Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

AULD LANG SYNE

F. Max Müller

AULD LANG SYNE

BY

The Rt. Hon. Professor F. MAX MÜLLER

AUTHOR OF THE “SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE,” ETC.

WITH A PORTRAIT

New York

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1899

Copyright, 1898, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

TROW DIRECTORY

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY

NEW YORK

PREFACE

What are you to do when you are sent away by your doctor for three or four weeks of perfect rest? You are made to promise that you will lie perfectly fallow, take no books and allow no proofsheets to reach you. A very eminent German professor, the late Dr. Neander, the famous Church historian, solved the difficulty in his own way. He had faithfully promised his physician that he would take no books with him to Karlsbad, but had at last, as a great favour, obtained permission to take at least one work with him on his journey. On the morning of his departure the doctor wished to say good-bye to his patient, and calling at his door saw a cart laden with heavy folios. “But, dear professor,” he said, with considerable surprise and displeasure, “you had promised me to take no books with you.” “Yes, doctor,” the professor replied, “but you allowed me one work, so I thought I might take the Fathers with me to Karlsbad.” I might have done the same, if I had taken the “Rig Veda” only, or the Sacred Books of the East with me, but my conscience would not allow it, so that I found myself in small lodgings at an English watering place with nothing to do all day long but to answer a number of accumulated letters and to read The Times, which always follows me. What was I to do? Doctors ought to know that to a man accustomed to work enforced rest is quite as irritating and depressing as travaux forcés. In self-defence I at last hit on a very simple expedient. I began to write what could be written without a single book, and taking paper, pen and ink—these I had never forsworn—I jotted down some recollections of former years. The fancy took me, and I said with Goethe:—

Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten—

and after a day or two I was so absorbed in my work, if work it could be called, that I said again with Goethe:—

Ihr drängt euch zu! Nun gut, so mögt ihr walten....

Of course I had to leave many a gap in my sketch of Auld Lang Syne. Dates, even names, would now and then leave me in the lurch, and as I had no means of verifying anything, I had to wait till I was settled again among my books and letters and papers at home. But though I corrected some glaring anachronisms and some mistaken names, I could leave my MS. very much as it had been written down in my temporary exile, and I can therefore vouch for its truth so far that it is an exact copy of the negative developed by long exposure in my memory. Whether it is accurate, who can tell? I know from sad experience that my memory is no longer what it was. All I can say is that the positive copy here published is as true and as exact as the rays of the evening sun of life, falling on the negative in my memory, could make it. Though I have suppressed whatever could possibly have given offence to any sensible person, however sensitive, I have not retouched the pictures of my friends or acquaintances, nor have I tried, as is now so much the fashion, to take out all the lines and wrinkles so that nothing remains but the washed-out faces of angels.

What I give here is but a small portion of the panorama of life that has passed before my eyes. Of myself there is but little, for the spectator or interpreter in a panorama should remain unseen and in the dark. It is a pleasure to him, though often a sad pleasure, to see once more what he has seen before, to live the old time over again, to look once more at dear faces, once so full of love and life, to feel the touch of a vanished hand, and hear a voice that is still.

As we grow old it is our fate to lose our friends; but the friends we have lost are often nearer to us than those who remain. Will they never be quite near to us again? Stars meet stars after thousands of years, and are we not of more value than many a star?

F. MAX MÜLLER.

CONTENTS

AULD LANG SYNE

MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS

The man that has no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils:

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted.

Thus wrote Shakespeare; but with all due respect for the immortal bard, he was wrong for once. Did not my dear friend, Arthur Stanley, hate music, and was he not to be trusted? Were his affections dark as Erebus?

True it is, music gives us a new life, and to be without that life is the same loss as to be blind, and not to know the infinite blue of the sky, the varied verdure of the trees, or the silver sparkle of the sea. Music is the language of the soul, but it defies interpretation. It means something, but that something belongs not to this world of sense and logic, but to another world, quite real, though beyond all definition. How different music is from all other arts! They all have something to imitate which is brought to us by the senses. But what does music imitate? Not the notes of the lark, nor the roar of the sea; they cannot be imitated, and if they are, it is but a caricature. The melodies of Schubert were chosen, not from the Prater, but from another world.

For educational purposes music is invaluable. It softens the young barbarian, it makes him use his fingers deftly, it lifts him up, it brings him messages from another world, it makes him feel the charm of harmony and beauty. There is no doubt an eternal harmony that pervades every kind of music, and there are the endless varieties of music, some so strange that they seem hardly to deserve to be called a gift of the Muses. There is in music something immortal and something mortal. There is even habit in music; for the music that delights us sounds often hideous to uneducated ears.

Indian music is thoroughly scientific, based on mathematics, and handed down to the present age after many centuries of growth. But when we hear it for the first time, it seems mere noise, without melody, without harmony, without rhythm. The Maoris have their own music too, but send a New Zealander to hear a long symphony of Beethoven, and, if he can, he will certainly run away long before the finale.

In a lesser degree it is the same with us. Beethoven’s compositions were at first considered wild and lawless. Those who admired Mozart and Haydn could not endure him. Afterwards the world was educated up to his Ninth Symphony, but some of his later sonatas for pianoforte and violin were played by Mendelssohn and David in my hearing, and they both shrugged their shoulders, and thought that the old man had been no longer quite himself when he wrote them. We have grown into them, or up to them, and now many a young man is able to enjoy them, and to enjoy them honestly. I remember the time when Schumann’s songs were published at Leipzig, and the very same songs which now delight us were then by the best judges called curious, strange, interesting, promising, but no more. Yes, there is habit in music, and we are constantly passing through a musical education; nay, the time comes when our education seems finished, and we can learn and take in no more. I have passed through a long school. I began with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, lived on with Mendelssohn, rose to Schumann, and reached even Brahms; but I could never get beyond, I could never learn to enjoy Wagner except now and then in one of his lucid intervals. No doubt this is my fault and my loss, but surely the vulgus profanum also has its rights and may protest against being tired instead of being refreshed and invigorated by music. Would Mendelssohn have admired Wagner? Would Beethoven have listened to his music, would Bach have tolerated it? Yet these were musicians too, though perhaps not sufficiently educated. To be honest, a great deal of Wagner’s music seems tiresome to me, and I do not see why it should ever end.

My musical education began very early, so early that I cannot remember ever passing through any drudgery. As long as I remember I could play, and I was destined to become a musician, till I went to the University, and Mendelssohn advised me to keep to Greek and Latin. I was born and brought up in Dessau, a small German town in an oasis of oak-trees where the Elbe and the Mulde meet, a town then overflowing with music. Such towns exist no longer.

When I went to school at Dessau, this small capital of the small Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau counted, I believe, not more than ten or twelve thousand inhabitants. Everybody knew everybody. As a boy I knew not only the notables of Dessau, I knew the shops and the shopmen, the servants, the day-labourers (Tagelöhner) who sawed and split wood in the street, every old woman that sold apples, every beggar that asked for a Pfennig—mark, not a penny, but the tenth part of a penny. It was a curious town, with one long street running through it, the Cavalierstrasse, very broad, with pavements on each side. But the street had to be weeded from time to time, there being too little traffic to prevent the grass from growing up between the chinks of the stones. The houses had generally one storey only; those of two or three storeys were mostly buildings erected by the Duke for his friends and his higher officials. Many houses were mere cottages, consisting of a ground floor and a high roof. Almost every house had a small mysterious looking-glass fastened outside the window in which the dwellers within could watch and discuss an approaching visitor long before he or she came within speaking distance. It was the fashion not only to whitewash the plastered walls of houses, but to green-wash, or to blue-wash, or to pink-wash them. All this is changed now; few people remember the old streets, with distant lamps swinging across to make darkness more visible at night, and with long waterspouts frowning down on the pavement like real gurgoyles, and not frowning only, but during a thunderstorm pouring down buckets of water on the large red and green umbrellas of the passers-by.

