PAUL HEYSE
1875
"How does it happen," I asked recently of a distinguished portrait-painter, "that you, who formerly have made successful efforts in several other branches of art, have at last confined yourself wholly to portrait-painting?"
"I think it is because it has given me the most pleasure," replied he, "to study and to perpetuate an object which has never existed before, and will never appear again."
With these words he seemed to me strikingly to designate the interest which attracts a person to distinct individuality, that of the inner as well as that of the outer being. To the critic, too, the individual is an especially alluring object; to him, too, the execution of a portrait is a singularly fascinating occupation. Unfortunately, his means of communication are deplorably far behind those of the painter. What can be more difficult and more fruitless than the attempt to express in words that which is purely individual – that which in accordance with its very nature must mock at every effort of reproduction? Is not personality, in its uninterrupted flow, the true perpetuum mobile, which does not admit of being constructed?
And yet these insolvable problems ever charm and attract anew. After we have gradually become familiar with an author, have come to feel ourselves perfectly at home in his writings, to perceive dimly that certain of their characteristics dominate others, and then happen to be by nature of a critical turn of mind, we can find no peace until we have rendered ourselves an account of our impressions, and made clear the indistinct image of the character of another ego that has arisen within our own soul. We hear or read criticisms on an author and find them absurd. Why are they absurd? Other statements seem to us but half true. What is lacking to make them wholly true? A new work of importance from his pen appears. How far have the earlier works been a preparation for it? We almost become curious to learn how we ourselves would characterize his talent – and we satisfy our curiosity.
I
Whoever casts a glance on the long row of closely printed volumes which form Paul Heyse's complete works, and remembers that the author was born in the year 1830, will first of all be apt to exclaim, "What industry!" Involuntarily he will trace back this astonishing productiveness to a will power of rare endurance. None the less, however, does it owe its origin to a singularly fortunate nature. This nature possessed within itself so luxuriant a fruitfulness that it has yielded its harvest without the least effort of the will, without any undue exertion; it has yielded a harvest of such variety that we might believe it to be fostered according to a defined plan and with a painstaking will; nevertheless, it has obviously been permitted to act with thorough independence. To allow nature to rule, to follow one's own pleasure or bent (sich gehen zu lassen1), has been from the outset, as we soon come to feel, Heyse's motto, and so it happens that with qualities which usually lead to a wandering, scanty, fragmentary productiveness, he has completed and perfected each undertaking, having written lyric and epic poems, one grand epos (Thekla), a dozen dramas, more than fifty "novellen," and two large romances. He began early; while yet a student, he entered on his literary career. Free from care as a pedestrian tourist who gayly whistles as he strolls along, never hurrying, pausing to drink at every spring, lingering before the bushes by the wayside, and plucking flowers as well as berries, resting in the shade, and wandering along in the shade, he has gradually trodden a pathway of such extent that we could only expect to see it traversed by one who maintained a breathless march, with eyes fixed unwaveringly on the goal.
The voice followed by Heyse as an author is unquestionably the voice of instinct. North German though he is, nothing is farther removed from him than cool deliberation and premeditation. Born in Berlin, he nevertheless takes root in Munich, and finds in the ardent South German race and in the throbbing South German life the surroundings most congenial to his temperament; at home in South Germany, he yet feels constantly drawn to Italy, as the land where the human plant has attained a more beautiful and luxuriant growth than elsewhere, one that is less disturbed by reflex action, and where the voice of the blood speaks most distinctly, most powerfully. This voice is the siren voice which allures Heyse. Nature! Nature! keeps ringing in his ear. Germany has authors who appear almost wholly devoid of inspiration, and who have only been made what they are by a vigorous North German will (as Karl Gutzkow, for instance); others (as Fanny Lewald) whose works bear the impress of an active North German intellect. Neither through volition nor deliberation does Heyse create and fashion his works, but simply by heeding the inner impulse.
