Literary Recollections I
I am the son of a poet, and I have tried very hard all my life not to be a poet myself, if poet means a man who tries to make his thoughts dance gracefully in the chains of metre and rhyme. In my own very prosaic work I have had to suffer all my life from suppressed poetry, as one suffers from suppressed gout. Poets will, no doubt, protest most emphatically against so low a view of their art. They assure us that they never feel their chains, and that they are perfectly free in giving expression to their thoughts in rhyme and metre. Some of the more honest among them have even gone so far as to confess that their best thoughts had often been suggested to them by the rhyme. Platen may be quite right when he says:
Was stets und aller Orten sich ewig jung erweist
Ist in gebundenen Worten ein ungebundener Geist.
(What proves itself eternal in every place and time
Is an unfettered spirit, free in the chains of rhyme.)
True, very true. You may get that now and then, but in our modern languages it is but seldom that thought soars up quite free on the wings of rhyme. Many and many a thought sinks down because of the weight of the rhyme, many and many a thought remains altogether unspoken because it will not submit to the strait jacket of the rhyme; many and many a poor thought is due entirely to an irrepressible rhyme; and if some brilliant thoughts have really been suggested by the rhyme, would it not be better if they had been suggested by something else, whether you call it mind or soul? The greatest masters of rhyme, such as Browning in English or Rückert in German, and even H. Heine, often fall victims to their own mastery. They spoil their poems in order to show that they can find a rhyme for anything and everything, however grotesque the rhyme may be. I remember once being bold enough to ask Tennyson what was the use or excuse of rhyme. He was not offended, but was quite ready with his answer: “Rhyme helps the memory,” he said—and that answer was as honest as it was true. But what is useful for one purpose, for the purpose of recollecting, may be anything but useful for other purposes, it may be even hurtful, and in our case it has certainly proved hurtful again and again to the natural flow and expression of thought and feeling.
Nor should I venture to say a word against Platen’s gebundene Worte. It was only the very necessity of finding a word to answer to time which led me to speak of chains of rhyme. Gebundene Worte are not necessarily rhymed words, they are measured words, and these are no doubt quite natural and quite right for poetry. Metre is measure, and metrical utterance, in that sense, was not only more natural for the expression of the highest thoughts, but was probably everywhere more ancient also than prose. In every literature, as far as we know, poetry came first, prose second. Inspired utterance requires, nay produces, rhythmic movements not only of the voice (song and prosodia), but of the body also (dance). In Greek, chorus means dance, measured movement, and the Greek choruses were originally dances; nay, it can be proved that these dancing movements formed really the first metres of true poetry. Hence, it was quite natural that David should have danced before the Lord with all his might. Language itself bears witness to the fact that the oldest metres were the steps and movements of dancers. As the old dances consisted of steps, the ancient metres consisted of feet. Even we ourselves still speak of feet, not because we understand what it means, but simply because the Greeks and Romans spoke of feet, and they said so because originally the feet really marked the metre.
The ancient poets of the Veda also speak of feet, and they seem to have been quite aware why they spoke of metrical feet, for in the names of some of their metres we still find clear traces of the steps of the dances which accompanied their poems. Trishtubh, one of their ancient metres, meant three-step; Anushtubh, the later Sloka, meant by-step 1 or Reigen. The last syllables or steps of each line were called the Vritta, or the turn, originally the turn of the dancers, who seem to have been allowed to move more freely till they came to the end of one movement. Then, before they turned, or while they turned, they marked the steps more sharply and audibly, either as iambic or as trochaic, and afterwards marched back again with greater freedom. Hence in ancient Sanskrit the end or turn of each line was under stricter rules as to long and short steps, or long and short syllables, whereas greater freedom was allowed for the rest of a line. Thus Sanskrit Vritta, the turn, came to mean the metre of the whole line, just as in Latin we have the same word versus, literally the turn, then verse, and this turn became the name for verse, and remained so to the present day. There is no break in our history, and language is the chain that holds it together. A strophe also was originally a turning, to be followed by the antistrophe or the return, all ideas derived from dancing. The ancient Sanskrit name for metre and metrical or measured speed was Khandas. The verb Khand would correspond phonetically to Latin scandere, in the sense of marching, as in a-scendere, to march upward, to mount, and de-scendere, to march downward, all expressing the same idea of measured movement, but not of rhyme or jingle. These movements were free and natural in the beginning; they became artificial when they became traditional, and we find in such works as the Sanskrit Vritta-ratnâkara, “the treasury of verse,” every kind of monstrosity which was perpetrated by Hindu poets of the Renaissance period, and perpetrated, it must be confessed, with wonderful adroitness.
But I must not tire my friends with these metrical mysteries. What I want them to know is that in the most ancient Aryan poetry which we possess there is no trace of rhyme, except here and there by accident, and that everywhere in the history of the poetry of the Âryas, rhyme, as essential to poetry, is a very late invention. It is the same in Semitic languages, though in Semitic as well as in Aryan speech, in fact, wherever grammatical forms are expressed chiefly by means of terminations, rhyme even in prose is almost inevitable. And this was no doubt the origin of rhyme. In languages where terminations of declension and conjugation and most derivative suffixes have retained a full-bodied and sonorous form, it was difficult to avoid the jingle of rhyme. In Latin, which abounds in such constantly recurring endings as orum, arum, ibus, amus, atis, amini, tatem, tatibus, inibus, etc., good prose writers had actually to be warned against allowing their sentences to rhyme, while poets found it very easy to add these ornamental tails to their measured lines.
