The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Vii Part 17

Thus united they continued for some time to kneel in the church, and neither made a sound. Suddenly they felt their hands lightly touched and looked up. The Pastor was standing between them with a s.h.i.+ning face, and holding his hands on their heads in blessing. By chance he had entered the church once more from the vestry and, touched and amazed, had witnessed the betrothal which had been consummated here apart from the wedding in the presence of G.o.d. He, too, said no word, but his eyes spoke. He drew the youth and the girl to his breast, and pressed his favorites affectionately to him.

Then, leading the way, he went with the couple into the vestry in order to let them out. And thus the three left the little, quiet, bright village church. Lisbeth and the Hunter had found each other--for their lives!

GUTZKOW AND YOUNG GERMANY

By Starr Willard Cutting, Ph.D. Professor of German Literature, University of Chicago

A group of men, including, among others, Ludwig Borne, Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt, Ludolf Wienbarg, and Karl Gutzkow, dominate the literary activity of Germany from the beginning of the fourth decade to about the middle of the nineteenth century. The common bond of coherence among the widely divergent types of mind here represented, is the spirit of protest against the official program of the reaction which had succeeded the rise of the people against Napoleon Bonaparte. This German phase of an essentially European political restoration had turned fiercely upon all intelligent, patriotic leaders, who called for a redemption of the unfulfilled pledges of const.i.tutional government, given by the princes of Germany, in dire need of popular support against foreign invasion, and had construed such reminders as disloyalty and as proof of dark designs against the government. It had branded indiscriminately, as infamous demagogues, traitors, and revolutionists, all those who, like Jahn, the _Turners,_ and most of the members of the earliest _Burschenschaften_ (open student societies), longed for the creation of a new empire under the leaders.h.i.+p of Prussia, or, like Karl Follen (Charles Follen, first professor of German at Harvard), preferred the establishment of a German republic on lines similar to those of the United States of America. Under a policy of suppression, manipulated by Metternich with consummate skill in the interest of Austria against Prussia and against German confidence in the sincerity and trustworthiness of the Prussian government, the reaction had by arrests, prosecutions, circ.u.mlocution-office delays, banishments, and an elaborate system of espionage, for the most part silenced opposition and saved, not the state, but, at any rate, the _status quo_.

This "success" had incidentally cost Germany the presence and service of some of the ablest and best of her own youth, who spent the rest of their lives in France, England, Switzerland, or the United States. We Americans owe to this "success" some of the most admirable types of our citizens.h.i.+p--expatriated Germans like Karl Follen, Karl Beck, Franz Lieber, the brothers Wesselhoeft, and many others.

Wienbarg dedicated in 1834 his _Esthetic Campaigns_ to Young Germany.

This term has since then served friend and foe to designate the group of writers of whom we speak. Their slogan was freedom. Freedom from cramping police surveillance; freedom from the arbitrary control of government, unchecked by responsibility to the people; freedom from the narrowing prescriptions of ecclesiastical authority, backed by the power of the state; freedom from the literary restraint of medievalism in modern letters--these and various other brands of freedom were demanded by different members of the school. Just because the birth-throes of modern Germany, which extend over the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, were especially violent during the period under consideration, the program of the school had from the outset a strong political bias. The broad ma.s.ses of the people were unacquainted with political forms and principles. They were by time-hallowed tradition virtually the wards of their patriarchal princes, sharing with these protectors a high degree of jealous regard for state sovereignty and of instinctive opposition towards any and all attempts to secure popular restraint of the sovereign's will and national unification, that should demand subordination of the single state to the central government. All early attempts to awaken popular interest in social and political reform had fallen flat, because of this helpless ignorance and indifference of public opinion. But the drastic official measures against early agitators proved to be a challenge to further activity in the direction of progress.