Many an author is tempted to impart to his reader an idea of himself differing somewhat from the correct one. He takes pleasure in representing himself as that which he would like to be, – in former times, as being endowed either with keener sensibilities or deeper melancholy than he ever possessed, in our day as being now more experienced, now colder or harsher, than he really is. More than one distinguished author, as Mérimée, or Lecomte de Lisle, has so shrunk from manifesting his emotions that he has succeeded, on the other hand, in exhibiting an appearance of lack of feeling by no means natural to him. Such people make it a point of honor not to breathe freely and easily until they have crossed the snow-line where the human element in our natures ends, and their contempt for those who lay claim to the sympathy of the multitude on the plane below leads them to yield to the temptation to force their way up to a height whither pride, not instinct, bids them ascend. For Heyse this temptation does not exist. He has never for a moment been able or willing to write himself into either greater warmth or coldness than he actually felt. He has never professed to be writing with his heart's blood when he was fashioning calmly as an artist, and he has patiently submitted when the critics censured him for lack of warmth. On the other hand, he has never been able to report, as so many of the most eminent French authors have done, a horrible or revolting occurrence with the same stoic tranquillity, and in the same tone that would be suitable in stating where a man of the world purchases his cigars, or where the best champagne could be obtained. He aims neither at the ardent style of passionate temperaments, nor at the self-control of the worldling. In comparison with Swinburne he seems rather cold, and in comparison with Flaubert naïve. But the narrow path in which he wanders is precisely that which is pointed out to him by the instinct of his innermost being, by the purely individual and yet so complicated being which is the result of his nature.
II
The power which an individual obeys as an artist, necessarily becomes the power which in his works is exalted to the place of honor. That is the reason why Heyse as an author glorifies nature. Not what a human being thinks or desires, but what he is by nature interests Heyse in him. The highest duty in his eyes is to honor nature and heed her voice. Sin against nature is the true sin. Give her free scope, and let her act her own pleasure.
There are, therefore, not many authors who are such marked fatalists as Heyse. In free will, according to the traditional sense of the word, he does not believe, and is evidently quite as sceptically opposed to Kant's categorical imperative as his Edwin or his Felix.[2] But if he does not believe in innate ideas, he does believe in innate instinct, and this instinct is sacred to him. In his "novellen" he has described how unhappy the soul feels when this instinct is either disturbed or rendered uncertain. In his "Kenne Dich Selbst" (Know Thyself) it is intelligence, in his "Reise nach dem Glück" (Journey after Happiness) it is morality that is the disturber of the peace.
In the first of these "novellen" Heyse has represented the anguish which proceeds from a too early or a premeditated invasion on the instinctive life of the soul. "That beautiful stupor of youth, that dreamy, unconscious plenitude of the powers, the pure faculty of enjoyment of the yet unexhausted senses, was lost to young Franz through his premature struggle for self-consciousness."2 He here portrays the sleeplessness of the mind, which is as dangerous for the health of the soul as actual sleeplessness is for the welfare of the body, and shows how one in whom the reflex faculty is maimed "loses that mysterious, obscure substance which is the very pith and marrow of our personality."