There can be little doubt that it was the rhymed Latin poetry, as used in the services of the Roman Catholic Church, which suggested to the German converts the idea of rhymed verses. The pagan poetry of the Teutonic races had no rhymes. It was what is called alliterative. In the German dialects the accent remained mostly on the radical syllable of words, and thus served to shorten the terminations. Hence we find fewer full-bodied terminations in Gothic than in Latin, while in later Teutonic dialects, in English as well as in German, these terminations dwindled away more and more. Thus, we say Di’ chter when the Romans would have Dicta’ tor, Pre’ diger for prœdica’ tor, cha’ ncel for cance’ lla. In order to bind their poetical lines together the German poets had recourse to initial letters, which had to be the same in certain places of each verse, and which, if pronounced with strong stress or strain, left the impression of the words being knitted together and belonging together. Here is a specimen which will show that the rules of alliteration were very strictly observed by the old German poets, far more strictly than by their modern imitators. The old rule was that in a line of eight arses there should be two words in the first and one in the second half beginning with the same letter, consonant or vowel, and always in syllables that had the accent. Here is a line from the old “Song of Hildebrand,” dating from the eighth century:—
| Hiltibraht joh Hadhubrant | Hiltibraht and Hadhubrant |
| Untar harjum tuâm, etc. | Between hosts twain, etc. |
Rückert has imitated this alliterating poetry in his poem of “Roland”:—
Roland der Ries
Im Rathhaus zu Bremen
Steht er im Standbild
Standhaft und wacht.
Kingsley has attempted something like it in his “Longbeard’s Saga,” but with much greater freedom, not to say licence:—
Scaring the wolf cub,
Scaring the horn-owl,
Shaking the snow-wreaths
Down from the pine boughs.
But to return to our modern poetry and to the poets whom I have known, and of whom I have something to tell, does it not show the power of tradition if we see them everywhere forcing their feet into the same small slippers of rhyme? And who would deny that they have achieved, and still are achieving, wonderful feats?—tours de force, it is true, but so cleverly performed that one hardly sees a trace of the force employed. No doubt much is lost in this process of beating, and hammering, and welding words together (a poet is called a Reimeschmied, a smith of rhymes, in German); much has to be thrown away because it will not rhyme at all (silver has been very badly treated in English poetry, because it rhymes with nothing, at present not even with gold), but what remains is often very beautiful, and, as Tennyson said, it sticks to the memory. One wishes one could add that the difficulty of rhyme serves to reduce the number of unnecessary poets that spring up every year. But rhyme does not strangle these numerous children of the Muses, and it is left to our ill-paid critics to perform every day, or every week, this murder of the innocents.
It may not seem very filial for the son of a poet thus to blaspheme against poetry, or rather, against rhyme. Well, I can admire rhymed poetry, just as I can admire champagne, though if the wine is really good I think it is a pity to make it mousseux.
H. Heine, who certainly was never at a loss for a rhyme, writes, at the end of one of his maddest poems, “Die Liebe”: “O Phœbus Apollo, if these verses are bad, I know thou wilt forgive me, for thou art an all-knowing god, and knowest quite well why for years I could not trouble myself any longer with measuring and rhyming words!” And he adds: “I might, of course, have said all this very well in good prose.” He ought to know, but there will not be many of his admirers to agree with him.2
I hardly remember having ever seen my father, and I came to know him chiefly through his poetry. He belonged to the post-Goethe period, though Goethe (died 1832) survived him. He was born in 1794, and died in 1827, and yet in that short time he established a lasting reputation not only as a scholar, but as a most popular poet. His best known poems are the “Griechenlieder,” the Greek songs which he wrote during the Greek war of independence. Alas! in those days battles were won by bravery and the sword, now by discipline and repeating guns. These Greek songs, in which his love of the ancient Greeks is mingled with his admiration for heroes such as Kanaris, Mark Bozzaris, and others who helped to shake off the Turkish yoke, produced a deep impression all over Germany, perhaps because they breathed the spirit of freedom and patriotism, which was then systematically repressed in Germany itself. The Greeks never forgot the services rendered by him in Germany, as by Lord Byron in England, in rousing a feeling of indignation against the Turk, and as the marble for Lord Byron’s monument in London was sent by some Greek admirers of the great poet, the Greek Parliament voted a shipload of Pentelican marble for the national monument erected to my father in Dessau.
My father’s lyrical poems also are well known all over Germany, particularly the cycles of the “Schöne Müllerin” and the “Winterreise,” both so marvellously set to music by Schubert and others. He certainly had caught the true tone of the poetry of the German people, and many of his poems have become national property, being sung by thousands who do not even know whose poems they are singing. As a specimen showing the highest point reached by his poetry, I like to quote his poem on Vineta, the old town overwhelmed by the sea on the Baltic coast. The English translation was made for me by my old, now departed, friend, J. A. Froude:—
| VINETA. | |
|---|---|
| I. | I. |
| Aus des Meeres tiefem, tiefem Grunde | From the sea’s deep hollow faintly pealing, |
| Klingen Abendglocken dumpf und matt, | Far-off evening bells come sad and slow; |
| Uns zu geben wunderbare Kunde | Faintly rise, the wondrous tale revealing |
| Von der schönen alten Wunderstadt. | Of the old enchanted town below. |
| II. | II. |
| In der Fluthen Schoss hinabgesunken | On the bosom of the flood reclining |
| Bleiben unten ihre Trümmer stehn, | Ruined arch and broken spire, |
| Ihre Zinnen lassen goldne Funken | Down beneath the watery mirror shining |
| Wiederscheinend auf dem Spiegel sehn. | Gleam and flash in flakes of golden fire. |
| III. | III. |
| Und der Schiffer, der den Zauberschimmer | And the boatman who at twilight hour |
| Einmal sah im hellen Abendroth, | Once that magic vision shall have seen, |
| Nach derselben Stelle schifft er immer, | Heedless how the crags may round him lour, |
| Ob auch rings umher die Klippe droht. | Evermore will haunt the charmèd scene. |
| IV. | IV. |
| Aus des Herzens tiefem, tiefem Grunde | From the heart’s deep hollow faintly pealing, |
| Klingt es mir, wie Glocken, dumpf und matt: | Far I hear them, bell-notes sad and slow, |
| Ach! sie geben wunderbare Kunde | Ah! a wild and wondrous tale revealing |
| Von der Liebe, die geliebt es hat. | Of the drownèd wreck of love below. |
| V. | V. |
| Eine schöne Welt is da versunken. | There a world in loveliness decaying, |
| Ihre Trümmer bleiben unten stehn, | Lingers yet in beauty ere it die; |
| Lassen sich als goldne Himmelsfunken | Phantom forms across my senses playing, |
| Oft im Spiegel meiner Träume sehn. | Flash like golden fire-flakes from the sky. |
| VI. | VI. |
| Und dann möcht’ ich tauchen in die Tiefen, | Lights are gleaming, fairy bells are ringing, |
| Mich versenken in den Wiederschein, | And I long to plunge and wander free |
| Und mir ist als ob mich Engel riefen | Where I hear those angel-voices singing |
| In die alte Wunderstadt herein. | In those ancient towers below the sea. |
That the poet did not consider rhyme an essential element of poetry, he has shown in some of his assonantic poems, such as:
Alle Winde schlafen
Auf dem Spiegel der Flut;
Kühle Schatten des Abends
Decken die Müden zu.
