Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century - Georg Brandes 7 стр.

Each time that Heyse has attempted to gain a modern interest for ancient myths, he has been fortunate. The charming little youthful poem, "Die Furie" (The Fury), is among the best that he has written. In a little drama, "Perseus" (not included in his collected works), he has given a new interpretation of the Medusa myth; he has felt pity for poor, beautiful Medusa, to whom was allotted the cruel fate of turning every one into stone, and he informs us that the envy of the goddesses who were jealous of her love for Perseus is alone to blame for this. Her head falls by the hand of her own lover, while she, in order not to harm him through her pernicious gaze, buries her face in the sand. Heyse has transformed the ancient myth into an original and sorrowful Mährchen. The story of the "Centaur" is bright, and full of profound thought. We are not astonished when "Im Paradiese" informs us that this story inspired the favorite fresco of the painter Kohle. The pilgrimage "unserer lieben Frau von Milo," which as a picture we almost think we see before our eyes, so vividly is the fresco described, is intimately related as a poem to "Der letzte Centaur" (The last Centaur)! That sounds almost like the last of the Mohikans! What does Heyse know of the last Centaur? How could he possibly introduce him into a regular "novelle"? It is done with consummate art, and yet in the most natural way in the world. He first, so to speak, brings together two circles, then a third circle, and in the latter he conjures up the Centaur. The first circle is the world of the living, the second the world of the dead, the third easily and naturally comprises the world of the supernatural. The story begins, contrary to Heyse's custom, in a purely autobiographical way, therefore with the strongest possible elements of reality. The author, late one evening, approaches a wine-house, where, in his youth, he was in the habit of meeting every week his dearest friends and comrades, all of whom are now dead, and lets them pass in review before his mind's eye. Finally he enters the wine-house, feels weary, and suddenly it seems to him as though he were summoned to join the old circle, and as the door is opened, lo! his friends all sit together. But not one of them extends a hand to him who is entering, and their faces wear an expression of formality, seriousness, and sorrow. Every now and then they drink long draughts from their wineglasses, while their pale cheeks and dim eyes sparkle and glow for a moment, but directly afterward they sit rigid and silent once more, staring into their glasses. One of them alone is not bowed down by the destiny that has overtaken them, and of which, from a mute agreement, not a word is spoken in the society. It is Genelli, the distinguished painter, whose "Centaur" in the "Schackschen Sammlung" at Munich is the admiration of all travellers. One of the company remarks that such a Genelli creation looks so life-like that one is almost inclined to believe that the artist himself was a participator in the scene. And as the master calmly replies "And so he was," we glide imperceptibly from the realm of the dead to the world of fiction. He has seen the Centaur with his own eyes, one beautiful summer afternoon, as it came trotting, without thought of evil, into a little Tyrolese village, where Genelli sat over his wineglass. In olden times, the Centaur was a country physician by profession, had grown weary during a professional tour across the mountains, had laid himself down to sleep in a glacier-cave, was then frozen in and now, after the lapse of centuries, the ice had melted about him, and he could freely gaze on the changed world with his wondering eyes. It is Sunday, and just church time, when, with his mighty body,  a Farnese Hercules above, a superb, heroic battle-charger below,  with floating mane and long, trailing horse tail, with a spray of roses behind one ear in his thick hair, he trots through the empty streets, only now and then terrifying some old woman, who flees, with shrieks of alarm, from the strange apparition. He sees the church door open, the building full of people, and a marvellously beautiful woman with a child on her arm, painted over the altar. Filled with curiosity, meaning no harm, he trots through the portal, over the stone flags, and approaches the altar. It can easily be comprehended what a