In "Die Reise nach dem Glück" it is conventional morality, which by supplanting instinct has shattered the soul. A young girl, having conquered her own natural impulses from motives of inculcated morality, has banished her lover from her presence late at night, and thereby become the innocent cause of his death. The remembrance of this misfortune haunts her constantly. "If one's own heart does not point out the way, one is sure to go astray. Once before in my life I was made wretched because I refused to hearken to my heart, let it cry as loudly as it would. Now I will pay heed if it but whispers to me, and I will have ear for nothing else."3
In instinct the entire nature is present. Now if the inner devastation which results where instinct has lost its guiding power, be in Heyse's eyes the most profound of all misfortunes, to the characters he delights most in delineating, the consciousness of life presents the exact opposite; that is, the most profound sense of happiness in the enjoyment of the totality and harmony of their natures. Heyse, as a matter of course, is far removed from considering self-introspection as a principle inimical to the healthy sense of life. His own views appear to be about the same as those expressed by the invalid in "Kenne Dich Selbst" in the words: just as agreeable as it may be for him to awaken in the night, to consider and to know that he is able to sleep still longer, just so glorious it appears to him to arouse from his dreamy state of happiness, to collect his thoughts, to reflect, and then, as it were, to turn over on the other side and indulge in further enjoyment. At all events, in his romance "Kinder der Welt" (Children of the World), he has permitted Balder, the most ideally fashioned character in the book, to carry out this last thought in a still more significant way. Melancholy views have just been expressed, speculations regarding the sun which shines indifferently on the just and on the unjust, and looks down upon more wretchedness than happiness, and about the infinite, ever-recurring miseries of life, and more to like effect. Franzel, the young socialist printer, has been expatiating upon the opinion that one who had truly considered the lot of humanity, could never find rest or peace, and in his distress has called life a lie when Balder attempts to show him that a life in which repose was possible, would no longer deserve the name. And then Balder explains to Franzel in what the enjoyment of life for him consists; namely, in "experiencing past and future in one." With the utmost originality he declares that he could have no enjoyment if his experiences were incomplete, and that in his silent moments of contemplation all the scattered elements of his being were united in one harmonious whole. "Whenever I have wished to do so, that is to say, as often as I have desired to make for myself a genuine holiday of life and to enjoy to the utmost my little existence, I have, as it were, conjured up all the periods of my life at once: my laughing, sportive childhood, when I was yet strong and well, then the first glow of thought and feeling, the first pangs of youth, the foreboding of what a full, healthy, mature life must be, and at the same time the renunciation which usually becomes a habit only to very old people." To such a conception of life, human existence is not divided into moments, which vanish, leaving us to bemoan their disappearance, nor is it broken into fragments in the service of reciprocally contending impulses and thoughts; to one who possesses the faculty of casting out an anchor at any moment, of realizing the totality and reality of one's own being, life cannot lacerate like a bad dream. "Do you not think," says Balder, "that he who can generate within himself at any moment, if he but choose, such a fulness of the sense of existence, must consider it empty talk when people say, it were better never to have been born?"4 It must be remembered that it is a cripple whose days are numbered, who utters these words; and a cripple, moreover, whom the poet has evidently modelled after the image of the so differently thinking Leopardi. The peculiar kind of epicurean philosophy expressed by them, and which, through a synthetic reflection, gathers together all time in the eternal present, is in reality the poet's conclusive conception of life. It is the hearkening of harmoniously planned nature to her own harmonies. The infinite gods make all their gifts to their favorites complete, all the infinite joys and all the infinite sorrows. This life-philosophy admits into its inner harmony even the discord of infinite pain, and succeeds in finding for it a satisfactory solution. Here is the point wherein Heyse most sharply differs from Turgenief and the other great modern pessimists of poetry. He makes bold to impute to his favorite characters even the most unlovely and shocking errors, in order that he may restore to them, after divers trials and afflictions, their inner peace. The young baron in the romance, "Im Paradiese" (In Paradise), is an instance of this. A sin against his better self weighs upon his conscience. He has lost that inner harmony with his own emotional nature, "on which everything depends." It becomes manifest in the course of the book that through this failing, he has, besides, transgressed against his best friend. Nevertheless, through all the mistakes and misfortunes, which are the inevitable result, he finds himself again. The harmony of nature was but temporarily set aside; not, as he had feared, hopelessly destroyed.