Luna hängt sich Schleier
Ueber ihr Gesicht,
Schwebt in dämmernden Träumen
Ueber die Wasser hin.
Alles, alles stille
Auf dem weiten Meer,—
Nur mein Herz will nimmer
Mit zur Ruhe gehn.
In der Liebe Fluten
Treibt es her und hin,
Wo die Stürme nicht ruhen,
Bis der Nachen sinkt.
Though my father was a great admirer of Goethe, he seems to have incurred his displeasure and to have been brought into personal collision with the grand old poet. Goethe had translated some modern Greek songs; it may be, as my father thought, without having fully mastered the difficulties of the spoken Greek language. My father published a complete translation of Fauriel’s collection of Greek popular poetry,3 and Goethe did not like comparisons between his work and that of anybody else, least of all of quite a young poet. “Die schöne Müllerin” also may have seemed to Goethe an encroachment on a domain peculiarly his own. In fact, when my father, with my mother, went to Weimar to pay their respects to Goethe, his Excellency was somewhat stiff and cold. My mother, also, had evidently not been sufficiently careful and respectful. She was the granddaughter of the famous pedagogue Basedow, the reformer of national education all over Germany, who had been a friend of Goethe in his youth. Goethe speaks of him in his poem, “Prophete rechts (Basedow), Prophete links (Lavater), das Weltkind (Goethe) in der Mitten.” And he also complains bitterly of Basedow in his “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” as being never without a pipe in his mouth, and as lighting his pipe with most offensive tinder—Stinkschwamm, as Goethe calls it. My mother, when asked by Goethe, “Was für eine geborene” she was (What had been her maiden name?), could not resist the temptation, and replied, laughing: “Your Excellency ought to scent it; I am the granddaughter of Basedow.” Happily my mother was very beautiful, and was pardoned the liberty she had taken. Still, the relations between my father and Goethe always remained rather strained, and all that I find in his album is a medallion portrait of Goethe with the following lines, dated 7th November, 1825:—
Meinen feyerlich Bewegten
Mache Dank und Freude kund;
Das Gefühl das Sie erregten
Schliesst dem Dichter selbst den Mund.
He was on much warmer terms with the poets of the Swabian school, Uhland, Schwab, Justinus Kerner, etc. In the year before his death, 1827, he spent some time with them in Würtemberg, and in many respects he may be reckoned as belonging to their school. The verses which Uhland wrote in my father’s album have often been quoted as a curious prophecy of his early death. It seems that some conversations which he had with the Seherin of Prevorst 4 when staying in Justinus Kerner’s house near Weinsberg, had filled him and his friends with misgivings. Uhland’s lines were:—
Wohl blühet jedem Jahre
Sein Frühling, süss und licht,
Auch jener grosse, klare—
Getrost, er fehlt dir nicht;
Er ist dir noch beschieden
Am Ziele deiner Bahn,
Du ahnest ihn hienieden
Und droben bricht er an.
Zu freundlicher Erinnerung an,
L. Uhland.
Stuttgart, den 13 Sept., 1827.
Justinus Kerner himself also wrote some lines in which he alludes to the apparition of spirits. His rooms, as my mother assured me, were always full of them, and they all seemed on the most familiar terms with the other inmates.
Nicht wie Geister, nein! wie Sterne
Kamt ihr freundlich in der Nacht,
Ja, so ernst und mild wie Sterne
Hat uns euer Bild gelacht
Oft wenn schweigt der Welt Getümmel
Wird’s so treten in den Himmel
Den die Lieb uns angefacht.
Justinus Kerner
und seine Hausfrau,
Friedericke.
Weinsberg, 7, 15, ’27.
am Tage euerer nächtlichen
Erscheinung.
I once came myself in personal contact with Uhland, the head of the Swabian school of poetry, when he was already an old man. He came to Leipzig when I was a student there, and stayed at the house of Professor Haupt, the famous Latin and German scholar. Uhland was a very shy and retiring man, and had declined every kind of public reception. However, the young students would not be gainsayed, and after assembling in the afternoon to consider what should be done to show their respect to the German poet and the liberal German politician, they marched off, some 600 or 800 of them, drew up in front of the house where they knew Uhland was staying, and sang some of Uhland’s songs. At last Uhland, a little, old, wrinkled man, appeared at the window, and expected evidently that some one should address him. But no arrangements had been made, and no one ventured to speak, fearing that at the same time two or three others might step forward to address the old poet. After waiting a considerable time, the position became so trying that I could bear it no longer; I stepped forward, and in a few words told Uhland how he was loved by us as a poet, as a scholar, and as a fearless defender of the rights of the people, and how proud we were to have him amongst us. We then waited to hear him speak, but he could not overcome his shyness, and sent a message to ask some of us to come into his room to shake hands with him. Even then he could say but very little, but when he knew that I was the son of his old friend, Wilhelm Müller, he was pleased. To me it was like a vision of a bygone age when I looked the old poet in the eyes, and whenever I hear his song, “Es zogen drei Burschen wohl über den Rhein,” or when I read his beautiful ballads, I see the silent poet looking at me with his kind eyes, unable to use meaningless words, but simply saying “Thank you.”