Dessau was then a very poor town, but a læta paupertas reigned in it; everybody knew how much everybody else possessed or earned, and no one was expected to spend more than was justified by his position. We can hardly understand now with how little people then managed, not only to live, but thoroughly to enjoy the highest pleasures of life. My grandfather, who was the Duke’s Prime Minister, received, I believe, no more than two thousand thalers (£300) salary, though there may have been additional allowances for rent, carriages and horses. But there was a curious mixture of simplicity of life and enjoyments of the highest kind. I remember in my grandfather’s house delightful social gatherings, musical and literary performances. I remember Mozart’s “Don Juan,” Beethoven’s “Fidelio” being performed there, the latest works of Goethe and Jean Paul being read and appreciated with a cup of tea or a glass of wine. A more select circle enjoyed their Shakespeare, their Dante, their Calderon in English, Italian, and Spanish. I remember my grandfather (the son of Basedow, the reformer of national education in Germany) in his Court uniform, driving to Court in his carriage and pair, servants in full livery, everybody making room for him and bowing deep on each side, hat in hand. And when he came back from Court, was it not a real holiday for his grandchildren to turn the pockets of his uniform inside out—the pockets were lined on purpose with soft leather—to see what bonbons and cakes he had brought home for us from Tafel—i.e., dinner at Court? Almost my first recollections come from my grandfather’s house. My mother, after the very early death of my father, who died before I was four years old, had gone back to live at her father’s house. This was a very common arrangement then. Two or three generations often lived together in the same house, and among the better families the house was looked upon as a common home, descending from father to son and grandson. There was a large garden stretching out behind the house, which was our playground. Our neighbours’ gardens were separated on each side from our own by a low hedge only. Next door to us was the house of a soap and candle maker, and I still remember the disagreeable smells on the day when soap was boiled and candles were drawn. People talked across the garden hedge to their neighbours, and all the affairs of the town were discussed there. Our neighbour on the right side took lodgers, and one of them was a young man who had come to Dessau to study music under F. Schneider, and at the same time to give music lessons. He had been a theological student, but had umgesattelt (changed saddles), and now tried to support himself as best he could at Dessau. He often talked to me across the garden hedge (I was only five years old). One day he lifted me across into his own garden, and asked whether I would like to learn the pianoforte. I, of course, said yes, and he then bade me promise to come to him every day for half an hour, but not to say a word to my mother or to anybody else. The bargain was struck; I kept my music quite secret, till, after about half a year or so, I sat down at my grandfather’s pianoforte, and to the amazement of everybody played some easy pieces of Mozart or Diabelli. Of course the young theological student—his name was Kahle—was engaged at once to be my music-master. He charged five Groschen (sixpence) for a lesson, and I made very rapid progress. My mother was very musical; she had a splendid alto voice, and was often invited to sing the solos at the great musical festivals in Germany. My aunts, too, sang very well, and as a little boy I could sing all the songs which they sang, and well remember being put on a table to sing Händel’s great arias, “Schnell wie des Blitzes Strahl,” etc. Dessau at that time was steeped in music.

The reigning Duke kept a first-rate orchestra, and at the head of it was Friedrich Schneider, a well-known composer of the old school, a cantor, like Bach, but also Ducal Capellmeister, and the head of what was then called a musical school, now a conservatorium. This school was frequented by students from all parts of Germany, and it has produced some excellent musicians and well-known composers. There were public concerts given regularly every fortnight at a very low charge, and there were rehearsals twice a week, at which a few people only were allowed to be present. I was one of the few, and every Tuesday and Friday after school I sat there for an hour or two hearing the very best music excellently performed, and being deeply impressed, nay, awed by old Schneider, who stormed at the players when a single note went wrong, and used language which I was not allowed to repeat. He was a character. A small, square man, with greyish hair flowing down to his shoulders, his black eyes full of fire, and sometimes of fury. He was very fond of his glass of wine, which had given to his whole face, and particularly to his nose, a glowing ruddy complexion. He brooked no opposition from anybody, and he was the terror of all the young musicians who showed themselves at Dessau. His orchestra had such a reputation at that time that some of the greatest celebrities considered it an honour either to have their compositions performed or to be allowed to sing or play at his concerts. I remember Paganini, Sonntag, Spohr, Mendelssohn (then quite a young man), and many more passing through their ordeal at Dessau. Mendelssohn’s visit left a deep impression on my mind. I was still a mere child, he a very young man, and, as I thought, with the head of an angel. Mendelssohn’s was always a handsome face, but later in life the sharpness of his features betrayed his Jewish blood. He excelled as an organ player, and while at Dessau he played on the organ in the Grosse Kirche, chiefly extempore. I was standing by him, when he took me on his knees and asked me to play a choral while he played the pedal. I see it all now as if it had been yesterday, and I felt convinced at that time that I too (anch’ io) would be a musician. Was not Weber, Karl Maria von Weber, my godfather, and had he not given me my surname of Max? My father and mother had been staying with Weber at Dresden, and my father had undertaken to write the text for a new opera, which was never finished. Weber was then writing his “Freischütz,” and my mother has often described to me how he would walk about the whole day in his room composing, not before the pianoforte, but with a small guitar, and how she heard every melody gradually emerging from the twang of his little instrument. Both his wife and my mother were expecting their confinement, and it was arranged that if the children should be boys, they should be called Max, if girls, Agathe. We were both boys, and Weber’s son, Max Maria von Weber, became a distinguished traveller, a most charming writer, and at last an influential financier in the Austrian service. He stayed with me several times at Oxford, and we exchanged notes about our respective fathers. He published a life of his father, which has, I believe, been translated into English.

Old Schneider was kind to young Mendelssohn, whenever he came to Dessau; they were both ardent admirers of Händel and Bach, but the more modern and romantic compositions of the young composer did not quite meet the approval of the severe Maestro. Schneider was terribly outspoken, and apt to lose his temper and become violent. He once had a most painful scene with Madame Sonntag, or rather with Countess Something, as she was then. First of all, he thought very little of any composer whose name ended in ini or ante, and he would but seldom yield to the Duke and Duchess when they wished now and then to have some of Rossini’s or Mercadante’s music performed by their own orchestra. But when the Italian Countess ventured to speak to his orchestra and to ask them for a ritardando of her own, he flourished his bâton and broke out: “Madame,” he said, “you may sing as you like, but I look after of my orchestra,” and there was an end of it.

Life went on, and what time I could spare from school work, perhaps too much, was given to music. There was not an air or a symphony of Beethoven’s which at that time I could not have hummed from beginning to end, and even now I often detect myself humming, “Ich bin’s, du bist’s, O himmlisches Entzücken!” Who does not know that duet between Fidelio and Florestan? Much of that humming repertorio has remained with me for life, though I cannot always tell now where an Allegro or Adagio comes from. It comes without being called, I cannot drive it away when I want to be quiet. I hum the bass, I whistle the piccolo, I draw out the notes from the violoncello, I blow the trumpet, in fact I often feel like Queen Bess, “And she shall have music wherever she goes.”

When I was about eleven or twelve, old Schneider allowed me to play with accompaniment of the full orchestra some concertos of Mozart, etc. This was a great event in my quiet life, and everything looked as if music was to be my profession. When afterwards I went to the Nicolai School at Leipzig, the school at which Leibniz (not Leibnitz) had been educated, I lived again in the musical house of Professor Carus. His wife sang sweetly; his son, my old friend, Professor V. Carus, was an excellent violin player, a pupil of David. I myself began to play the violoncello, but without much success, and I joined a chorus under Mendelssohn, who was then director of the famous Gewandhaus Concerts at Leipzig. We often had to sing anything he had composed and wished to hear before performing it in public. As a friend of my father and my mother, Mendelssohn was always most charming to me, but he did not encourage my idea of a musical career. The fact was I had not time to serve two masters. I could not practise and study music as it ought to be practised and studied without neglecting Greek and Latin, and, as life became more serious, my mind was more and more drawn to the thoughts of antiquity, to Homer and Cicero, and away from the delights of music. I heard excellent music at the house of Professor Carus. I still have an old slip of paper on which Mendelssohn, Liszt, David, Kalliwoda and Hiller wrote their names for me one evening after they had been playing quartettes at Professor Carus’s house. (See page [14].)

I even ventured while at Leipzig to play sometimes at public concerts in the neighbourhood. But when I began to look forward to what I should make of my life, and how I should carve out for myself a useful career, I saw that music was out of the question. There was another consideration which determined my choice. There was much deafness in my family. My mother became deaf when she was still quite young, my grandmother, several of my uncles and cousins, all had lost their hearing, and this induced me, young as I was, to choose a profession which would be possible even if I should share the same misfortune. I could not think of medicine, or law, or the Church—so I said to myself, keep to Greek and Latin, try to be a scholar. A professorship was my highest ambition, but I thought that even if that should fail, I might find a quiet Benedictine cell somewhere, and support myself by my pen. So music had to step into the background, not altogether, but so as not to interfere with more serious work. No, music, though somewhat slighted, has remained a true and faithful friend to me through life. I have enjoyed music until very late in life when I began to feel satisfied, and would much rather hum a symphony to myself than hear it played, often not half so well as I remembered it at Dessau, at the Gewandhaus Concerts at Leipzig, and at the marvellous Conservatoire Concerts in Paris. These were the perfection of instrumental music. Never has any other performance come near them. It was difficult to get a ticket. People used to form queue and stand the whole night in order to secure the next morning an abonnement for the season. To buy a ticket was beyond my means, for when I was at Paris I had entirely to support myself. But a friend of mine took me to the Conservatoire, and I often sat in the corridor without seeing the orchestra, listening as if to organ music. It was perfect. Every instrument of the orchestra was first-rate—the players had mostly passed through the same school, the conductor was an old man with a German name which I forget. Was it Habeneck? He reminded me of Schneider, and certainly his orchestra marched like a regiment of soldiers.

And besides being a constant source of the highest enjoyment to me, music has often helped me in my pilgrimage through life. Both in Paris and later on in London, many a house was open to me which would have remained closed to a mere scholar. Musicians also always took an interest in the son of the poet, Wilhelm Müller, whose songs had been set to music, not only by Schubert, but by many other popular composers. I well remember, when telling Jenny Lind whose son I was, how she held up her hands and said: “What? the son of the poet of the ‘Müllerlieder’! Now sit down,” she said, “and let me sing you the ‘Schöne Müllerin.’” And she began to sing, and sang all the principal songs of that sad idyll, just moving her head and hands a little, but really acting the whole story as no actress on the stage could have acted it. It was a perfect tragedy, and it has remained with me for life. Stockhausen also (who, as I saw too late, has just been celebrating his seventieth birthday) once sang the “Winterreise” to me in the same way, but as I had to accompany him I had only half the pleasure, though even that was great.

