WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL
By OTTO HELLER, PH.D.
Professor of the German Language and Literature, Washington University
Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl was born May 6, 1823, in Bieberich on the Rhine, of parents so poor that after his father's early death his mother had to deprive herself of every comfort in order to enable the lad to go to the university. At Bonn he swerved from his theological bent—chiefly through the influence of two of his professors, Ernst Moritz Arndt and Ch. F. Dahlmann—and made up his mind to devote his studies henceforth to the scientific as well as patriotic purpose of comprehending the character and history of his own people. Even in the many articles concerning popular ways and manners which he had already contributed to periodicals he revealed a thorough firsthand acquaintance with the land and the people, in particular the peasantry, as he had observed them in the course of numerous holiday tramps.
Soon after leaving the university he drifted into professional journalism. He held a number of responsible editorial positions, nor did he wholly withdraw from such work when in 1859 he was called to the newly created chair of the History of Civilization and of Statistics at Munich. Both in his professional and publicistic capacity he wrote prolifically to the very end of his life, November 16, 1897. His works are classifiable, roughly, under three headings: History of Culture, Sociology, and Fiction. Of the large number, the following, chronologically enumerated, are considered the most important.
[Illustration: WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL]
The Natural History of the People, being the Elements of German Social Politics (1851-1869), in four volumes; Musical Character-Portraits (1853); Culture-historical Stories (1856); The Palatine People (1857); Studies in the History of Culture, from Three Centuries (1859); German Work (1861); Tales of the Olden Time (1863); New Story-Book (1868); From my Nook (1874); At Eventide (1880); Riddles of Life (1888); Religious Studies of a Worldling (1892-1893); A Whole Man (1897).
Riehl's position in the literature of Germany cannot be defined solely, nor even mainly, on the basis of his imaginative writings. As a romancer he falls far short of Gustav Freytag, whose Pictures of the German Past served Riehl obviously for a model, and of Jeremias Gotthelf, in whose manner, though perhaps unconsciously, he likewise strove to write. It is characteristic of his tales that they invariably play against a native background, which, however, stretches across more than full ten centuries, and that, while failing to prove any high poetic vocation for their author, they demonstrate his singularly acute perception of cultural tendencies and values. Equally keen is the appreciation shown in these stories of the dominant national traits, whether commendable or otherwise: German contentiousness, stubbornness, envy, jealousy and Schadenfreude, i.e., the malicious joy over calamities that befall others, are impartially balanced against German self-reliance, sturdiness, love of truth, sense of duty, sincerity, unselfishness, loyalty, and depth of feeling.
On the whole, the inclusion of Riehl among the most eminent German writers of the nineteenth century is due far less to his works of fiction than to a just recognition of his primacy among historians of culture, on account of the extraordinary reach of his influence. This influence he certainly owed as much to his rare art of popular presentation as to his profound scholarship. Nevertheless the intrinsic scientific worth of these more or less popular writings is vouched for by the consensus of leading historians and other specially competent judges who, regarding Riehl's work as epoch-making and in some essential aspects fundamental, recognize him as one of the organizers of modern historical science and in particular as the foremost pioneer in the exploration of the widest area within the territory of human knowledge; in fine, as the most efficient representative of the History of Civilization.
Kulturgeschichte, as Riehl used the term, connoted a rather ideal conception, namely, that of an interpretative record of the sum total of human civilization. It required a high challenge like that to energize and unify the requisite laborious research in so many different directions art, letters, science, economics, politics, social life, and what not. The History of Civilization, as understood by Riehl, embraces the results gained in all the special branches of historical study, political history included.
By a formulation so comprehensive and exacting, Riehl himself stood committed to the investigation of the national life not only in the breadth and variety of its general aspect, but also in its minuter processes that had so far been left unheeded. But under his care even the study of seemingly trite details quickened the approach to that fixed ideal of a History of Civilization that should have for its ultimate object nothing less than the revelation of the spirit of history itself. The goal might never be attained, yet the quest for it would at all events disclose "the laws under which racial civilizations germinate, mature, bloom, and perish."