Another poet who was a friend and admirer of my father, and whom I saw likewise like a vision only passing before me, was Heinrich Heine. He was younger than my father (1799–1856), and evidently looked up to him as his master. “I love no lyric poet,” he wrote, “excepting Goethe, so much as Wilhelm Müller.” I found a letter of his which deserves to be preserved. Alas! the whole of my father’s library and correspondence was destroyed by fire, and this letter escaped only because my mother, a great admirer of Heine’s poems, had preserved it among her own books. Here is the letter, or at least parts of it. The original was sent about the years 1841–43, when I was a student at Leipzig, to Brockhaus’ Blätter für Litterarische Unterhaltung, but the original was never returned to me. It has often been quoted in histories of German literature, and I give the extracts here from Gustav Karpeles’ “Heinrich Heine’s Autobiographie,” Berlin, 1888, pp. 149, 150:—
Hamburg, 7th June, 1826.
I am great enough to confess to you openly that my Small Intermezzo metre 5 possesses not merely accidental similarity with your own accustomed metre, but probably owes its most secret rhythm to your songs—those dear Müller-songs which I came to know at the very time when I wrote the Intermezzo. At a very early time I let German folk-song exercise its influence upon me. Later on, when I studied at Bonn, August Schlegel opened many metrical secrets to me; but I believe it was in your songs that I found what I looked for—pure tone and true simplicity. How pure and clear your songs are, and they are all true folk-songs. In my poems, on the contrary, the form only is to a certain extent popular, the thoughts belong to our conventional society. Yes, I am great enough to repeat it distinctly, and you will sooner or later find it proclaimed publicly, that through the study of your seventy-seven poems it became clear to me for the first time how from the forms of our old still existing folk-songs new forms may be deduced which are quite as popular, though one need not imitate the unevennesses and awkwardnesses of the old language. In the second volume of your poems the form seemed to me even purer and more transparently clear. But why say so much about the form? What I yearn to tell you is that, with the exception of Goethe, there is no lyric poet whom I love as much as you.
Another fragment of the same letter occurs on page 195 (951). Here Heine, referring to his North Sea poems, writes:—
The “North Sea” belongs to my last poems, and you can see there what new keys I touch, and on what new lines I move along. Prose receives me in her wide arms, and in the next volume of my “Reisebilder” you will find in prose much that is mad, bitter, offensive, angry, and very polemical. Times are really too bad (1826), and whoever has strength, freedom, and boldness has also the duty seriously to begin the fight against all that is bad and puffed up, against all that is mediocre, and yet spreads itself out so broad, so intolerably broad. I beg you, keep well disposed towards me, never doubt me, and let us grow old together in common striving. I am conceited enough to believe that when we are both gone my name will be named together with yours. Let us therefore hold together in love in this life also.
I never came to know Heine. I knew he was in Paris when I was there in 1846, but he was already in such a state of physical collapse that a friend of mine who knew him well, and saw him from time to time, advised me not to go and see him. However, one afternoon as I and my friend were sitting on the Boulevard, near the Rue Richelieu, sipping a cup of coffee, “Look there,” he said, “there comes Heine!” I jumped up to see, my friend stopped him, and told him who I was. It was a sad sight. He was bent down, and dragged himself slowly along, his spare greyish hair was hanging round his emaciated face, there was no light in his eyes. He lifted one of his paralysed eyelids with his hand and looked at me. For a time, like the blue sky breaking from behind grey October clouds, there passed a friendly expression across his face, as if he thought of days long gone by. Then he moved on, mumbling a line from Goethe, in a deep, broken, and yet clear voice, as if appealing for sympathy:—
“Das Maulthier sucht im Düstern seinen Weg.”
Thus vanished Heine, the most brilliant, sparkling, witty poet of Germany. I have seen him, that is all I can say, as Saul saw Samuel, and wished he had not seen him. However, we travel far to see the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, of Nineveh and Memphis, and the ruins of a mind such as Heine’s are certainly as sad and as grand as the crumbling pillars and ruined temples shrouded under the lava of Vesuvius. “Eine schöne Welt ist da versunken,” I said to myself, and I went home and read in Heine’s “Buch der Lieder.” “Du bist wie eine Blume,” “Ich habe im Traum geweinet,” “Ein Tannenbaum steht einsam.” “Yes,” I said, “snow-white lilies spring from muddy ponds, and small mushrooms are said to grow on fresh-fallen snow.”
Few poets in Germany have been or are still so admired and loved as Heine, but few poets also have been so viciously maligned as Heine. Society, no doubt, had a right to frown on him, but against such calumnies as were heaped on him by envy, hatred, and malice, it is well to remember some of his last lines:—
Hab’ eine Jungfrau nie verführet
Mit Liebeswort, mit Schmeichelei,
Ich hab’ auch nie ein Weib berühret,
Wüsst’ ich, dass sie vermählet sei.
Wahrhaftig, wenn es anders wäre,
Mein Name, er verdiente nicht
Zu strahlen in dem Buch der Ehre,
Man dürft’ mir spucken in’s Gesicht.
That is strong language and evidently meant as an answer to his spies and enemies. But why will people always spy into the most uninteresting part of a poet’s life? Why are they bent on knowing on what terms Dante stood to Beatrice, Petrarch to Laura, Goethe to Frau von Stein, Heine to George Sand. Volumes have been written on their intimate relations, and yet whom does it concern, and what can it teach us? Let the dead bury their dead.