How many memories crowd in upon me! I heard Liszt when I was still at school at Leipzig. It was his first entry into Germany, and he came like a triumphator. He was young, theatrical, and terribly attractive, as ladies, young and old, used to say. His style of playing was then something quite new—now every player lets off the same fireworks. The musical critics who then ruled supreme at Leipzig were somewhat coy and reserved, and I remember taking a criticism to the editor of the Leipziger Tageblatt which the writer did not wish to sign with his own name. Mendelssohn only, with his well-tempered heart, received him with open arms. He gave a matinée musicale at his house, all the best known musicians of the place being present. I remember, though vaguely, David, Kalliwoda, Hiller; I doubt whether Schumann and Clara Wieck were present. Well, Liszt appeared in his Hungarian costume, wild and magnificent. He told Mendelssohn that he had written something special for him. He sat down, and swaying right and left on his music-stool, played first a Hungarian melody, and then three or four variations, one more incredible than the other.

We stood amazed, and after everybody had paid his compliments to the hero of the day, some of Mendelssohn’s friends gathered round him, and said: “Ah, Felix, now we can pack up (‘jetzt können wir einpacken’). No one can do that; it is over with us!” Mendelssohn smiled; and when Liszt came up to him asking him to play something in turn, he laughed and said that he never played now; and this, to a certain extent, was true. He did not give much time to practising then, but worked chiefly at composing and directing his concerts. However, Liszt would take no refusal, and so at last little Mendelssohn, with his own charming playfulness, said: “Well, I’ll play, but you must promise me not to be angry.” And what did he play? He sat down and played first of all Liszt’s Hungarian Melody, and then one variation after another, so that no one but Liszt himself could have told the difference. We all trembled lest Liszt should be offended, for Mendelssohn could not keep himself from slightly imitating Liszt’s movements and raptures. However, Mendelssohn managed never to offend man, woman, or child. Liszt laughed and applauded, and admitted that no one, not he himself, could have performed such a bravura. Many years after I saw Liszt once more, at the last visit he paid to London. He came to the Lyceum to see Irving and Ellen Terry act in “Faust.” The whole theatre rose when the old, bent Maestro appeared in the dress circle. When the play was over, I received an invitation from Mr., now Sir Henry, Irving to join a supper party in honour of Liszt. I could not resist, though I was staying with friends in London and had no latch-key. It was a brilliant affair. Rooms had been fitted up on purpose with old armour, splendid pictures, gorgeous curtains. We sat down, about thirty people; I knew hardly anybody, though they were all known to fame, and not to know them was to profess oneself unknown. However, I was placed next to Liszt, and I reminded him of those early Leipzig days. He was not in good spirits; he would not speak English, though Ellen Terry sat on his right side, and, as she would not speak German or French, I had to interpret as well as I could, and it was not always easy. At last Miss Ellen Terry turned to me and said: “Tell Liszt that I can speak German,” and when he turned to listen, she said in her girlish, bell-like voice: “Lieber Liszt, ich liebe Dich.” I hope I am not betraying secrets; anyhow, as I have been indiscreet once, I may as well say what happened to me afterwards. It was nearly 3 A.M. when I reached my friend’s house. With great difficulty I was able to rouse a servant to let me in, and when the next morning I was asked where I had been, great was the dismay when I said that I had had supper at the Lyceum. Liszt had promised to come to stay with me at Oxford, but the day when I expected him, the following note arrived from Amsterdam, probably one of the last he ever wrote:—

A few weeks after, I saw his death announced in the papers.

And thus Liszt left the stage. I saw his entrance and his exit, and when I asked myself, What has he left behind? I could only think of the new school of brilliant executionists of which he may truly be called the founder and life-long apostle. I confess that, though I feel dazzled at the impossibilities which he and his pupils perform with their ten fingers, I often sigh for an Allegro or an Andante by Haydn and Mozart as they were played in my young days with simplicity and purity on very imperfect instruments. Players now seem to think of themselves only, not of the musical poets whose works they are to render. Mendelssohn, Clara Wieck (Madame Schumann) even Moscheles and Hummel acted as faithful interpreters. On listening to them, exquisite as their execution was, one thought far more of what they played than how they played. That time is gone, and no one has now, or will ever have again, the courage to bring it back. If one wants to enjoy a sonata of Haydn one has to play it oneself or hum it, because the old fingers will not do their work any longer.

And Mendelssohn also, whom I had known as a young man, said good-bye to me for the last time in London. It was after the first performance of his “Elijah” in 1847. He too said he would come again next year, and then came the news of his sudden death. I saw him last at Bunsen’s house, where he played at a matinée musicale always ready to please and oblige his friends, always amiable and charming, even under great provocation. Only once I remember seeing him almost beside himself with anger, and well he might be. He possessed a most valuable album, with letters, poems, pictures, compositions of the most illustrious men of the age, such as Goethe and others. The binding had somewhat suffered, so it was sent to be mended, and I was present when it came back. It was at his sister’s house, Fanny Hensel’s, at Berlin. Mendelssohn opened the album, jumped up and screamed. The binder had cut off the blue skies and tree-tops of all the Italian sketches, and the signatures of most of the poems and letters. This was too much for Felix, he was for once infelix. Still, happy and serene as his life certainly was, for he had everything a man of his talents could desire, there were bitter drops in it of which the world knew little, and need not know anything now. There are things we know, important things which the world would be glad to know. But we bury them; they are to be as if they had never been, like letters that are reduced to ashes and can never be produced again by friends or enemies.

He was devoted to his sister Fanny, who was married to Hensel the painter, an intimate friend of my father. When I was a student at Berlin, I was much in their house in the Leipziger Strasse, and heard many a private concert given in the large room looking out on the garden. Mendelssohn played almost every instrument in the orchestra, and had generally to play the instrument which he was supposed to play worst. When he played the pianoforte, he was handicapped by being made to play with his arms crossed. All the celebrities of Berlin (and Berlin was then rich in celebrities) were present at those musical gatherings, and Mendelssohn was the life of the whole. He was never quiet for a moment, moving from chair to chair and conversing with everybody.

Boeckh, the great Greek scholar, lived in the same house, and Mendelssohn had received so good a classical education that he could hold his own when discussing with the old master the choruses of the Antigone. Mendelssohn was, in fact, a man teres et rotundus. He was at home in classical literature, he spoke French and English, he was an exquisite draughtsman, and had seen the greatest works of the greatest painters, ancient and modern. His father, a rich banker in Berlin, had done all he could for the education of his children. He was the son of Mendelssohn the philosopher, and when his son Felix had become known to fame, he used to say with his slightly Jewish accent: “When I was young I was called the son of the great Mendelssohn; now that I am old I am called the father of the great Mendelssohn; then, what am I?” Well, he found the wherewithal that enabled his son, and his other children too, to become what they were, all worthy of their great grandfather, all worthy of the name of Mendelssohn.

Die glückliche Fischerin.

Felix was attached to both his sisters, Fanny and Rebekah (Dirichlet), but he was more particularly devoted to Fanny (Hensel). They had been educated together. She knew Greek and Latin like her brother, she played perfectly, and composed so well that her brother published several of her compositions under his own name. They were one spirit and one soul, and at that time ladies still shrank from publicity. Everybody knew which songs were hers (I remember, for instance, “Schöner und Schöner schmückt sich die Flur”), and it was only later in life that she began to publish under her own name. I give the beginning of a song which she wrote for my mother. The words are my father’s, the little vignette was drawn by her husband, who was an eminent artist at Berlin.

The struggles which many, if not most men of genius, more particularly musicians, have had to pass through were unknown to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Some people go so far as to say that they miss the traces of those struggles in his character and in his music. And yet those who knew him best know that his soul, too, knew its own bitterness. His happiest years were no doubt spent at Leipzig, where I saw much of him while I was at school and at the University. He was loved and admired by everybody; he was undisputed master in the realm of music. He was at first unmarried, and many were the rumours as to who should be his bride. News had reached his friends that his heart had been won by a young lady at Frankfurt; but nobody, not even his most intimate friends, knew for certain. However, one evening he had just returned from Frankfurt, and had to conduct one of the Gewandhaus Concerts. The last piece was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I had sung in the chorus, and found myself on the orchestra when the concert was over, the room nearly empty, except his personal friends, who surrounded him and teased him about his approaching engagement. His beaming face betrayed him, but he would say nothing to anybody, till at last he sat down and extemporised on the pianoforte. And what was the theme of his fantasy? It was the passage of the chorus, “Wer ein holdes Weib errungen, mische seinen Jubel ein.” That was his confession to his friends, and then we all knew. And she was indeed “ein holdes Weib” when she arrived at Leipzig. One thing only she lacked—she could not express all she felt. She was soon called the “Goddess of Silence” by the side of her devoted husband, who never could be silent, but was always bubbling over like champagne in a small glass. They were a devoted couple, not a whisper was ever heard about either of them, though Mendelssohn had many friends, the greatest of all being his sister Fanny. With her he could speak and exchange whatever was uppermost or deepest in his heart. I have heard them extemporise together on the pianoforte, one holding with his little finger the little finger of the other. Her death was the heaviest loss he ever suffered in life. He was so unaccustomed to suffering and distress that he could never recover from this unexpected blow. Nor did he survive her long. She died on the 14th of May, 1847; he followed her on the 4th of November of the same year.