Personally Riehl applied the bulk of his labors to the two contiguous fields of Folklore and Art History. Folklore (Volkskunde) is here taken in his own definition, namely, as the science which uncovers the recondite causal relations between all perceptible manifestations of a nation's life and its physical and historical environment. Riehl never lost sight, in any of his distinctions, of that inalienable affinity between land and people; the solidarity of a nation, its very right of existing as a political entity, he derived from homogeneity as to origin, language, custom, habitat. The validity of this view is now generally accepted in theory, while its practical application to science must necessarily depend upon the growth of special knowledge. In The Palatine People Riehl presented a standard treatise upon one of the ethnic types of the German race, an illustration as it were of his own theorems.
Among Riehl's contributions to the History of Art, the larger number concern the art of music. He was qualified for this work by a sure and sound critical appreciation rooted in thorough technical knowledge. Here again, following his keen scent for the distinguishing racial qualities, he gave his attention mainly to the popular forms of composition; at the same time his penetrating historic insight enabled him to account for the distinctive artistic character of the great composers by a due weighing of their individual attributes against the controlling influences of their time. It is hardly necessary to add that in his reflections music was never detached from its generic connection with the fine arts, inclusive of industrial, decorative, and domestic art.
Like many another student and lover of the past Riehl was a man of conservative habits of mind, without, however, deserving to be classed as a confirmed reactionary. His anti-democratic tendency of thought sprang plausibly enough from convictions and beliefs which owed their existence, in some part at least, to strained and whimsical analogies. His defense of a static order of society rested at bottom upon a sturdy hatred of Socialism, then in the earliest stage of its rise. This ingrained aversion to the new, suggested to him a rather curious sort of rational or providential sanction for the old. He discerned, by an odd whim of the fancy, in the physical as well as the spiritual constitution of Germany a preëestablished principle of "trialism.". According to this queer notion, Germany is in every respect divided in partes tres. The territorial conformation itself, with its clean subdivision into lowland, intermediate, and highland, demonstrates the natural tri-partition to which a like "threeness" of climate, nationality, and even of religion corresponds. Hence the tripartition of the population into peasantry, bourgeoisie, and nobility should be upheld as an inviolable, foreordained institution, and to this end the separate traditions of the classes be piously conserved. Educational agencies ought to subserve the specific needs of the different ranks of society and be diversified accordingly. Riehl would even hark back to wholly out-dated and discarded customs, provided they seemed to him clearly the outflow of a vital class-consciousness. For instance, he would have restored the trade corporations to their medieval status; inhibited the free disposal of farming land, and governed the German aristocracy under the English law of primogeniture.
Altogether, Riehl's propensity for spanning a fragile analogy between concrete and abstract phenomena of life is apt to weaken the structural strength of his argumentation. Yet even his boldest comparisons do not lack in illuminative suggestiveness. Take, for example, the following passage from Field and Forest: "In the contrast between the forest and the field is manifest the most simple and natural preparatory stage of the multiformity and variety of German social life, that richness of peculiar national characteristics in which lies concealed the tenacious rejuvenating power of our nation." (See p. 418 of this volume.)
The predisposition to draw large inferences coupled with that pronounced conservatism detract in a measure from the authenticity of Riehl's work in the department of Social Science, which to him is fundamentally "the doctrine of the natural inequality of mankind." (See p. 417 of this volume.)
That Riehl, despite his conservative bias, is not a reactionary out and out has already been stated. He stands for evolutionary, not revolutionary, social reform; in his opinion the social-economic order can be bettered by means of the gradual self-improvement of society, and in no other way. Unless, moreover, the improvement be effected without the sacrifice of that basic subdivision of society, the needful social stability is bound to be upset by the "proletariat"—namely, the entire "fourth estate" reinforced by the ever increasing number of deserters, renegades, and outcasts who have drifted away from their appointed social level.
Notwithstanding this rather dogmatic attitude of which, among other things, a sweeping rejection of "Woman Emancipation," was one corollary, Riehl's organic theory of society as explicitly stated in his Civic Society has a great and permanent usefulness for our time because of its thoroughgoing method and its clear-cut statement of problems and issues. The leader of the most advanced school of modern historians, Professor Karl Lamprecht, goes so far as to declare that the social studies of W.H. Riehl constitute the very corner stone of scientific Sociology. In this achievement, to which all of his scholarly endeavors were tributary, Riehl's significance as a historian of culture may be said to culminate.