Whilst at Leipzig as a young student I still imagined myself a poet, and from time to time some of my poems appeared, to my great joy, in the local papers. I even belonged to a poetical society, and I remember at least two of us who in later times became very popular writers in Germany. One was a Jew of the name of Wolfsohn, whose play, “Only a Soul,” giving the tragedy of a Russian peasant girl, proved a great success all over Germany, and is still acted from time to time. He died young. Another, Theodor Fontane, is alive, and one of the best known and best loved novel-writers of the day. He was a charming character, a man of great gifts, full of high spirits and inexhaustible good humour. He began life in a chemist’s shop, and had a very hard struggle in his youth, which may have prevented his growing to his full height and strength. He might have been another Heine, but the many years of hard work and hopeless drudgery kept him from soaring as high as his young wings would have carried him. I remember but little of his poetry now, there remains but the sense of pleasure which I derived from it at the time. Now and then, as it happens to all of us, a few long-forgotten lines rise to the surface. In a political poem of his, I remember a young Liberal being warned with the following words:—
Sonst spazierst du nach Siberien
In die langen Winterferien,
Die zugleich Hundstage sind!
And I have never forgotten the last lines of his beautiful poem, “Die schöne Rosamunde,” where he says of the King:—
Ihn traf des Lebens grösster Schmerz:
Der Schmerz um dieses Leben!
All young poets in Germany were then liberal and more than liberal, all dreamt and sang of a united Germany. But being thirty years ahead of Bismarck, they were unmercifully sent to prison, and often their whole career was ruined for life. Living much in that society, I too, a harmless boy of eighteen, was sent to prison as a person highly dangerous to the peace of Europe. The confinement in the academic career was not very severe, however, except in one respect. From time to time one was allowed to go out, provided one kept on good terms with the attendants. But the serious thing was that as one became a popular character all one’s friends came to visit one, and they expected of course to be hospitably entertained. The consumption of beer and tobacco was considerable, and so was the bill at the end of my political incarceration. More of that perhaps by-and-by. Nearly all the political poetry of that time, much as it then stirred the people, is now forgotten; even the names of the poets are known to but few, though they have found their way into the various histories of German literature. I remember as one of the best, Herwegh, who came to Leipzig when I was a student, and who, of course, was fêted by the Burschenschaft at a brilliant supper. Much beer was drunk, much tobacco was smoked, many speeches were made. The police were present, and the names of all who had taken part were entered in the Black Book, mine among the rest. Herwegh was a real poet, unfortunately he spent nearly all his poetical genius on political invective. How well I remember his poem in which every verse ended with the words:—
Wir haben lang genug geliebt,
Wir wollen endlich hassen!
But there were some poems of his which well deserved a longer life. One began with the words: “Ich möchte hingehen wie das Abendroth.” Very beautiful, but my memory does not serve me further, and my copy of his poems has vanished from my library like many other volumes which I lent to my friends.6
I well remember the pleasure which Herwegh’s poems gave me, but the words themselves are gone. It is the same with so many of our recollections. I can still feel the intense delight, the hushed reverence with which I looked the first time at Raphael’s Madonna di San Sisto, and looked at it again and again whenever I passed through Dresden. But whether the colour of the Virgin’s dress is red or blue I cannot tell. I dare say it is all there, in the treasure-house of my memory. Nay, sometimes it suddenly appears, only never when I call for it. What is forgotten, however, does not seem to be entirely forfeited; it can be gotten again, and it probably forms, though unknown, the fertile soil for new harvests: that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.
Another famous political poet whose acquaintance I made when he was an old man was Moritz Arndt. His poetry was not very great, but the effect which he produced by his “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland” has been, and is still, perfectly marvellous. If Bismarck finished the unity of Germany, Arndt laid the foundation of it, and in the grateful memory of the people his song will probably be remembered long after Bismarck’s diplomatic triumphs have been forgotten. I shall never forget old Arndt, for, old as he was, he gave me such a grip of the hand that I thought the blood would squirt from my nails.
Lesser poets and writers whom I knew at that time, while I was a student at Leipzig, were Karl Beck, of Hungarian extraction, Robert Blum (fusillé at Vienna by Windischgrätz, 9th November, 1848), Herlossohn, Kühne, Laube, and several more whose names I could find in Histories of German Literature, or the Conversations-Lexicon, but no longer in the camera obscura of my memory. And yet some of their poems were really beautiful, full of high thoughts and deep feeling. But the world does not recognise a poet of one poem, or even of ten or twenty. In order to be a poet a man must produce hundreds of poems, volume after volume, good, bad, and indifferent. Nor is there here anything like the survival of the fittest. Although ever so many of Schiller’s or Goethe’s poems have become old and antiquated—few will deny this—yet no one is satisfied with a selection of the best, few people would ever agree as to which are the best. We must take them all or none. In that respect the ancient poets are certainly much better off. What is left of Tyrtaeos or Sappho, or of Horace and Catullus, can be carried in our waistcoat pocket, nay, in the folds of our brains; and though even here sifting might increase enjoyment, yet we can take in whatever there is without sinking under the burden. But who can remember Goethe or Wordsworth or Victor Hugo, aye, who has time even to read all their verses, so as to mark, learn, and inwardly digest them?