During most of the time when Mendelssohn celebrated his triumphs as director of the Gewandhaus Concerts, young Robert Schumann was at Leipzig, but he was little seen. Mendelssohn, so bright and happy himself, wished to see the whole world around him bright and happy, and was kind to everybody. The idea of jealousy was impossible at that time in Mendelssohn’s heart. Neither could Schumann, as a young and rising musician, have thought himself then to be in any sense an equal or rival of Mendelssohn. But there are natures which like to be left alone, or with a very few intimate friends only, and which shrink from the too demonstrative happiness of others. It is not envy, it often is modesty; but in any case it is not pleasant. Schumann was conscious of his own strength, but he was still struggling for recognition, and he was also struggling against that adversity of fortune which seems to decree poverty to be the lot of genius. There was another struggle going on, a struggle which is generally fought out in private, but which in his case was carried on before the eyes of the world, at least the musical world of Leipzig. He was devoted to a young pianoforte player, Clara Wieck. But her father, a great teacher of music, would not allow the marriage. He had devoted years of his life to the musical education of his daughter, and then, as she was just beginning to earn applause for herself and her master, as well as the pecuniary reward for their combined labours, a young musician, poor, and not yet recognised, wished to carry her off. Parents have flinty hearts, and the father said “No.”

Many a time have I watched young Schumann walking alone in the neighbourhood of Leipzig, being unexpectedly met by a young lady, both looking not so happy as I thought that under the circumstances they ought. This went on for some time, till at last, as usual, the severe or flinty-hearted father had to give way, and allow a marriage which certainly for many years was the realisation of the most perfect happiness, till it ended in a terrible tragedy. There was the seed of madness in the genius of Schumann as in that of so many really great men, and in an access of mania he sought and found rest where Ophelia sought and found it.

I did not see much of Schumann, nor of Madame Schumann, in later life, though in concerts in London I often admired her exquisite rendering of her husband’s compositions. I only recollect Schumann as a young man sitting generally in a corner of the orchestra, and listening to one of his works being performed under Mendelssohn’s direction. I remember his very large head, his drooping eyes; I hardly ever remember a smile on his face. And yet the man must have been satisfied, if not happy, who could write such music as his, who could write, “Wohlauf noch getrunken den funklenden Wein!” and he lived to see his own creations admired more even than those of Mendelssohn. He lived to see his critics turned into admirers; in fact he educated his public, and gained a place for that thoughtful, wistful, fairy-like music which is peculiarly his own.

Many celebrated musicians stayed at Leipzig during Mendelssohn’s reign. I remember Moscheles, Thalberg, Sterndale Bennett, Clara Novello, young and fascinating, and many more. Another friend of Mendelssohn who stayed some time at Leipzig was Ferdinand Hiller. We heard several of his compositions, symphonies and all the rest, performed at the Gewandhaus Concerts under Mendelssohn’s direction. In his life there was, perhaps, too little of the dira necessitas that has given birth to so many of the masterpieces of genius. He might, no doubt, have produced much more than he did; but that he was striving to the very end of his life was proved to me by an interesting letter I received from him about a year before his death. His idea was to write a great oratorio, and he wanted me to supply him with a text. It was a colossal plan, and I confess it seemed to me beyond the power of any musician, nay, of any poet. It was to be a historical drama, representing first of all the great religions of the world, each by itself. We were to have the hymns of the Veda, the Gâthas of the Avesta, the Psalms of the Old Testament, the Sermons and Dialogues of Buddha, the trumpet-calls of Mohammed, and, lastly, the Sermon on the Mount, all of them together forming one mighty symphony in which no theme was lost, yet all became in the end an accompaniment of one sweet song of love dominating the full chorus of the ancient religions of the world. It was a grand idea, but was it possible to realise it? I was ready to help, but before a year was over I received the news of Hiller’s death, and who is the musician to take his place, always supposing that he could have achieved such a World Oratorio?

It was in the last year of his life that Mendelssohn paid his last visit to England to conduct his last oratorio, the “Elijah.” It had to be performed at Exeter Hall, then the best place for sacred music. Most of the musicians, however, were not professionals, and they had only bound themselves to attend a certain number of rehearsals. Excellent as they were in such oratorios as the “Messiah,” which they knew by heart, a new oratorio, such as the “Elijah,” was too much for them; and I well remember Mendelssohn, in the afternoon before the performance, declaring he would not conduct.

“Oh, these tailors and shoemakers,” he said, “they cannot do it, and they will not practise! I shall not go.” However, a message arrived that the Queen and Prince Albert were to be present, so nothing remained but to go. I was present, the place was crowded. Mendelssohn conducted, and now and then made a face, but no one else detected what was wrong. It was a great success and a great triumph for Mendelssohn. If he could have heard it performed as it was performed at Exeter Hall in later years, when his tailors and shoemakers knew it by heart, he would not have made a face.

It was at Bunsen’s house, at a matinée musicale, that I saw him last. He took the liveliest interest in my work, the edition of the Rig Veda, the Sacred Hymns of the Brâhmans. A great friend of his, Friedrich Rosen, had begun the same work, but had died before the first volume was finished. He was a brother of the wife of Mendelssohn’s great friend, Klingemann, then Hanoverian Chargé d’Affaires in London, a poet many of whose poems were set to music by Mendelssohn. So Mendelssohn knew all about the Sacred Hymns of the Brâhmans, and talked very intelligently about the Veda. He was, however, subjected to a very severe trial of patience soon after. The room was crowded with what is called the best society of London, and Mendelssohn being asked to play, never refused. He played several things, and at last Beethoven’s so-called “Moonlight Sonata.” All was silence and delight; no one moved, no one breathed aloud. Suddenly in the middle of the Adagio, a stately dowager sitting in the front row was so carried away by the rhythm, rather than by anything else, of Beethoven’s music, that she began to play with her fan, and accompanied the music by letting it open and shut with each bar. Everybody stared at her, but it took time before she perceived her atrocity, and at last allowed her fan to collapse. Mendelssohn in the meantime kept perfectly quiet, and played on; but, when he could stand it no longer, he simply repeated the last bar in arpeggios again and again, following the movements of her fan; and when at last the fan stopped, he went on playing as if nothing had happened. I dare say that when the old dowager thanked him for the great treat he had given her, he bowed without moving a muscle of his inspired face. How different from another player who, when disturbed by some noise in the audience, got up in a rage and declared that either she or the talker must leave the room.

And yet I have no doubt the old lady enjoyed the music in her own way, for there are many ways of enjoying music. I have known people who could not play a single instrument, who could not sing “God save the Queen” to save their life, in eloquent raptures about Mendelssohn, nay, about Beethoven and Bach. I believe they are perfectly honest in their admiration, though how it is done I cannot tell. I began by saying that people who have no music in them need not be traitors, and I alluded to my dear friend Stanley. He actually suffered from listening to music, and whenever he could, he walked out of the room where there was music. He never disguised his weakness, he never professed any love or admiration for music, and yet Jenny Lind once told me he paid her the highest compliment she had ever received. Stanley was very fond of Jenny Lind, but when she stayed at his father’s palace at Norwich he always left the room when she sang. One evening Jenny Lind had been singing Händel’s “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” Stanley, as usual, had left the room, but he came back after the music was over, and went shyly up to Jenny Lind. “You know,” he said, “I dislike music; I don’t know what people mean by admiring it. I am very stupid, tone-deaf, as others are colourblind. But,” he said with some warmth, “to-night, when from a distance I heard you singing that song, I had an inkling of what people mean by music. Something came over me which I had never felt before; or, yes, I had felt it once before in my life.” Jenny Lind was all attention. “Some years ago,” he continued, “I was at Vienna, and one evening there was a tattoo before the palace performed by four hundred drummers. I felt shaken, and to-night while listening to your singing, the same feeling came over me; I felt deeply moved.” “Dear man,” she added, “I know he meant it, and a more honest compliment I never received in all my life.”

However, unmusical as Stanley’s house was, Jenny Lind, or Mrs. Goldschmidt as she was then, often came to stay there. “It is so nice,” she said; “no one talks music, there is not even a pianoforte in the house.” This did not last long however. A few days after she said to me: “I hear you have a pianoforte in your rooms at All Souls’. Would you mind my practising a little?” And practise she did, and delightful it was. She even came to dine in College, and after dinner she said in the most charming way: “Do you think your friends would like me to sing?” Of course, I could not have asked her to sing, but there was no necessity for asking my friends. In fact, not only my friends listened with delight to her singing, but the whole quadrangle of All Souls’ was black with uninvited listeners, and the applause after each song was immense, both inside and outside the walls of the College.