[Ill.u.s.tration: KARL FERDINAND GUTZKOW]

The July revolution of 1830 in Paris added fuel to the flame of this agitation in Germany and intensified the interest of still wider ma.s.ses in the question of large nationality and popular control. Then came, on the twenty-seventh of May, 1832, the German revolutionary speeches of the Hambach celebration, and, on April third, 1833, the Frankfurt riot, with its attempt to take the Confederate Council by surprise and to proclaim the unification of Germany. The resulting persecution of Fritz Reuter, the tragedy of Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, the simultaneous withdrawal or curtailment of the freedom of the press and the right of holding public meetings were most eloquent advocates with the public mind for a st.u.r.dy opposition to the conservatism of princes and officials.

No wonder, then, that thinking men, like Heine and Gutzkow, were fairly forced by circ.u.mstances into playing the game. No wonder that their tales, novels, and dramas became in many cases editorials to stimulate and guide public thought and feeling in one direction or another. This swirl of agitation put a premium upon a sort of rapid-fire work and journalistic tone, quite incompatible with the highest type of artistic performance. While the Young Germans were all politically liberal and opposed to the Confederate Council and to the Metternich program, they were in many ways more cosmopolitan than national in temper.

The foregoing may serve to show the only substantial ground for the charge of didacticism, frequently lodged by their critics against the writers of the school. For it is beside the mark to speak of their opposition to romanticism as a ground for the charge in question. They were all, to be sure, anti-Romanticists. They declined to view life through roseate-hued spectacles or to escape the world of everyday reality by fairy-tale flights into the world of the imagination. They called upon men to discover by clear-eyed vision not only the beauties but also the defects of contemporary social existence. They would employ literature, not as an opiate to make us forget such defects, but as a stimulant to make us remedy them. Hence their repeated exhortations to use the senses and to trust them as furnis.h.i.+ng the best kind of raw material for legitimate art. Hence also their protests against the bloodless abstractions of the Nazarene school of painting and to transcendental idealism in art and literature. They cultivated art, not for its own sake, but for the sake of a fuller, saner, and freer human life. In this sense they were didactic; but they were no more didactic than the Romanticists and the Pseudo-Cla.s.sicists who had preceded them.

In their earnest contention for an organic connection between German life and German art and literature they were hewing more closely to the line of nature and truth than any other Germans since the time of Herder.

They are usually spoken of as free-thinkers and frequently as anti-religious in temper and conviction. The charge of irreligion seems based upon the misconception or the misrepresentation of their orthodox critics. It is, at any rate, undeserved, as far as Gutzkow, the leader of the school, is concerned. It is true that they were liberal in the matter of religious and philosophical thought. They were also skeptical as to the sincerity and usefulness of many current practises and inst.i.tutions of the Catholic and Protestant branches of the church; their wit, irony, and satire were directed, however, not against religion, but against the obnoxious externals of ecclesiasticism. This attack was provoked by the obvious fact that the reaction employed the inst.i.tutional state church as a weapon with which to combat the rising tide of popular discontent with existing social and political forms and functions. This was especially true after the accession to the throne of Prussia of that romantic and reactionary prince, Frederick William IV., in 1840.

Critics have ascribed the negative, disintegrating, and cosmopolitan spirit of the group as a whole to the fact that Borne and Heine were Jews. In addition, however, to the abundant non-racial grounds for this spirit, already urged as inherent in the historic crisis under discussion, we should recall the fact that Heine, as a literary producer, is more closely allied with the Romanticists than with Young Germany, and that Borne, who in his celebrated _Letters from Paris_ (1830-34) and elsewhere went farther than all other members of the school in transforming art criticism into political criticism, was no cosmopolitan but an ardent, sincere, and consistent German patriot.

Moreover, while Borne and Heine belong through sympathy and deliberate choice to Young Germany, the real spokesmen of the group, Wienbarg, Laube, Mundt, and Gutzkow, were non-Jewish Germans.

Among the external facts of Gutzkow's life, worth remembering in this connection, are the following: His birth on the seventeenth of March, 1811, as the son of humble parents; his precocious development in school and at the University of Berlin; his deep interest in the revolution of 1830 in Paris; his student experiments in journalism and the resulting a.s.sociation with the narrow-minded patriot, Wolfgang Menzel; his doctorate in Jena and subsequent study of books and men in Heidelberg, Munich, Leipzig, Berlin, and Hamburg; his a.s.sociation with Heine, Laube, Mundt, and Wienbarg and his journey with Laube through Austria and Italy in 1533; his breach with Menzel at the instance of Laube in the same year; his publication in 1835 of the crude sketch of an emanc.i.p.ation novel, _Wally the Skeptic_, compounded of suggestions from Lessing's Dr.