In towns like Paris and London, if a poet once succeeds in attracting attention, and gathering some male and female admirers around him, the very atmosphere which he breathes, the wide survey of humanity which he commands, strengthen and inspire him. No one becomes an Alpine climber who has no Alps to climb, and many a poetical soul languishes and withers if confined within the walls of a small provincial town. I have known very ordinary mortals who when they came to write for a great and influential newspaper became inspired like the prophetess on the Delphic tripod, and wrote well, while their ordinary writings remain feeble. I have known poets in small provincial towns who became changed after they had changed their provincial public for the public of a large capital. I remember a dear cousin of mine at Dessau, Adolf von Basedow, who was my playfellow when we were children, and remained my true friend all through life. He had a quite exceptional gift for occasional poetry, and later in life he wrote many things without ever being able to find a proper publisher. Some of his plays were acted and proved successful on neighbouring stages, but he never received that response which inspires and nerves a poet for higher efforts. He was very modest, nay, almost shy, and in these days humility, however charming in the man, is not likely to open the road to success. Now that he is gone, there are all his poetical productions laid aside and soon to be forgotten, while some of the poetry we are asked to admire in these days is far inferior to those fallen leaves. He was an officer and went through the whole of the Franco-German war, having, like so many others, to leave his wife and children at home. He returned home safe, but his health had suffered, and he never was himself again. I have seldom known a more high-minded and truly chivalrous character, content with the small surroundings in which he had to move, but never making the smallest concession to expediency or meanness. He was proud of his name, and whatever we may think of the small nobility in Germany, their manly pride keeps up a standard of honour without which the country would not be what it is. We may laugh at their courts of honour and their duels, arising often from very trifling causes, but in our age of self-seeking and pushing we want some true knights as the salt of the earth.
While I was at the University at Leipzig I well remember meeting Robert Blum in literary circles. He certainly was not a poet, but when required he could speak very powerfully and wield his pen with great effect. Never shall I forget the horror I felt when I heard of his execution at Vienna. No doubt there was danger when the mob broke into the Kaiserburg, shouting and yelling, and when Prince Metternich said to the Emperor, who had asked him what this hideous noise could mean, “Sire, c’est que Messieurs les démocrates appellent la voix de Dieu.” But for all that, to shoot a member of the German Parliament then sitting at Frankfurt was an outrage for which Austria has had to pay dearly. Still more cruel was the execution at the same time of a little helpless Jew, Jellineck, whom I had known as belonging to a small class reading Arabic with Professor Fleischer at Leipzig. Robert Blum may have been a dangerous man in the then state of German political excitement, but Jellineck was nothing but a perfectly harmless scholar, and if he was found guilty by a court-martial, it could only have been because he could never express himself intelligibly. If he had been killed in the streets of Vienna like many others, all one could have said would have been, “Qu’allait-il faire dans cette galère?” but to shoot a harmless student after a short court-martial was no better than lynching. There has been a Nemesis for all that, as Austria knows too well, and what would the world be without that invisible Nemesis?
With every year my own work became more and more prosaic, and yet more and more absorbing. Neither at Berlin nor afterwards at Paris, had I time or inclination to make new friends or cultivate literary society. Berlin never was rich in poets or poetry; Paris also, when I was there in 1844, and again in 1847 and 1848, had no names to attract me. Lamartine had some fascination for me, and I managed to see him and hear much about him from a common friend, Baron von Eckstein. This German Baron was a well-known character in Paris between 1840 and 1850, a German settled there for many years, a Roman Catholic, much mixed up, I believe, in small political transactions, and a constant contributor to the Augsburger Zeitung, at that time the Times of Germany. He was a man of wide interests, a student of Sanskrit, chiefly attracted by the mystic philosophy of the Upanishads and the Vedânta. When he heard of my having come to Paris to attend Burnouf’s lectures and to prepare the first edition of the “Rig Veda,” he toiled up to my rooms, though they were au cinquième and he was an old man and a martyr to gout. He was full of enthusiasm, and full of kindness for a poor student. I was very poor then; I hardly know now how I managed to keep myself afloat, yet I never borrowed and never owed a penny to anybody. I disliked giving lessons, but I worked like a horse for others, copying and collating manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Royale. I lived like a Hindu Sannyâsin, but, as Heine said,
Und ich hab’ es doch ertragen—
Aber fragt mich nur nicht wie.
Baron Eckstein’s eyes were too weak to allow him to copy and collate Sanskrit manuscripts, and I gladly did it for him. I recollect copying for him, among other texts, the whole of the Aitarêya Brâhmana in Latin letters. I still possess a copy of it. He paid me liberally, and he often invited me to lunch with him at his café, which was welcome to a young man of good appetite, who had to be satisfied with wretched dinners at the Palais Royal, but not at Véfour’s or the Trois Frères Provençaux. Being the Paris correspondent of the leading German paper, the Baron was on friendly terms with many of the political and literary celebrities of the time. I believe he was in receipt of a literary pension from the French Government, but I do not know it for certain. He offered to introduce me to George Sand, to Lamennais, to the Comtesse d’Agout (Daniel Stern), to Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and others. But I shut my eyes and shook my head; I had no time then for anything but the Veda, and getting ready for the great battle of life that was before me. I am sorry for it now, but, without self-denial, we can never do anything.
When the February revolution came, Baron d’Eckstein was very active. His friend Lamartine was then in the ascendant, and through him he knew all that was going on. No revolution, I believe, was ever made with so little preparation. There was no conspiracy of any kind. A night or two before the contemplated banquet to Ledru Rollin, Lamartine was asked by his friends, Eckstein being present, whether he would accept office under the Duchesse d’Orléans, provided she was proclaimed Regent in the Chamber. He laughed as if it were an idle dream, outside the sphere of practical politics, as we now say, but he accepted. The Duchesse and her friends counted on him, and his prestige at that time was so great that he might have carried anything. But no one knows his own prestige, and when the moment came, when the Duchesse d’Orléans was present in the Chamber and Lamartine was expected to speak, there was confusion and fright; some shots had been fired in the Assembly, the name of the Republic had been shouted, the Deputies broke up, and the Duchesse had to fly. Never was kingdom lost with so little excuse. I saw the whole so-called revolution from my windows at the corner of the Rue Royale and the Boulevard de la Madeleine. I may have to describe what I saw at some other time. At present I am thinking of the poet-statesman only, of Lamartine and his brilliant speech from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville.