hubbub is caused by this monster, newly arisen from hell. The parson shrieks aloud, waves toward the beast whatever consecrated thing he may happen to hold in his hand, and cries "Apage! apage!" (which the Centaur understands because it is Greek). The congregation makes the sign of the cross over and over again; and filled with astonishment, this beast of ancient story then trots out of the door again, and accompanied by all the old women and all the children of the village, who are naturally very much shocked to see "the lofty traveller so lightly clad," presses onward to the village inn, where Genelli is sitting on the balcony. The master then informs the Centaur that he has awakened to life either a couple of hundred years too late or too early. At the time of the Renaissance he would doubtless have been well received. "But at the present day, among this narrow-chested, broad-browed, enervated, unmanned, worn-out race that is called the modern world!" Genelli could not venture to make out a very cheering horoscope for him. "Wherever you may show yourself, in cities or in villages, the street-urchins will run after you and pelt you with rotten apples, the old women will cry murder, and the priest will report you to be the foul fiend himself, etc." And it comes to pass as Genelli has prophesied. While the worthy Centaur, with the good nature that belongs to the strong, allows the public to stare at him, to feel his soft, velvety hide, while he, in genial mood, drains glass after glass of wine, and hands back his empty glass over the railing of the arbor to the pretty bar-maid, to whom he at once gave his rose, hatred and envy are lying in ambush to work his destruction. A complete conspiracy has been formed against him. "At the head stood, of course, the reverend clergy, who deemed it detrimental to the spiritual welfare of their parishioners to come into closer contact with a certainly unchristian, wholly naked, and no doubt, very immoral beast-man." Equally incensed was an Italian who had been exhibiting on the market-place a stuffed calf with two heads and five legs. The horse-man could be seen gratis, he was alive and drank and talked, and who knew whether he might not even be moved to treat the by-standers to some skilful feats of horsemanship. The calf, on the other hand, was a peaceful genius, and gave no signs of any such extravagant undertakings. The Italian cannot enter into competition. "There is a difference," he explains to the parson, "between a legalized, natural sport, that is carried on with the full approval of the police, and a monster that is wholly beyond the limits of probability, such a one as has never been known to exist before, who, travelling without passport or license, makes the country unsafe and steals the bread from the mouths of honest five-legged calves." But the most passionate opponent of the Centaur is the little bow-legged village tailor, the bridegroom elect of the pretty bar-maid. The tailor, too, discloses his mind to the parson, and expresses his anxiety lest the new fashion introduced by the unknown should ruin the whole tailor's trade, and, moreover, overthrow all conceptions of decency and good morals. So, while the Centaur, in his cheerful mood, is just engaged in carrying the fair Nanni on his back round the court-yard of the inn, and, at the same time, entertaining the by-standers with an exceedingly graceful and peculiar dance, all the conspirators appear with a company of mounted gens-d'armes to capture him. Without honoring them with the slightest attention, he continues his dance, and softly pressing the maiden's hands on his breast, he makes a magnificent leap over the heads of the peasants and away he goes. Pistol-balls follow him, with sharp reports, without hitting him, and soon he stands free on the next mountain slope. There, moved by the piteous entreaties of the maiden, he allows her to glide gently down to the ground. "Greatly as she had been flattered by the chivalrous homage of the stranger, and pitiful as was the figure her own sweetheart displayed beside him, she could not expect a solid support from this mounted foreigner." Her practical nature triumphs, and like a hunted chamois she springs from stone to stone into her tailor's arms. An expression of divine scorn glides over the countenance of the Centaur; he is seen to move away, and shortly afterward he has vanished from the eager gaze of those who are staring after him.