Reimarus, from Saint Simonism, and from the sentimental tragedy of Charlotte Stieglitz in real life; Menzel's revengeful denunciation of this colorless and tedious novel, as an "outrageous attack upon ethics and the Christian religion"; the resulting verdict of the Mannheim munic.i.p.al court, punis.h.i.+ng Gutzkow by one month's imprisonment, with no allowance for a still longer detention during his trial; the official proscription of all "present and future writings" by Gutzkow, Wienbarg, Laube, Mundt, and Heine; Gutzkow's continued energetic champions.h.i.+p of the new literary movement and editorial direction of the Frankfurt _Telegraph_, from 1835 to 1837, under the very eyes of the Confederate Council; his removal in 1837 to Hamburg and his gradual transformation there from a short story writer and journalist into a successful dramatist; his series of eleven plays, produced within the s.p.a.ce of fifteen years, from 1839 to 1854; the success of his tragedy, _Uriel Acosta_, in 1846, and the resulting appointment of the author in the same year as playwright and critic at the Royal Theatre in Dresden; his temperate partic.i.p.ation in the popular movement of 1848 and consequent loss of the Dresden position; the death of his wife, Amalia, in the same-year after an estrangement of seven years, due to his own infatuation for Therese von Bacharacht; his happy marriage in 1849 with Bertha Meidinger, a cousin of his first wife; the publication in 1850-51 of his first great novel of contemporary German life, ent.i.tled, _Spiritual Knighthood_; his continuous editorial work upon the journal, _Fireside Conversations_, from 1849 until the appearance of his other great contemporary novel, _The Magician of Rome_, 1858-61; his attack of insanity under the strain of ill health in 1865 and unsuccessful attempt at suicide; and, finally, his rapidly declining health and frequent change of residence from Berlin to Italy, thence to Heidelberg, and from there to Sachsenhausen, near Frankfurt-on-the-Main, and his tragic death there, either intentional or accidental, in the night of December fifteenth, 1878, when under the influence of chloral he upset the candle, by the light of which he had been reading, and perished in the stifling fumes of the burning room.

This bare outline recalls the personality and career of the best single embodiment of the spirit of Young Germany. His humble birth, unusual grasp of intellect, and ambition to secure an adequate education brought him into early touch with alert representatives of the educated middle cla.s.ses, who were the keenest and most consistent critics of the political, social, and ecclesiastical reaction which gripped German life at that time. Menzel's student connection with the Jena _Burschenschaft_, his early published protest against the emptiness of recent German literature, and his polemic, ent.i.tled _German Literature_, and aimed at the imitators of Goethe and at Goethe's own lack of interest in German unification, attracted young Gutzkow, who had also been a member of the _Burschenschaft_, and prompted him to write and publish in his student paper a defense of Menzel against his critics.

This led Menzel to invite Gutzkow to Stuttgart and to propose a cooperation which could be but short-lived; for Menzel was timid and vacillating, whereas Gutzkow was sincere, courageous, and consistent.

This steadfastness and singleness of purpose, combined with a remarkable power to appreciate, adopt, and express the leading thoughts and aspirations of his own time, make Gutzkow the most efficient leader of the whole group. Heine was, as already noted, too much of a Romanticist to be a thorough-going Young German. Besides, he lacked the sincerity and the enthusiastic conviction which dedicated practically every work of Karl Gutzkow to the task of restoring the proper balance between German literature and German life. Gutzkow felt that literature had, in the hands of the Romanticists, abandoned life to gain a fool's paradise.