Instinct is directly the voice of the blood. Hence it comes that Heyse's characters are deeply rooted in family and race. Like the law of Moses, they seem to teach that the soul is in the blood. They follow the voice of the blood, and to it they appeal. The undeveloped ones among them are the vigorous expression of the type of a race; the developed ones know their own nature and respect it; they accept it as it is with the feeling that it cannot be altered; they are as thoroughly guided by the instinct of their natures as are the characters of Balzac by selfishness. In order to render clear my meaning, let me quote a few passages from the "Kinder der Welt." When Edwin falls passionately in love with Toinette, his brother Balder, unknown to him, goes to her to implore her not to reject his brother, through caprice or frivolity, and throw herself away on a stranger. Her answer to his appeal is that she has but just learned and comprehended wherefore it is that in her whole life she has never been able to gain happiness. She has been informed of the secret of her origin, namely, that her unhappy mother had been betrayed into her father's power through force, and from this fact she draws the certainty that it is impossible for her to love. "My friend," says she, "I feel sure you mean well by me, you and your brother, but it would be criminal in me to persuade myself that you could help me now that everything is so clear to me, and that I am convinced that my destiny irrevocably lies in the blood." (The words are emphasized in the text.) This is in her eyes the last irrefutable argument. In all the characters of the book this respect for nature, almost bordering on superstition, is prominent. As it is with Toinette, so it is in the case of her opposite pole Lea. They are contrasts in every point; in this one particular alone they accord. After Lea, who has become the wife of Edwin, has learned how much power the memory of Toinette still exercises over his heart, and is overpowered with grief at the discovery, she is one day reading a book by Edwin, and for a time consoling herself by considering how much she understands of his writings that would be above the comprehension of another woman, when suddenly she flings away the book, for the thought rushes through her brain "how powerless is all comprehension of minds in comparison with the blind, irrational elemental attraction of natures which enslaves all freedom and infatuates the wisest." She is a woman apparently of a purely intellectual mould. A lively, ardent desire for knowledge and for clearness of mental vision has led her to Edwin; he gave her instructions in – philosophy. One would therefore suppose that she, on her part, would at this crisis have attempted to combat the magic power of the blood by an appeal to the intellectual forces which have for so long united her with Edwin. On the contrary. Far from being characterized as all mind and soul, she is beyond all else a nature. She has always loved Edwin passionately, but she has feared that his love, less ardent than her own, would be made to recoil by outbursts of her passion, and yet she – the philosopher – has said to herself, in her loneliness: "Love is folly – blissful madness – laughter and weeping without sense or meaning. Thus I have always loved him until reason was lost and forgotten." Now that the happiness of her wedded life is at stake, she breaks out into the words: "If he perceives that the blood of my mother flows in my veins, – hot Old Testament blood, – perhaps he will discover that he made a grievous mistake when he thought that he could form with such a being 'a marriage of reason.' Perhaps the day may come when I dare tell him everything, because he himself is no longer satisfied with a modest life-happiness, because he has come to demand something prouder, more unrestrained, more overwhelmingly profuse – and then I can say to him, 'You need not seek far; still waters are deep.'"5 Everything is here characteristic, the tracing back to origin and race, as well as the protest of this ardent, passionate nature against the disguise of spontaneous passion as a reasonable sacrifice. Only those who are familiar with this fundamental trait of Heyse will have true comprehension of and interest in one of his dramas which might otherwise be considered his weakest, and which in many respects appears to me not wholly worthy of him; I mean "Die Göttin der Vernunft" (The Goddess of Reason). Is it not extremely singular that Heyse, with the whole gigantic French Revolution to choose from, should single out this theme of all others and treat it in precisely the way he has done? Many a poet in the selection of such a subject would have in view an organ for the pathos of the revolution, or would allow the purely ideal inspiration of the goddess of reason in the historic crisis to ennoble a past which, though frivolous and undignified, has nevertheless tragically avenged itself. Such a poet as Hamerling could no doubt make something appropriate out of the theme. Heyse, true to his temperament, paused awestruck before this apparition: a woman, a bit of nature, with feminine instincts and feminine passion, is proclaimed to be reason, the goddess of reason, that is to say, the dry, rigid, dead, rationalistic reason of the eighteenth century! Thereupon Heyse creates a fictitious woman who by virtue of the depth of her nature (upon the whole, far in advance of her time) is overpowered by the feeling that vast, all-embracing life does not admit of being traced back to any scholastic formula, a woman who loves and fears, suffers and hopes, who trembles for the life of her father and that of her lover, who in her anguish lest her lover should misunderstand her, falls into a state of despondency, who as a genuine child of her author has said: "To me the highest aim is to do nothing which causes me to be at variance with myself," and then permits this woman – her every fibre quivering with passion, in a frenzy of personal despair, without a thought of the universal and the abstract, of the Republic or of intellectual freedom, and while her father is being murdered before the church door – to be driven to proclaim from the altar the new gospel of reason, which she herself has once mockingly designated the world's law that two times two make four. This drama appears to me of far greater value as a contribution to the psychology of its author than from a poetic point of view.