Stanley’s feeling about music reminds me of another music-hater at Oxford, the late Dr. Gaisford, the famous Dean of Christ Church. It was he who put my name on the books of “The House,” a very great honour to an unknown German scholar on whom the University, at his suggestion, had just conferred the degree of M.A. What the Dean’s idea of music was may best be judged from his constantly appointing old scouts or servants who were too old to do their work any longer as bedmakers to be singing men in the Cathedral choir. The Dean’s stall was under the organ, and one day in every month, when “The voice of Thy thunder was heard round about, and the lightnings shone upon the ground, and the earth was moved and shook withal,” a certain key in the organ made the seat on which the Dean sat vibrate under him. On that day, before he left the Cathedral, he invariably thanked the organist, Dr. Corfe, for the nice tune he had played.

Music, in fact, was at a very low ebb at Oxford when I arrived there. The young men would have considered it almost infra dignitatem to play any instrument; the utmost they would do was now and then to sing a song. Yet there was much love of music, and many of my young and old friends were delighted when I would play to them. There was only one other person at Oxford then who was a real musician and who played well, Professor Donkin, a great mathematician, and altogether a man sui generis. He was a great invalid; in fact, he was dying all the years I knew him, and was fully aware of it. It seemed to be quite admissible, therefore, that he, being an invalid, and I, being a German, should “make music” at evening parties; but to ask a head of a house or a professor, or even a senior tutor, to play would have been considered almost an insult. And yet I feel certain there is more love, more honest enjoyment of music in England than anywhere else.

And how has the musical tide risen at Oxford since those days! Some of the young men now come up to college as very good performers on the pianoforte and other instruments. I never know how they learn it, considering the superior claims which cricket, football, the river, nay, the classics and mathematics also have on their time at school. There are musical clubs now at Oxford where the very best classical music may be heard performed by undergraduates with the assistance of some professional players from London. All this is due to the influence of Sir F. Ouseley, and still more of Sir John Stainer, both professors of Music at Oxford. They have made music not only respectable, but really admired and loved among the undergraduates. Sir John Stainer has been indefatigable, and the lectures which he gives both on the science and history of music are crowded by young and old. They are real concerts, in which he is able to illustrate all he has to say with the help of a well-trained choir of Oxford amateurs. As to myself, I have long become a mere listener. One learns the lesson, whether one likes it or not, that there is a time for everything. Old fingers grow stiff and will no longer obey, and if one knows how a sonata of Beethoven ought to be played, it is most painful to play it badly. So at last I said: “Farewell!” The sun has set, though the clouds are roseate still with reflected rays. It may be that I have given too much time to music, but what would life have been without it? I do not like to exaggerate, or say anything that is not quite true. Musical ears grow sensitive to anything false, whether sharp or flat. But let us be quite honest, quite plain. Is there not in music, and in music alone of all the arts, something that is not entirely of this earth? Harmony and rhythm may be under settled laws; and in that sense mathematicians may be right when they call mathematics silent music. But whence comes melody? Surely not from what we hear in the street, or in the woods, or on the sea-shore, not from anything that we hear with our outward ears, and are able to imitate, to improve, or to sublimise. Neither history nor evolution will help us to account for Schubert’s “Trockne Blumen.” Here, if anywhere, we see the golden stairs on which angels descend from heaven to earth, and whisper sweet sounds into the ears of those who have ears to hear. Words cannot be so inspired, for words, we know, are of the earth earthy. Melodies, however, are not of this earth, and the greatest of musical poets has truly said:—

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

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:—

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:—

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.

LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS
II

When I had settled in England in 1847, my literary acquaintances began afresh. I have had the good fortune of being on more or less intimate terms with such poets as Kingsley, Clough, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, and with poets in prose such as Froude, Ruskin, Carlyle, and I may add, in spite of the Atlantic, Emerson, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I knew other writers such as Macaulay, Arthur Helps, Arthur Stanley, Frederick Maurice, Dr. Martineau; I may add even the names of Faraday, Lyall, Sedgwick, Thirlwall, Grote, Whewell, Richard Owen, Darwin, Huxley, among my personal acquaintances or friends.

Kingsley was married to one of my wife’s aunts. She was one of six most remarkable sisters, all married except the eldest and, I believe, the most gifted, who had devoted her life to the education of her younger sisters. Besides Charles Kingsley, the husbands of the other sisters were Froude, the historian; Lord Wolverton, of high standing in the financial world as the head of the house of Glyn, and the valued adviser of Mr. Gladstone in his earlier financial reforms; R. Mertyns Bird, an illustrious name in the history of India as the organiser of the North-Western Provinces; and “S. G. O.”

How soon popularity vanishes! There was a time when everybody knew and spoke of “S. G. O.” He was Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, an influential writer on political and social subjects, a frequent contributor to The Times during the Crimean War, a man of great force and independence of character. He was a giant in stature, and extremely attractive by his varied knowledge in different branches of physical science. He was a well-known microscopist, and when it was wanted, a doctor, a nurse, a surgeon, a dentist. However, he was not a poet, like his two brothers-in-law. He was an active clergyman, a sanitary reformer, a ready helper wherever poor people were ready to be helped. These five men, the husbands of five remarkable sisters—of whom one, Mrs. Bird, is still living at the age of ninety-six (she died this year), and not only living, but alive to all that is interesting in the world, and full of good works—represented a power in England. “S. G. O.” moved in a sphere of his own, and seldom came to Oxford. But Kingsley and Froude soon became my intimate friends.

If I call Froude a poet it is because, as I explained before, I do not consider rhyme as essential to poetry. But for really poetical power, for power of description, of making the facts of history alive, of laying bare the deepest thoughts of men and the most mysterious feelings of women, there was no poet or historian of our age who came near him. I knew him through all his phases. I knew him first when he was still a fellow of Exeter College. I was at that time often with him in his rooms in High Street, opposite to St. Mary’s Church, when he was busy writing novels, and I well remember passing an evening with him and trying to find the right name for a novel which afterwards appeared under the title of “Nemesis of Faith.” I saw him almost daily while his persecution at Oxford was going on, gaining strength every day. He had to give up his fellowship, on which he chiefly depended. I will not repeat the old story that his novel was publicly burnt in the quadrangle of Exeter College. The story is interesting as showing how quickly a myth can spring up even in our own lifetime, if only there is some likelihood in it, and something that pleases the popular taste. What really happened was, as I was informed at the time by Froude himself, no more than that one of the tutors (Dr. Sewell) spoke about the book at the end of one of his College Lectures. He warned the young men against the book, and asked whether anybody had read it. One of the undergraduates produced a copy which belonged to him. Dr. Sewell continued his sermonette, and warming with his subject, he finished by throwing the book, which did not belong to him, into the fire, at the same time stirring the coals to make them burn. Of what followed there are two versions. Dr. Sewell, when he had finished, asked his class, “Now, what have I done?” “You have burned my copy,” the owner of the book said in a sad voice, “and I shall have to buy a new one.” The other version of the reply was, “You have stirred the fire, sir.”

And so it was. A book which at present would call forth no remark, no controversy, was discussed in all the newspapers, and raised a storm all over England. Bishops shook their heads, nay even their fists, at the young heretic, and even those among his contemporaries at Oxford who ought to have sympathised with him, and were in fact quite as unorthodox as he was, did not dare to stand up for him or lend him a helping hand. Stanley alone never said an unkind word of him. The worst was that Froude not only lost his fellowship, but when he had accepted the Headmastership of a college far away in Tasmania, his antagonists did not rest till his appointment had been cancelled. Froude unfortunately was poor, and his father, a venerable and well-to-do Archdeacon, was so displeased with his son that he stopped the allowance which he had formerly made him. It seems almost as if the poverty of a victim gave increased zest and enjoyment to his pursuers. Froude had to sell his books one by one, and was trying hard to support himself by his pen. This was then not so easy a matter as it is now. At that very time, however, I received a cheque for £200 from an unknown hand, with a request that I would hand it to Froude to show him that he had friends and sympathisers who would not forsake him. It was not till many years later that I discovered the donor, and Froude was then able to return him the money which at the time had saved him from drowning. I should like to mention the name, but that kind friend in need is no longer among the living, and I have a feeling that even now he would wish his name to remain unknown. This is by no means the only instance of true English generosity which I have witnessed. But at the time I confess that I was surprised, for I did not yet know how much of secret goodness, how much of secret strength there is in England, how much of that real public spirit, of that chivalrous readiness to do good and to resist evil without lifting the vizor. Froude had a hard struggle before him, and, being a very sensitive man, he suffered very keenly. Several times I remember when I was walking with him and friends or acquaintances of his were passing by without noticing him, he turned to me and said: “That was another cut.” I hardly understood then what he meant, but I felt that he meant not only that he had been dropped by his friends, but that he felt cut to the quick. Persecution, however, did not dishearten him; on the contrary, it called forth his energies, and the numerous essays from his pen, now collected under the title “Short Studies on Great Subjects,” show how he worked, how he thought, how he followed the course that seemed right to him without looking either right or left. Bunsen, who was at the time the Prussian Minister in London, and had heard from me about Froude, took a deep interest in him, and after consulting with Archdeacon Hare and Frederick Maurice, suggested that he should spend a few years at a German university. I was asked to bring my young friend to Carlton Terrace, where Bunsen received him with the truest kindness. What he tried to impress on him was that the questions which disturbed him required first of all a historical treatment, and that before we attempt to solve difficulties we should always try to learn how they arose. Froude was on the point of going to Germany with the assistance of some of Bunsen’s friends when other prospects opened to him in England. But frequently in later life he referred to his interview with Bunsen and said, “I never knew before what it meant that a man could drive out devils.”