Here Genelli's voice is hushed, the little circle breaks up, and the poet awakens in the ante-room of the inn.

All the qualities which make a poetic work an enjoyment to the reader are combined in this "Märchen"; an exalted humor, which casts a gentle glow over all the details, the tenderest semi-tone and the finest clair-obscure, that permits the action of the piece to glide gently from the light of day into a dream of a circle of the dead, and then again allows the twilight of the shadow-world to be illumined by a sunbeam from old Hellas. Add to this a profound thought, which is entirely original to its poet. For this sportive tale is in reality a hymn to freedom in art as well as in life, and to freedom as Heyse has conceived it. In his eyes freedom does not consist in a struggle for freedom (as, for instance, in the case of the Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen), but it is the protest of nature against dogmas in the religious sphere, of nature against conventionality in the social and moral sphere. Through nature to freedom! that is his path and that his watchword. Thus the Centaur as half human being, half divinity, is to his fancy a beloved symbol. How beautiful is the Centaur in his proud strength gained from the remnant of old Grecian blood he has preserved in his veins! What must he not have suffered, the poor Centaur, for the remnant of heathenism, that has arisen in him, and that, after having been frozen in a few thousand years, has ventured out into the light of day in our age when all the glaciers are beginning to melt away! How much more instructive, how much more sedate and moral, does the whole civilized world about him find his interesting rival, the stuffed calf, with two tongues and five legs, which are by no means intended for progress, but are conservative legs that with all due propriety keep the place ascribed to them. Such curiosities never exceed the limits of any civil custom, never exhibit themselves without permission from the public authorities and the clergy, and are therefore none the less unusual. They will always remain rivals of the Centaur, considered by some as his equal and by others as far outshining him.

And is not the poet himself, on his Pegasus in this petty modern social world of ours, the living representative of "the last Centaur"?

X

I have noted down some expressions of opinion concerning Heyse, favorable and unfavorable all mixed together.

"Heyse," says one, "is the woman's doctor, the German woman's doctor, who has thoroughly understood Goethe's saying,

That he is no poet for men, Prince Bismarck has rightly felt."

"On the contrary," says another, "Paul Heyse is very masculine. He is pronounced weak by some because he is pleasing, because a finished grace has lent its impress to his creations. People do not realize how much strength is requisite in order to have this exquisite charm!"

"What is Heyse?" says a third. "The denizen of a small town, who has so long played hide and seek with Berlin, with the social life of the world, with politics, that he has estranged himself from our present, and only feels at home among the troubadours in Provence. I always scent out something of the Provençale and of the provincialist in his writings."

"This Heyse," remarks a fourth, "in spite of his fifty years and the maturity of his authorship, has the weakness to wish to persuade us throughout that he is an immoral, lascivious poet. But no man believes him. That is his punishment."

"I have never in my life been so greatly envied," once said a lady, an old friend of Heyse's youth, in my presence, "as I was to-day, in one of our higher schools for young ladies, which I was visiting, when the rumor was circulated that I was about to pass the evening in a circle where I would meet him. The little damsels (Backfische) unanimously commissioned me to carry to him their enthusiastic greetings. How gladly would they one and all have thrown themselves into his arms! He is and always will be the idolized author of young maidens."

"One can define Paul Heyse," said a critic, "as the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy of German poetry. He appears like Mendelssohn when compared to the great masters. His nature, like that of Mendelssohn, is a German lyric, sensitive temperament, permeated with the most refined Southern culture. Both men lack the grand pathos, the energetic power, the storm of the dramatic element; but both have natural dignity in earnestness, charming amiability and pleasing grace in jest, they are thoroughly cultured in regard to form, they are virtuosos in execution."

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 24

He who possesses talent should also possess courage. He must dare trust his inspiration, he must be convinced that the fancy which flashes through his brain is a healthy one, that the form which comes natural to him, even if it be a new one, has a right to assert its claims; he must have gained the hardihood to expose himself to the charge of being affected, or on the wrong path, before he can yield to his instinct and follow it wherever it may imperiously lead. When Armand Carrel, a young journalist at the time, was censured by the editor of the paper for which he wrote, who, pointing to a passage in the young man's article, remarked, "That is not the way people write," he replied, "I do not write as people write, but as I myself write," and this is the universal formula of a gifted nature. It countenances neither fugitive rubbish, nor arbitrary invention, but with entire self-consciousness it expresses the right of talent, when neither traditional form nor existing material suffices to meet the peculiar requirements of its nature, to choose new material, to create new forms, until it finds a soil of a quality to give nurture to all of its forces and gently and freely develop them. Such a soil the poet Hans Christian Andersen found in the nursery story.

