the mountaineer.  He sang it there right gaily,    Drank mead and cool red wine,  Beside him sat and listened    Three dainty damsels fine.  As many as sand-grains in the sea,  As many as stars in heaven be,  As many as beasts that dwell in fields,  As many as pence which money yields,  As much as blood in veins will flow,  As much as heat in fire will glow,  As much as leaves in woods are seen  And little grasses in the green,  As many as thorns that prick on hedges,  As grains of wheat that harvest pledges,  As much as clover in meadows fair,  As dust a-flying in the air,  As many as fish in streams are found,  And shells upon the ocean's ground,  And drops that in the sea must go,  As many as flakes that shine in snow—  As much, as manifold as life abounds both far and nigh,  So much, so many times, for e'er, oh thank the Lord on high!* * * * *