I confess I was somewhat surprised when Froude suddenly told me of his plan of writing a History of England, beginning with Henry VIII. My idea of a historian was that of a professor who had read and amassed materials during half his life, and at the end produced a ponderous book, half text, half notes. But, hazardous as the idea of writing a History of England seemed to me for so young a man, I soon perceived that Froude had an object in writing, and he certainly set to work with wonderful perseverance. Few of his critics have given him credit for what he did at Simancas and at the Record Office in London. I have seen him at work, morning and evening, among piles of notes and extracts. I know how the pages which are such pleasant light reading were written again and again till he was satisfied. Often I had to confess to him that I never copied what I had once written, and he was outspoken enough to tell me, “But you ought; and you will never write good English if you don’t.” He learnt Spanish, French, and German, so as to be able to read new and old books in these languages. He always kept up his classical reading, and translated, as far as I remember, several Greek texts from beginning to end. To these he afterwards referred, and quoted from them, without always, as he ought, going back again to the original Greek.

It is not for me to say that he did not make mistakes, and that he was not weak in some branches of historical knowledge. I cannot deny that in his translations also there are mistakes, arising from haste rather than from ignorance. But who has ever examined any translation from any language, without finding signs of what seems carelessness or ignorance? Four eyes see more than two. We have translations of Plato and Aristotle in Latin and in almost every language of Europe. The text has been critically examined for hundreds of years, and every difficult passage has been explained again and again. But is there any one translation which could be called immaculate? Was not even the last translation of Plato which is so deservedly popular, characterised by the late Rector of Lincoln, in the well-known words of a French writer, as très belle, mais peu fidèle? Now, while the true scholar, when examining a new translation, rejoices over every new happy rendering, the ill-natured critic, particularly if he wants to display his own superior knowledge, can easily pick out a number of passages where a mistake has been made, or where he thinks that a mistake has been made, and then proceed to show that the very best Greek scholar of the day does not know “what every schoolboy ought to know,” etc. There are many passages in Greek and other authors that admit of more than one translation. If the translator adopts one and rejects another, the game of the critic is easy enough: he has only to adopt the rejected rendering, and his triumph is secured. If that is so in Greek, how much more is it the case in translating passages from faded documents written in antiquated Spanish, nay, even letters of Erasmus written in his peculiar Latin, or statutes in Norman-French.

Translation is a difficult art, and scholars, particularly those who know the language from which, or the language into which, they translate as well as their own, consider a good translation almost impossible. I have had some experience in translating, and I know something of the treatment which translators may expect from conceited critics. The Sacred Books of the East, translated by myself and a number of friends, the best scholars I could find, have not escaped that kind of pedantic criticism. Impartial and honest critics have recognised the difficulties under which scholars labour in translating, often for the first time, ancient texts, whether Greek or Sanskrit. It is easy enough to translate a text, after it has once been translated; it is easy even to improve in a few places on the translations of the first pioneers. But to translate for the first time an ancient text, badly edited or not yet edited at all, is a totally different thing, and those who undertake it have a right not only to the indulgence, but to the gratitude of all who come after them. No one in our sphere of studies would call himself a scholar who has not edited a text never edited before, or at least translated a text that never was translated before. There are some critics who think they have done their duty if they can discover a few flaws in a translation, though they cannot even appreciate the labours and the brilliant though silent discoveries of a first translator. The work that has to be done by a first translator of an ancient text is often the work of a real decipherer. He has to grope his way through Egyptian darkness like the first interpreter of an Egyptian or Babylonian inscription. He cannot help making mistakes. But though we know now how often even a Champollion (died 1832) was mistaken, do we not feel ashamed if we read what another most eminent Egyptologist and Coptic scholar, Amadeo Peyron (died 1870), the head of the Egyptian Museum at Turin, said of Champollion? “I have known Champollion,” he said, “the so-called decipherer of hieroglyphics, very well, from his first visits to our Museum. I took him for an ordinary swindler, and his publications have afterwards confirmed me in my views. His philological labours have remained to me unsolved riddles.”[^[7]]

I have lately had another experience. I had to revise my translation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” and I was surprised to see how many passages there were which I had to alter, not because I did not know either German or English, but because in many places a translation can only be approximately faithful; and it is only a happy thought that enables us now and then to approach nearer to the German original, though in that case often at the expense of the English idiom.

In the case of Froude, we must remember that, whatever he wrote, he had to meet not a single critic only, but a whole army. As far as one could see, a kind of association had been formed for the suppression of his “History.” Those who were behind the scenes know how certain of his rivals and enemies actually banded themselves together, as if against a common enemy. Now, I remember seeing in Fraser’s Magazine, then edited by Froude, a review of Green’s “History of the English People,” with pages and pages of mistakes in names, in dates, in facts. Yet, the same writers who delighted in picking holes in Froude’s “History” from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, kept up a constant chorus of applause for Green’s “History of the English People”—no doubt rightly so; but why not mete the same measure to others also? One of his reviewers openly confessed that if he took the trouble of reading a book carefully, he could not afford to review it in one paper only, he had to write at least five or six articles to make it pay. This Φρουδοφονία, as it was called, went on year after year, but, strange to say, Froude’s work was not killed by it; on the contrary, it became more and more popular. In fact, together with his other works, it enabled him to live independently and even comfortably by his pen. Things have come to such a pass that, if we may trust the experience of publishers, nothing sells so well as a well-abused book, while laudatory notices seem to produce little or no effect. The public, it seems, has grown too wise. Even such powerful adjectives as epoch-making (Epoche-machend), monumental and even pyramidal, fall flat. Epoche-machend has too often been found out to mean no more than Poche-machend (Poche in German means claque), and monumental has once or twice proved a misprint for momental or momentary. Few scholars would agree with M. Le Bon that “works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination, as fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts.” This is a French exaggeration. But neither are books of history meant to be mere chronicles. History is surely meant to teach not only facts, but lessons also; and, though historians may say that facts ought to speak for themselves, they will not speak without a vates sacer. I am the last man to stand up for an unscholarlike treatment of history, or of anything else. But as I do not call a man a scholar who simply copies and collates MSS., makes indices or collects errata, I doubt whether mere Quellenstudium will make a historian. Quellenstudium is a sine quâ non, but it is not everything; and whereas the number of those who can ransack archives and libraries is large, the world has not been rich in real historians whom it is a delight to listen to, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and, may we not add, Macaulay and Froude? None of these historians, not even Gibbon, has escaped criticism, but how poor should we be without them!

Sir Walter Raleigh, when he was writing his “History of the World” in the Tower of London, overheard two boys quarrelling over the facts of an incident that had happened the day before; and he said to himself: “If these two boys cannot agree on an event which occurred almost before their own eyes, how can any one be profited by the narration which I am writing, of events which occurred in ages long past?” The answer which the critical historian would give to Raleigh would probably be: “Go and examine the two boys; find out their home, their relations, their circumstances, particularly the opportunities they had of seeing what they profess to have seen; and try to discover whether there was any bias in their minds that could have made them incline towards one side rather than the other. Give all that evidence, and then you are a real historian.” But is that true, and were any of the great historians satisfied with that? Was not their heart in their work, and is the heart ever far from what we call bias? Did not Herodotus, in describing the conflict between Greece and Asia, clearly espouse the cause of Greece? I know he has been called the father of lies rather than of history; but he has survived for all that. Did not Thucydides throughout his history write as the loyal son of Athens? Was Tacitus very anxious to find out all that could be said in favour of Tiberius? Was even Gibbon, in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” quite impartial? Ranke’s “History of the Popes,” may be very accurate, but for thousands who read Macaulay and Froude is there one who reads Ranke, except the historian by profession? History is not written for historians only. Macaulay wrote the history of the English Restoration as a partisan, and Froude made no secret on which side he would have fought, if he had lived through the storms of the English Reformation. If Macaulay had been one of the two boys of Sir Walter Raleigh, he would probably not have discovered some of the dark shadows on the face of William III. which struck the other boy; while some critics might possibly say of Froude that in drawing the picture of Henry VIII. he may have followed now and then the example of Nelson in the use of his telescope. Still, in describing such recent periods as the reign of Henry VIII., historians cannot, at all events, go very far wrong in dates or names. Froude may have been wrong in embracing the cause of Henry VIII. and accepting all the excuses or explanations which could be given for his violent acts. But Froude is, at all events, honest, in so far that no one can fail to see where his sympathies lie, so that he really leaves us free to decide what side we ourselves should take.