I

In his stories we meet with beginnings like this: "Any one might have supposed that something very extraordinary had happened in the duck-pond, there was such a commotion. All the ducks some swimming, some standing in the pond with their heads downward suddenly jumped on land, leaving the traces of their feet in the wet clay, and sending forth a loud, startled cry," or like the following: "Now, then, let us begin. When we are at the end of the story, we shall know more than we know now: but to begin. Once upon a time there was a wicked sprite, indeed, he was the most mischievous of all sprites!" The construction, the position of the words in individual sentences, the entire arrangement, is at variance with the simplest rules of syntax. "This is not the way people write." That is true; but it is the way they speak. To grown people? No, but to children; and why should it not be proper to commit the words to writing in the same order in which they are spoken to children? In such a case the usual form is simply exchanged for another; not the rules of abstract written language, but the power of comprehension of the child is here the determining factor; there is method in this disorder, as there is method in the grammatical blunder of the child when it makes use of a regular imperfect for an irregular verb. To replace the accepted written language with the free, unrestrained language of familiar conversation, to exchange the more rigid form of expression of grown people for such as a child uses and understands, becomes the true goal of the author as soon as he embraces the resolution to tell nursery stories for children? He has the bold intention to employ oral speech in a printed work, he will not write but speak, and he will gladly write as a school-child writes, if he can thus avoid speaking as a book speaks. The written word is poor and insufficient, the oral has a host of allies in the expression of the mouth that imitates the object to which the discourse relates, in the movement of the hand that describes it, in the length or shortness of the tone of the voice, in its sharp or gentle, grave or droll character, in the entire play of the features, and in the whole bearing. The nearer to a state of nature the being addressed, the greater aids to comprehension are these auxiliaries. Whoever tells a story to a child, involuntarily accompanies the narrative with many gestures and grimaces, for the child sees the story quite as much as it hears it, paying heed, almost in the same way as the dog, rather to the tender or irritated intonation, than to whether the words express friendliness or wrath. Whoever, therefore, addresses himself in writing to a child must have at his command the changeful cadence, the sudden pauses, the descriptive gesticulations, the awe-inspiring mien, the smile which betrays the happy turn of affairs, the jest, the caress, and the appeal to rouse the flagging attention all these he must endeavor to weave into his diction, and as he cannot directly sing, paint, or dance the occurrences to the child, he must imprison within his prose the song, the picture, and the pantomimic movements, that they may lie there like forces in bonds, and rise up in their might as soon as the book is opened. In the first place, no circumlocution; everything must be spoken fresh from the lips of the narrator, aye, more than spoken, growled, buzzed, and blown as from a trumpet: "There came a soldier marching along the high-road one, two! one, two!" "And the carved trumpeters blew, 'Trateratra! there is the little boy! Trateratra!'" "Listen how it is drumming on the burdock-leaves, rum-dum-dum! ram-dum-dum!' said the Father Snail." At one time he begins, as in "The Daisy," with a "Now you shall hear!" which at once arrests the attention; and again he jests after the fashion of a child: "So the soldier cut the witch's head off. There she lay!" We can hear the laughter of the child that follows this brief, not very sympathetic, yet extremely clear presentation of the destruction of an imposter. Often he breaks into a sentimental tone, as for instance: "The sun shone on the Flax, and the rain-clouds moistened it, and this was just as good for it as it is for little children when they are washed, and afterward get a kiss from their mother; they become much prettier, and so did the Flax." That at this passage a pause should be made in the narrative, in order to give the child the kiss mentioned in the text, is something to which every mother will agree, and which seems to be a matter of course; the kiss is really given in the book. This regard for the young reader may be carried still farther, inasmuch as the poet, by virtue of his ready sympathy, so wholly identifies himself with the child and enters so fully into the sphere of its conceptions, into its mode of contemplation, indeed, into the range of its purely bodily vision, that a sentence like the following may readily flow from his pen: "The biggest leaf here in the country is certainly the burdock-leaf. Put one in front of your waist, and it is just like an apron, and if you lay it upon your head, it is almost as good as an umbrella, for it is quite remarkably large." These are words which a child, and every child, can understand.