Whatever Lamartine was, a poet, a dreamer, an aristocrat, he had the spirit of noblesse in him, and that spirit prevailed at the time. It was due to him, I believe, that capital punishment was then abolished once for all for political offences. Sinister elements came to the surface, but they had soon to hide again. I remember another speaker at the Hôtel de Ville, speaking after Lamartine in support of the abolition of every kind of title and privilege, and, before all, for the abolition of the nobility. He was eloquent, he was furious, and after he had summed up all the crimes committed by the French nobility and laughed at those who had grown rich and powerful by the misdeeds of their noble ancestors, he finished up in a loud voice, “Soyons ancêtres nous-mêmes,” a sentiment loudly applauded by the unwashed multitudes who aspired to take the place of the ancêtres whom they had just heard execrated from the balcony of their terrible Hôtel de Ville.
All the walls in the streets where I lived were then chalked with the mysterious words, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Not far from my house there was a tobacconist’s shop, called Aux trois blagues, with three tobacco pouches painted over the window. My friend, the tobacconist, was an aristo, so he left the trois blagues and simply wrote underneath, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
But I must not forget another poet, the greatest German poet I have ever known, and of whom I saw a great deal at Berlin before I migrated to Paris, I mean Rückert. It is strange how little his poems are known in England and France. He has never had an apostle, nor would a mere herald do him much service. He was a poet somewhat like Wordsworth, who must be laid siege to, not till he surrenders, but till we surrender to him. If he is known at all in England, it is through his lyric poems, which have been set to music, as they deserved to be, by Schumann. Who has not heard “Du, meine Seele, du, mein Herz,” one of the grandest songs of our age? But, alas! either the words are murdered in a translation which would break the heart both of the poet and the composer, or the German words are often pronounced so badly that no one can tell whether they are English or German or Sanskrit. Rückert was one of the richest poets. There is hardly a branch of poetry which he has not cultivated. I say cultivated on purpose, for his poetry was always a work of art, sometimes almost of artifice. He was not equally successful in all his poetical compositions: particularly towards the end of his life he disappointed many of his admirers by his dramatic attempts. He is like Wordsworth in this respect also, that one cannot enjoy all he writes, yet in the end one comes to enjoy much that has been put aside at first, because it comes from him.
I may be prejudiced, yet a poet whose verses Goethe repeated on his deathbed is not likely to be overrated by me. These are the verses which, we are told, Goethe murmured before he exclaimed, “More light, more light!” and passed away:—
UM MITTERNACHT.
Um Mitternacht
Hab’ ich gewacht
Und aufgeblickt zum Himmel,
Kein Stern am Sterngewimmel
Hat mir gelacht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Hab’ ich gedacht
Hinaus in dunkle Schranken;
Es hat kein Lichtgedanken
Mir Trost gebracht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Nahm ich in Acht
Die Schläge meines Herzens;
Ein einz’ger Puls des Schmerzens
War angefacht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Kämpft’ ich die Schlacht
O Menschheit, deiner Leiden;
Nicht konnt’ ich sie entscheiden
Mit meiner Macht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Hab’ ich die Macht
In deine Hand gegeben:
Herr über Tod und Leben,
Du hältst die Wacht
Um Mitternacht.
If I had a strong personal liking for Rückert it might be excused. He was really an Eastern poet, rich in colour, but equally rich in thought.
The first poems of his I knew in my youth were his “Oestliche Rosen.” My father reviewed them (“Vermischte Schriften,” vol. v., p. 290). He declared he might have judged them by one letter, the letter K, which in Roman times meant condemnation, but which in Rückert’s case would give to his “Oestliche Rosen” their right title of “Köstliche Rosen.” One of Rückert’s greatest works, a real treasury of meditative thought and mature wisdom, was his “Weisheit des Brahmanen,” and this also appealed, no doubt, strongly to my own personal tastes. His translations of Oriental poetry, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, are perfect masterpieces. They often take away one’s breath by the extraordinary faithfulness and marvellous reproduction in German of plays on words and jingle of rhymes that seemed to be possible once, and once only, whether in Persian, Arabic, or Sanskrit. I may have been influenced by all this, and still more by my personal regard for the poet, but for all that I should strongly advise all who care for poetry, and for German poetry, to judge for themselves, and not to be disheartened if they do not strike gold on the first pages they open.
To know Rückert personally was a treat. I had heard much about him before I made his acquaintance, when I was a student at Berlin. The Duchess of Anhalt-Dessau, my own peculiar duchess, had in her youth been much admired by the Crown Prince of Prussia, afterwards Frederick William IV. She was herself a Prussian princess, a daughter of Prince Frederick Ludwig Karl of Prussia, who died 1796, and of a Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who after the death of her husband married the Duke of Cumberland, and became Queen of Hanover. This princess, a lady of great natural gifts, highly cultivated and well read, was personally acquainted with some of the most distinguished men in Germany. Even in the narrow sphere in which she had learnt to move and act in Dessau, she did much good in trying to discover young men of talent, and assisting them in their studies. She had always been very gracious to me, and even as a boy I was often invited to play with her à quatre mains at the Castle. I saw her for the last time after I had begun my Oriental studies at Leipzig, and before I went to Berlin. She told me then that she herself had known a little Sanskrit, that she and the young Crown Prince of Prussia had learnt the Sanskrit alphabet, and had corresponded in it, to the great annoyance of people who opened or read all letters that were not meant for them. “When you go to Berlin,” she said, “you must see Rückert, but do not be frightened. I was myself most anxious to see him. The King invited him to dinner, together with a number of his illustrious ménagerie. I asked the King where Rückert was sitting, the poet of ‘Frauenliebe’ and ‘Liebesfrühling.’ ‘Look there,’ the King said. ‘That broad-shouldered boor with his elbows on the table, eating a hunk of bread, that is your poet!’ And a désillusionnement it was,” she said. “Still, I was proud to have seen him and to have talked to him.” So I was prepared.