When the historian has to analyse prominent characters, and bring them again full of life on the stage of history, is it not the artist, nay the poet, who has to do the chief work, and not the mere chronicler? In Froude’s case the difficulty was very great. The contemporary estimates of Henry’s character were most conflicting, and without taking a line of his own, without claiming in fact the same privilege which Henry’s contemporaries claimed, whether friends or foes, it would have been impossible for him to create a character that should be consistent and intelligible. There was nothing too fiendish to be told of the English king by the Papal party, and yet we cannot help asking how such a caitiff, as he is represented to have been by Roman Catholic agents, could have retained the love of the English people and secured the services of some of the best among the noblemen and gentlemen of his time? If we take upon ourselves to reject all reports of Royal Commissioners in Henry’s reign as corrupt and mendacious, would it be worth while to write any history of the English people at all? It is, no doubt, an ungrateful task to whitewash a historical character that has been besmirched for years by a resolute party. Yet it has to be done from time to time, from a sense of justice, and not from a mere spirit of opposition. Carlyle’s heroes were nearly all the best-abused men in Christendom: Frederick the Great, Cromwell, and Goethe. Every one of these characters was lying, as Carlyle said himself, under infinite dung; yet every one of them is now admired by thousands, because they trust in Carlyle. It was the same Carlyle who encouraged Froude in his work of rehabilitating Bluff King Hal, and we ought, at all events, to be grateful to him for having enabled us to know all that can be said by the king’s advocates. If Froude wrote as a partisan, he wrote, at the same time, as a patriot, and if a patriot sees but one side of the truth, some one else will see the other.

Can we imagine any history of our own times written from the pole star, and not from amid the turmoil of contending parties? Would a history of the reign of Queen Victoria, written by Gladstone, be very like a history written by Disraeli? However, these squabbles of reviewers about the histories of Macaulay and Froude are now almost entirely forgotten, while the historical dramas which Macaulay and Froude have left us, remain, and Englishmen are proud of possessing two such splendid monuments of the most important periods of their history. Macaulay’s account of William III. remained unfinished, and it is characteristic of Froude that, if I understood him rightly, he gave up the idea of finishing the reign of Queen Elizabeth, because, as an Englishman, he was disappointed in her character towards the end of her reign.

I saw much of Froude again during the last years of his life, when he returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of History, having been appointed by Lord Salisbury. “It is the first public recognition I have received,” he used to say. He rejoiced in it, and he certainly did credit to Lord Salisbury’s courageous choice. His lectures were brilliant, and the room was crowded to the end. His private lectures also were largely attended, and he was on the most friendly and intimate terms with some of his pupils.

There is no place so trying for a professor as Oxford. Froude’s immediate predecessors, Goldwin Smith, Stubbs, and Freeman, were some of the best men that Oxford has produced. Their lectures were excellent in every respect. Yet every one of them had to complain of the miserable scantiness of their audiences at Oxford. The present Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Stubbs, in his “Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediæval and Modern History” (1886), states what may sound almost incredible, that he had sometimes to deliver his lectures “to two or three listless men.” The same may be said of some of the best lectures delivered in the University. The young men are encouraged in each college to attend the lectures delivered by the tutors, and are given to understand that professorial lectures “do not pay” in the examinations. These examinations are chiefly in the hands of college tutors. Professor Stubbs was not given to complain about anything that might seem to concern himself, yet he confesses that “sometimes he felt hurt that in the combined lecture list he found the junior assistant tutor advertising a course on the same subject, or at the same hours, as his own.” Nay, he goes so far in his modesty as to say: “It may be better that there should be a dozen or fifteen college lecturers working away with large classes, when I have only a few stray men,” but the real friends of the University would hardly think so. As things are at present, it has been said, and, I believe, truly said, that nearly all professorial lectures might be abolished, and the studies of the undergraduates would go on just the same. Oxford suffers in this respect from a real embarras de richesse. The University is rich enough, though by no means so rich as it was formerly, to keep up a double staff of teachers, professorial and tutorial. It supports sixty-five professors, readers, and lecturers, and probably four or five times as many tutors. Many of the tutors are quite equal to the professors, nay, it may be, even superior to them, but the most popular tutor, whose lectures, when in college, were crowded, has to be satisfied with two or three listless men as soon as he has been raised to the professoriate. Froude’s lectures formed an exception, but even this was quoted against him.

Froude was not only the most fascinating lecturer, but the most charming companion and friend. His conversation was like his writings. It never tired one, it never made one feel his superiority. His store of anecdotes was inexhaustible, and though in his old age they were sometimes repeated, they were always pleasant to listen to. He enjoyed them so thoroughly himself, he chuckled over them, he covered his eyes as if half ashamed of telling them. They are all gone now, and a pity it is, for most of them referred to what he had actually seen, not only to what he had heard, and he had seen and heard a good deal, both in Church and State. He knew the little failings of great men, he knew even the peccadilloes of saints, better than anybody. He was never ill-natured in his judgments, he knew the world too well for that, and it is well, perhaps, that many things which he knew should be forgotten. He himself insisted on all letters being destroyed that had been addressed to him, and from a high sense of duty, left orders that his own letters, addressed to his friends, should not be divulged after his death. Though he left an unfinished autobiography, extremely interesting to the few friends who were allowed to read it, those who decided that it should not be published have acted, no doubt, wisely and entirely in his spirit.

My friend Charles Kingsley was a very different man. He was a strong man, while Froude had some feminine weaknesses, but also some of the best feminine excellencies. His life and his character are well known from that excellent biography published by his gifted widow, not much more than a year after his death. This Life of hers really gave a new life to him, and secured a new popularity and influence to his writings. In him, too, what I admired besides his delightful character was his poetical power, his brilliant yet minute and accurate descriptions of nature, and the characters he created in his novels. With all the biographies that are now published, how little do people know after all of the man they are asked to love or hate! In order to judge of a man, we ought to know in what quarry the marble of which he was made was carved, what sunshine there was to call forth the first germs of his mind, nay, even whether he was rich or poor, whether he had what we rightly call an independence, and whether from his youth he was and felt himself a free man. There is something in the character of a man like Stanley, for instance, which we have no right to expect in a man who had to struggle in life like Kingsley. The struggle for life may bring out many fine qualities, but it cannot but leave traces of the struggle, a certain amount of self-assertion, a love of warfare, and a more or less pronounced satisfaction at having carried the day against all rivals and opponents. These are the temptations of a poor man which do not exist for a man of independent means. It is no use shutting our eyes to this. Every fight entails blows, and wounds, and scars, and some of them remain for life. Kingsley seems to have had no anxieties as a young man at school or at the University, but when he had left the University and become a curate, and, more particularly, when he had married on his small curacy and there were children, his struggles began in good earnest. He had often to write against time; he had to get up subject after subject in order to be able to write an article, simply that he might be able to satisfy the most troublesome tradesmen. He always wrote at very high pressure; fortunately his physical frame was of iron, and his determination like that of a runaway horse. People may say that he had the usual income of a country clergyman, but why will they forget that a man in Kingsley’s position had not only to give his children an expensive education, but had to keep open house for his numerous friends and admirers? There was no display in his quiet rectory at Eversley, but even the simplest hospitality entails more expense than a small living can bear, and his friends and visitors ranged from the lowest to the highest—from poor workmen to English and foreign royalties. As long as he could wield his pen he could procure the necessary supplies, but it had to be done with a very great strain on the brain. “It must be done, and it shall be done,” he said; yes, but though most of his work was done, and well done, it was like the work of an athlete who breaks down at the end of the day when his victory is won. People did not see it and did not know it, for he never would yield, and never would show signs of yielding. When, towards the end of his life, a canonry was offered him, first at Chester, then at Westminster, he felt truly grateful. “After all,” he said to me, “these stalls are good for old horses.” His professorship at Cambridge was really too much for him. He was not prepared for it. Personally he did much good among the young men, and was certainly most popular. At Cambridge as a professor he did his best, but he had hardly calculated Quid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent. Anyhow, the work soon became too much even for his iron constitution, and he was glad to be relieved. The fact is that Kingsley was all his life, in everything he thought and in everything he did, a poet, a man of high ideals, and likewise of unswerving honesty. No one knew Kingsley, such as he really was, who had not seen him at Eversley, and among his poor people. He visited every cottage, he knew every old man and old woman, and was perfectly at home among them. His “Village Sermons” gave them just the food they wanted, though it was curious to see every Sunday a large sprinkling of young officers from Sandhurst and Aldershot sitting quietly among the smock-frocked congregation, and anxious to have some serious conversation with the preacher afterwards. Kingsley was a great martyr to stammering, it often was torture to him in a lively conversation to keep us all waiting till his thoughts could break through again. In church, however, whether he was reading or speaking extempore, there was no sign of stammering; apparently there was no effort to overcome it. But when we walked home from church he would say: “Oh, let me stammer now, you won’t mind it.”

He was not a learned theologian, his one idea of Christianity was practical Christianity, honesty, purity, love. He was always most courteous, most willing to bow before higher authority or greater learning; but when he thought there was anything wrong, or mean, or cowardly, anything with which he, as an honest man, could not agree, he was as firm as a rock.