After a brief apprentices.h.i.+p to Jean Paul and to the romantic ideal, never whole-hearted, because of the disintegrating influence of his simultaneous acquaintance with Borne and Heine, Gutzkow utterly renounced the earlier movement and became the champion of a definite reform. He aimed henceforth to enrich German literature by abundant contact with the large, new thoughts of modern life in its relation to the individual and to the community. He was no less sincere in his determination to make literature introduce the German people to a larger, richer, freer, and truer human life for the individual and for the state. In his eyes statecraft, religion, philosophy, science, and industry teemed with raw material of surpa.s.sing interest and importance for the literary artist. He accordingly set himself the task in one way and another to make his own generation share this conviction. It is quite true that he was not the man to transform with his own hands this raw material into works of art of consummate beauty and perfection. He was conscious of his own artistic limitations and would have confessed them in the best years of his life with the frankness of a Lessing in similar circ.u.mstances. We may agree that he lacked the skill of many greater poets than he, to compress into artistic shape, with due regard for line, color, movement, and atmosphere of the original, the material of his observation. Yet we still have to explain the fact that he wrote novels and dramas pulsating with the life of his own contemporaries--works that claimed the attention and touched the heart of thousands of readers and theatre-goers and inspired many better artists than he to treat themes drawn from the public and private life of the day.

It would take us too far afield to trace in detail the nature and sources of Gutzkow's writings, by which he accomplished this important result. A few suggestions, together with a reminder of his great indebtedness to the simultaneous efforts of other Young Germans, notably those of Laube and Wienbarg, must suffice. Practically all of his earlier writings, like the short story, _The Sadducee of Amsterdam_ (1833), as well as the essays ent.i.tled _Public Characters_ (1835), _On the Philosophy of History_ (1836), and _Contemporaries_ (1837), are evidence of the intense interest of the author in the social, philosophical, and political leaders of the time. They are preliminary studies, to be used by him presently in his work as a dramatist.

In his two powerful novels, _Spiritual Knighthood_ (1850-51) and _The Magician of Rome_ (1858-61), he states and discusses with great boldness and skill those problems of the relation between Church and State--between religion and citizens.h.i.+p--that confronted the thoughtful men of the day.

The backbone of each of his numerous serious plays is some conflict, reflecting directly or indirectly the prejudices, antagonisms, shortcomings, and struggles of modern German social, religious, and civic life. _King Saul_ (1839) embodies, for instance, the conflict between ecclesiastical and temporal authority--between the authority of the church and the claims of the thinker and the poet; _Richard Savage_ (1839) that between the pride of n.o.ble birth and the promptings of the mother's heart; _Werner_ (1840), _A White Leaf_ (1842), and _Ottfried_ (1848), variations of the conflict between a man's duty and his vacillating, simultaneous love of two women; _Patkul_ (1840), the conflict between the hero's champions.h.i.+p of truth and justice and the triumphant inertia of authority in the hands of a weak prince; _Uriel Acosta_ (1846), the best of the author's serious plays, embodies the tragic conflict between the hero's conviction of truth and his love for his mother and for his intended wife.