Nevertheless, it would be an injustice to Heyse to infer from what has hitherto been made prominent, that he recognizes nothing higher than elemental nature and its impulses. By the word instinct is meant something wholly different from isolated impulses. Instinct is the inner need of being true to one's self. Therefore, it is that Heyse can consistently permit an independent sympathy to triumph over the ties of blood, and even over the closest bonds of relationship. In the novel "Der verlorene Sohn" (The Lost Son), a mother conceals, and tends unawares the innocent murderer of her son, and after he, through his amiability, has won the heart of the mother as well as that of the daughter, the poet makes him lead home the daughter as his bride. "The lost son" had been killed in honorable self-defence in the midst of great peril, and his opponent did not even know his name. Even when the mother learns the particulars concerning the death of her son, she places no hindrances on account of them in the way of the marriage, but bears alone, and without confiding her secret to a living mortal, the misfortune that has befallen her. Here, then, with the full accord of her character, a purely spiritual tie enters into the place of the ties of blood; the mother adopts as a son him through whose hand her own son has fallen; but in so doing she acts in harmony with the depths of her nature, and preserves her soul intact. It is the same in all cases where Heyse allows the personality, through considerations of duty, to repress a genuine passion, a deep love. Wherever this takes place (as in the drama "Marie Moroni," in the novelette "Die Pfadfinderin" – The Path-finder – or in the romance "Die Kinder der Welt") it is in order to maintain loyalty to self, in order not to forfeit the unity and healthfulness of the individual being, and duty may be seen to flow freely forth from the well-springs of one's own nature, inasmuch as the command not to be at variance with self is esteemed the highest law of duty. So far is Heyse removed from conceiving nature to be inimical to spirituality and duty.
In his eyes nature is all-embracing; everything that lies within the range of our possibilities, all that we perform or achieve, so far as it be of any value, bears infallibly her stamp, and over all which is not within our power, over our entire hereditary destiny, she rules directly, immediately, all-powerfully, and absolutely. Even the most unfortunate character which Heyse has portrayed, however badly fate may have dealt with him, finds consolation in the fact that he is a child of nature; that is to say, that he has not been shorn of his birthright. "If the elements of my being, which exclude me from happiness, have met and become intermingled through a great blind dispensation of the universe, and if I be doomed to ruin because of this combination, it is an unpleasant, but by no means an unendurable thought. On the other hand, a Heavenly Father, who de cœur léger, or perchance through pedagogic wisdom, would permit me, poor creature, to drift about so sorrowfully between heaven and earth, in order to accord me later a recompense throughout eternity, for my wasted time – no, dear friend, all the royal or unroyal theology in the world cannot make that seem plausible to me."6
Thus with Heyse, even he whose life has been the most aggravating failure, takes his refuge in the conception of nature as the last consoling thought; and thus he himself, in the most painful moments of his life, takes refuge therein, and to this the marvellous poems "Marianne" and "Ernst," the most profound and most touching of all his writings, have remained as witnesses. Nature is his starting-point and his final goal, the source of his poetry and its last word, his one and all, his consolation, his creed.