Frederick William IV. had tried hard to attract a number of the most eminent men in Germany to Berlin. Berlin by itself is not attractive, and it seemed as if the men who were then best known in Germany had chosen the South, rather than the North, for their residence. The Brothers Grimm Schelling, Cornelius and many more were tempted to Berlin by large salaries, and among them was Rückert also, not so much the Oriental scholar as the poet. He went to Berlin, after long hesitation and misgivings, and announced lectures on Arabic, Persian, and other Oriental languages. But he could not brook the restraints of official life. He had a little Landgut, Neusess, near Coburg, and thither he felt so strongly drawn during the summer that he soon appealed to the Minister of Public Instruction for leave of absence during each summer. This was most graciously granted by the King, but soon after followed a petition for leave of absence during a particularly severe winter. This too was granted, though the Minister ventured to say: “But, my dear Professor, if you are always absent during the summer semester, and now ask for leave of absence during the winter semester also, when do you mean to lecture?” Nor was this all. When I called on the Professor to enter my name for his lectures on the “Gulistan,” a Persian poem, he received me very coldly. He was indeed the broad-shouldered giant whom the Duchess had described to me. He wore a long dressing-gown, and his hair, parted in the middle, was hanging wildly about his temples.
“Why do you want to learn Persian?” he said. I humbly explained my reason. “It is no use your learning Persian,” he continued, “if you do not know Arabic.” To this I was able to reply that I had studied Arabic for a year under Professor Fleischer at Leipzig. However, the Professor was not to be foiled. He wanted to get away to Neusess, but at the same time to be able to satisfy the Minister that he had done his duty in offering to lecture. “You know,” he said, “tres faciunt collegium. I cannot lecture for one.” This was unanswerable, according to German academical etiquette. So I bowed, and went into the highways and hedges to secure the help of two commilitones. Accompanied by them, I invaded the Professor once more in his den. All three of us told him that we were most anxious to learn Persian.
One of them actually did wish to learn Persian, and became afterwards a very distinguished scholar. He was then called Paul Bötticher, but he is best known by his later name, Paul de Lagarde, a man of extraordinary power of work and an enormous accumulation of knowledge. When Rückert saw there was no escape, he yielded, at first not with a very good grace; but he soon became most delightful. We were really working together, and when he found out that I was the son of his old friend Wilhelm Müller, nothing could exceed his kindness to me. At first he often confessed to his pupils that he had forgotten his Persian, but with every week it seemed to come back to him. Nothing more was said about Neusess, and the fields and meadows and woods that he had to desert for our sakes. Whatever may have been said about Rückert as a professor, he was more useful in his informal teaching than many learned professors who year after year read their lectures to large admiring audiences.
“I cannot teach you Persian,” he used to say, “I can only tell you and show you how to learn it. I learnt everything I know by myself, and so can you. We will work together, but that is all I can do.” It was astounding to see how this giant had worked, all by himself. No one at that time thought, for instance, of studying Tamil. He showed me a copy of a complete Tamil, or was it Telugu, dictionary in folio, which he had copied and largely added to. He had studied Chinese too. He was far advanced in Sanskrit and Zend, and in Arabic and Persian he had probably read more, though in his own way, than many a learned professor. Such an honest student as Rückert was could do more good to his pupils in one hour than others by a whole semester of lecturing. And this is the secret of the success of German professors. They take their pupils into their work-shops, they do not keep them standing and gaping at the show-window. Thus the immense advantage which English Universities enjoy in being able to combine professorial with tutorial teaching, is made up for to a certain extent by the devotion of the German professors, who give up their time in their seminaries and so-called societies for the benefit of students who want to learn how to work, and do not wish to be simply crammed for examinations. They make friends of their pupils, their pupils are proud to do much of the drudgery work for them, while they remain for life their grateful pupils and afterwards their loyal colleagues. After term was over, there was, of course, no holding Rückert in Berlin, but he invited me to see him at Neusess, which a few years afterwards I did.
There I found the old man working in his farmyard like a real peasant, pitchforking manure into his cart, and carting it off to the fields. He was delighted to see me, and when he had washed his hands he came into his study to shake hands, and to talk about the work on which I was then engaged. Rückert was a scholar with whom one could discuss any question quite freely. Even if one had to differ from him, he was never offended by contradiction. When we could not agree he used to say: “We will leave this for the present, and discuss it another time.” He told me, among other things, how my father had saved his life.
The two young men were travelling together on foot in Italy. Italy was at that time, in the beginning of the century, the cynosure of every German student, and of every German poet. Goethe had described it, and they all wanted to follow in Goethe’s footsteps, and pass their “Wanderjahre” in the “Land wo die Citronen blühn!” How they did it with a few thalers in their pockets we can hardly understand, but it was done.
Rückert and my father were travelling on foot, and they had often to sleep in the poorest osterias. In these wretched hovels they got more than they had bargained for, and one fine morning, after getting out into the fresh air, they saw a lake, and my father jumped in to have a bath. Rückert could not resist, and followed. But he could not swim, the lake was deeper than he had thought, and he was on the point of drowning when my father swam towards him and rescued him. “I wrote my first epic poem then, in the style of Camoens,” said Rückert, with a loud chuckle, “and I called it the ‘Lousiade,’ but it has never been published.” After this visit I lost sight of Rückert, as of many of my German friends. But I still possess the manuscript of a metrical and rhymed version of the Sanskrit poem the “Meghadûta, the Cloud Messenger,” which I made and afterwards published (in 1847), and which contains a number of corrections and suggestions made by Rückert in pencil. “I translated it myself,” he said to me, “but I shall not publish my translation now.”
During my stay in Paris, as I remarked, there was no time for poets or poetry. I had to sit up night after night to copy and collate Sanskrit MSS., and I shall never forget how often I screwed down my green-shaded lamp in the morning and saw the sun slowly rising over the Boulevard, and lighting up the arch of the Porte St. Martin. I lived au cinquième in a corner house of the Boulevard de la Madeleine, in a house which exists no longer, or at all events has been very much changed, so that on my last visit I could not find my windows again.