Gutzkow wrote three comedies which in point of continued popularity have outlived all his other numerous contributions to the German stage: _Sword and Queue_ (1843), _The Prototype of Tartuffe_ (1844), and _The Royal Lieutenant_ (1849). The second of the three has the best motivated plot; the first and third have, by virtue of their national substance, their witty dialogue, and their droll humor, proved dearer to the heart of the German people. In _The Prototype of Tartuffe_ we are shown President La Roquette at the court of Louis XIV., obliged at last, in spite of his long continued successful efforts to suppress the play, to witness his own public unmasking in the person of Moliere's _Tartuffe_, of whom he is the sneaking, hypocritical original. We hear him in anger declare his readiness to join the Jesuits and we join in the laugh at his discomfiture. The scene of _The Royal Lieutenant_, written to celebrate the hundredth recurrence of Goethe's birthday, is laid in the Seven Years' War in the house of Goethe's father in Frankfurt. The Riccaut-like figure of the Royal Lieutenant himself, Count Thorane, and his outlandish attempts to speak German, the clever portraits of the dignified father and the cheerful mother, and the unhistorical sketch of little Wolfgang, with his pleased and precocious antic.i.p.ation of his future laurels, are woven by means of witty dialogue into an amusing, though not very coherent or logical whole. In Gutzkow's _Sword and Queue_ an entertaining situation at the court of Frederick William I. of Prussia is developed by a very free use of the facts of history, after the manner of the comedy of Scribe. With rare skill the different characters of the play are sketched and shown upon a background, which corresponds closely enough to historic fact to produce the illusion of reality. The comedy pilots the Crown Prince's friend, the Prince of Baireuth, through a maze of intrigue, including Prussian ambition to secure an alliance with England by the marriage of the Princess Wilhelmine to the Prince of Wales; a diplomatic blocking of this plan, with the help of the English Amba.s.sador Hotham; the changed front of the old King, who prefers a union of his daughter with an Austrian Archduke to the hard terms of the proposed English treaty; Hotham's proposal to the King to bring him a promising recruit for the corps of Royal Grenadiers; the evening of the Tobacco Parliament, in which the Prince of Baireuth feigns tipsiness and in a mocking funeral oration, in honor of the old King, tells the pseudo-deceased some bitter truths,--to a final scene, in which, as Hotham's proposed grenadier recruit with Queue and Sword, he wins not only the cordial approval of the King but also the heart and hand of Wilhelmine.

Karl Gutzkow's life-work was a struggle for freedom and truth. We recognize in the web of his serious argument familiarity with the best thought of the poets, theologians, and philosophers of his own day and of the eighteenth century. In religion a pantheist, he believed in the immortality of the soul, had unshaken confidence in the tendency of the world that "makes for righteousness," and recommends the ideal of "truth and justice" as the best central thought to guide each man's whole life.

He shares in an eminent degree, with other members of the group known as Young Germany, a significance for the subsequent development of German literature, far transcending the artistic value of his works. People are just beginning to perceive his genetic importance for the student of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and the recent naturalistic movement in European letters.

KARL FERDINAND GUTZKOW

SWORD AND QUEUE (1843)

TRANSLATED BY GRACE ISABEL COLBRON

PREFACE OF THE AUTHOR

The essence of the comic is self-contradiction, contrast. Even professional estheticians must acknowledge that by the very nature of its origin the following comedy answers this definition.

A king lacking the customary attributes of his station; a royal court governed by the rules that regulate any simple middle-cla.s.s household--surely here is a contradiction sufficient in itself to attract the Comic Muse. And it was indeed only when the author was well along in his work that he felt any inclination to introduce a few political allusions with what is called a "definite purpose," into a work inspired by the principles of pure comedy.

Ever since the example set by those great Greeks, aeschylus and Aristophanes, the stage has claimed the right to deal with extremes. He who, sinning and laden with the burden of human guilt, has once fallen a victim to the Eumenides, cannot, as a figure in a drama, go off on pleasure trips, nor can he go about the usual business of daily life.

Fate seizes him red-handed, causes him to see blood in every gla.s.s of champagne and to read his warrant of arrest on every chance sc.r.a.p of paper. And the Comic Muse is even less indulgent. When Aristophanes would mock the creations of Euripides, which are meant to move the public by their declining fortunes, he at once turns the tragedian into a rag-picker.

Comedy may, tragedy must, exaggerate. The exaggerations in _Sword and Queue_ brought forth many a contemptuous grimace from the higher-priced seats in the Court Theatres. But it needs only a perusal of the _Memoirs of the Markgravine of Baireuth, Princess of Prussia_, to give the grotesque picture a certificate of historical veracity. Not only the character-drawing, but the very plot, is founded on those Memoirs, written in a less sophisticated age than our own, and the authenticity of which is undisputed.