His favourite pursuits lay in natural science. He knew every flower, every bird, every fish, and every insect in his neighbourhood, and he had imbibed a belief in the laws of nature, which represented to him indirectly the thoughts of God. When, therefore, after a long continuance of drought, the bishop of his diocese ordered him to have a special prayer for rain, he respectfully and firmly declined. He would pray for the good gifts of heaven, offer thanks to God for all that He was pleased to send in His wisdom, but he would not enter into particulars with Him, he would not put his own small human wisdom against the Divine wisdom; he would not preach on what he thought was good for us, for God knew best. He had no difficulty in persuading his farmers and labourers that if they had any trust in God, and any reverence for the Divine wisdom that rules the world, they would place all their troubles and cares before Him in prayer, but they would not beg for anything which, in His wisdom, He withheld from them. “Thy will be done,” that was his prayer for rain. There was great commotion in ecclesiastical dovecotes, most of all in episcopal palaces. All sorts of punishments were threatened, but Kingsley remained throughout perfectly quiet, yet most determined. He would not degrade his sacred office to that of a rain-maker or medicine-man, and he carried his point. “In America we manage these things better!” said an American friend of Kingsley. “A clergyman in a village on the frontier between two of our States prayed for rain. The rain came, and it soaked the ground to such an extent that the young lambs in the neighbouring State caught cold and died. An action was brought against the clergyman for the mischief he had done, and he and his parishioners were condemned to pay damages to the sheep farmers. They never prayed for rain again after that.”

Kingsley incurred great displeasure by the support he gave to what was called Christian Socialism. His novel “Alton Locke,” contained some very outspoken sentiments as to the terrible sufferings of the poor and the duties of the rich. Kingsley, Frederick Maurice, and their friends, did not only plead, but they acted; they formed societies to assist poor tailors, and for a time the clothes they wore showed but too clearly that they had been cut in Whitechapel, not in Regent Street. Poor Kingsley suffered not only in his wardrobe, but in his purse also, owing to his having been too sanguine in his support of tailoring by co-operation.

However, his books, both in prose and poetry, became more and more popular, and this meant that his income became larger and larger.

Publishers say that novels and sermons have the largest market in England and the colonies, and Kingsley provided both. All went on well: even his being stopped once in the middle of a sermon by a clergyman who had invited him to preach in his church in London, but did not approve of his sermon, did not hurt him. He had many influential friends; both the Queen and the Prince of Wales had shown by special marks of favour how much they appreciated him, and he had a right to look forward to ecclesiastical preferment and to a greater amount of leisure and freedom. One unexpected cloud, however, came to darken his bright and happy life. Some people will say that he brought it upon himself, but there are certain clouds which no honest man can help bringing upon himself. He, no doubt, began the painful controversy with Newman. Having seen how much misery had been caused among some of his own dearest friends by the Romanising teaching under the auspices of Newman and Pusey, he made the mistake of fastening the charge of dishonesty, half-heartedness, and untruthfulness on Newman personally, instead of on the whole Roman Catholic propaganda in England from the time of Henry VIII.’s apostasy from the Roman Church to that of Newman’s apostasy from the Church of England. I shall not enter into this controversy again. I have done so once, and have been well punished for having ventured to declare my honest conviction that throughout this painful duel Kingsley was in the right. But Kingsley was clumsy and Newman most skilful. Besides, Newman was evidently a man of many friends, and of many able friends who knew how to wield their pens in many a newspaper.

In spite of having taken a most unpopular step in leaving the national church, Newman always retained the popularity which he had so well earned as a member of that Church. I have myself been one of his true admirers, partly from having known many of his intimate friends at Oxford, partly from having studied his earlier works when I first came to England. I read them more for their style than for their contents. If Newman had left behind him no more than his exquisite University sermons and his sweet hymns he would always have stood high among the glories of England. But Kingsley also was loved by the people and surrounded by numerous and powerful friends. It must be due to my ignorance of the national character, but I have certainly never been able to explain why public sympathy went so entirely with Newman and against Kingsley; why Kingsley was supposed to have acted unchivalrously and Newman was looked upon as a martyr to his convictions, and as the victim of an illiberal and narrow-minded Anglican clique. Certain it is that in the opinion of the majority Kingsley had failed, and failed ignominiously, while Newman’s popularity revived and became greater than ever.

Kingsley felt his defeat most deeply; he was like a man that stammered, and could not utter at the right time the right word that was in his mind. What is still more surprising was the sudden collapse of the sale of Kingsley’s most popular books. I saw him after he had been with his publishers to make arrangements for the sale of his copyrights. He wanted the money to start his sons, and he had a right to expect a substantial sum. The sum offered him seemed almost an insult, and yet he assured me that he had seen the books of his publishers, and that the sale of his books during the last years did not justify a larger offer. He was miserable about it, as well he might be. He felt not only the pecuniary loss, but, as he imagined, the loss of that influence which he had gained by years of hard labour.

However, he was mistaken in his idea that he had laboured in vain. Immediately after his death there came the most extraordinary reaction. His books sold again in hundreds of thousands, and his family received in one year a great deal more from his royalties than had been offered him for the whole copyright of all his books. People are more willing now to admit that though Newman may have been right in his “Apologia pro Vita Sua,” Kingsley was not wrong in pointing out the weak points in Newman’s character and in the moral and political doctrines of the Roman Catholic system, more particularly of the Jesuits, and the dangers that threatened his beloved England from those who seemed halting between the two Churches, the one national, the other foreign, the one reformed, the other unreformed.

There was another occasion when Newman’s and Kingsley’s friends had a sharp conflict at Oxford. When the Prince of Wales was invited to Oxford to receive his honorary degree of D.C.L., he had, as was the custom, sent to the Chancellor a list of names of his friends on whom he wished that the same degree should be conferred at the same time. One of them was Kingsley, then one of his chaplains. When his name was proposed a strong protest was made by Dr. Pusey and his friends, no one could understand why. Dr. Pusey declared distinctly that he did not mean to contest Kingsley’s orthodoxy, but when asked at last to give his reasons, he declared that Kingsley’s “Hypatia” was an immoral book. This was too much for Dr. Stanley, who challenged Pusey to produce one single passage in “Hypatia” which could be called immoral. On such conditions Shakespeare could never have received an honorary degree from the University of Oxford. I still possess the copy of “Hypatia” which Stanley examined, marking every passage that could possibly be called immoral. It need hardly be said that there was none. Still Dr. Pusey threatened to veto the degree in Convocation and to summon his friends from the country to support him. And what could have been done to prevent an unseemly scandal on such an occasion as a royal visit to Oxford? Dr. Stanley and his friends yielded, and Kingsley’s name was struck out from the Prince’s list, and, what was still worse, it was never placed again on the list of honorary doctors such as might really have reflected honour on the University. If ever the secret history of the degrees conferred honoris causa by the University of Oxford on truly eminent persons, not members of the University, comes to be written, the rejection of Kingsley’s name will not be one of the least interesting chapters.

Kingsley’s death was a severe blow to his country, and his friends knew that his life might have been prolonged. It was a sad time I spent with him at Eversley, while his wife lay sick and the doctors gave no hope of her recovery. He himself also was very ill at the time, but a doctor whom the Queen had sent to Eversley told him that with proper care there was no danger for him, that he had the lungs of a horse, but that he required great care. In spite of that warning he would get up and go into the sick-room of his wife, which had to be kept at an icy temperature. He caught cold and died, being fully convinced that his wife had gone before him. And what a funeral it was! But with all the honour that was paid to him, all who walked back to the empty rectory felt that life henceforth was poorer, and that the sun of England would never be so bright or so cheerful again, now that he was gone. Though I admired—as who did not?—his poetical power, his brilliant yet most minute and accurate descriptions of nature, and the lifelike characters he had created in his novels, what we loved most in him was his presence, his delightful stammer, his downright honesty, and the perfect transparency of his moral nature. He was not a child, he was a man, but unspoiled by the struggles of his youth, unspoiled by the experiences of his later years. He was an English gentleman, a perfect specimen of noble English manhood.

Having been particularly attached to his young niece, my wife, he had at once allowed me a share in his affections, and when other members of her family shook their heads, he stood by me and bade me be of good cheer till the day was won, and she became my wife. That was in 1859. Here are some verses he had addressed to his two nieces, to my wife and to her sister, afterwards Mrs. Theodore Walrond (died 1872):—

TO G***.

A hasty jest I once let fall—

As jests are wont to be, untrue—

As if the sum of joy to you

Were hunt and picnic, rout and ball.

Your eyes met mine: I did not blame;

You saw it: but I touched too near

Some noble nerve; a silent tear

Spoke soft reproach and lofty shame.

I do not wish those words unsaid.

Unspoilt by praise or pleasure, you

In that one look to woman grew,

While with a child, I thought, I played.

Next to mine own beloved so long!

I have not spent my heart in vain.

I watched the blade; I see the grain;

A woman’s soul, most soft, yet strong.

A FAREWELL.

My fairest child, I have no song to give you;

No lark could pipe to skies so dull and grey:

Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you

For every day.

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.

Do noble things, not dream them, all day long:

And so make life, death, and that vast for ever

One grand sweet song.

In the original, as written down in her album, there is a third verse between the two:—

I’ll tell you how to sing a clearer carol

Than lark who hails the dawn on breezy down,

To earn yourself a purer poet’s laurel

Than Shakespeare’s crown.

LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS
III