In the case of Seckendorf, the technical, or, I might say, the symphonic composition of the play, which allots the parts as arbitrarily as in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ does Peter Quince, who says to highly respectable people: "You play the Lion, and you play the a.s.s,"

necessitates making a victim of a man who was a mediocre diplomat, but for a time, at least, a fairly good soldier. The author feels no compunction on this score. Stupidity, as Comus artlessly thinks, is not wickedness; the Lion or the a.s.s--each is necessary to different moments in the play. A Brandenburg-Prussian comedy of 1733 can, _a priori_, hardly fail to be "unjust" to an Imperial Amba.s.sador of that epoch. Such injustice belongs to the native wantonness of the Comic Muse. In plays of a specifically Austrian character, Prussia, and especially the people of Berlin, have suffered the same necessary injustice of comedy.

Fortunately, according to Chevalier Lang and other more reliable authorities, this particular Seckendorf was both vain and tyrannous. His hatred for Frederick II. and his eternal "combinations" went to such lengths that, during the first Silesian war, he offered the Austrian Court a detailed plan by which the "Land-hungry conqueror" might be personally rendered innocuous. (See Arneth, _Maria Theresa_, Vol. I).

However, Puck's manner of writing history may be softened a little. It is not necessary for the actor to present Seckendorf as an imbecile.

Actors have the unfortunate habit of taking the whole hand when a finger is offered. In truth I have seen but a very few performances of my play in which Frederick William I. still retained, beneath his att.i.tude of stern father, some share of royal dignity; in which Eversmann, despite his confident impudence, still held his tongue like a trembling lackey; in which the Hereditary Prince, despite his desire to find everything in the Castle ridiculous, still maintained a reserve sufficient to save him from being expelled from Berlin for his impertinent criticisms--or where the Princess was still proud and witty beneath her girlish simplicity.

And still rarer is it to see a Seckendorf who, in spite of his clumsy "combinations," did not quite sink to the level of the Marshal von Kalb.

At this point a dramaturgic hint might not come amiss. In cases where there is danger of degrading the part, the stage manager should take care to intrust such roles to the very actors who at first thought might seem least suited for them--those whose personalities will compel them to raise the part to a higher level. The buffoon and sometimes even the finer comedian cannot free Shakespeare from the reproach of having given two kings of Denmark a clown as Prime Minister. It is very much less necessary that the audience should laugh at Polonius' quips than that the quips should in no wise impair his position as courtier, as royal adviser, as father of two excellent children, and, at the last, as a man who met death with tragic dignity. In such a case a wise manager intrusts the comic part to an actor who--is not comic.

The following play was written in the spring of 1843. Some of our readers may chance to know the little garden of the Hotel Reichmann in Milan. In a room which opens out into the oleander bushes, the trickling fountains, and the sandstone cupids of that garden, the first four acts ripened during four weeks of work. The fifth act followed on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Como.

Amid surroundings which, by their beauty, bring to mind only the laws of the ideal, to hold fast to those burlesque memories from the history of the sandy Mark Brandenburg was, one may feel sure, possible only to a mind which turned in love to its Prussian home, however "treasonable" its other opinions. And yet the romanticism of San Souci, as well as the estheticism of the Berlin Board of Censors, has at all times persecuted the play, now forbidding it, again permitting an occasional performance, and again prohibiting it even after 1848.

When the aged and revered Genast from Weimar had played the king a dozen times in the Friedrich-Wilhelmstadtisches Theater, Hinckeldey's messengers brought the announcement that the presentation of the piece met with disfavor in high places. Frederick William IV. did everything possible to hamper and curtail the author's ambitions. But to give truth its due, I will not neglect to mention that this last prohibition was softened by a.s.signing as its motion the allusion made in the play to that legend of the Berlin Castle, "The White Lady," who is supposed to bring a presage of death to the Prussian royal family.

The Dresden Court Theatre was formerly a model of impartiality. And above all, Emil Devrient's energetic partisans.h.i.+p for the newer dramatic literature was a great a.s.sistance to authors in cases of this kind. This play, like many another, owes to his artistic zeal its introduction to those high-cla.s.s theatres where alone a German dramatist finds his best encouragement and advance. Unfortunately, the war of 1866 again banished _Sword and Queue_ from the Vienna Burgtheater, where it had won a place for itself.

SWORD AND QUEUE

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

FREDERICK WILLIAM I., _King Of Prussia, father of Frederick the Great._