To enumerate the names of all the German poets who affected the Oriental manner would be to give a list of the illustrious obscure. Most of them have only served to furnish another illustration of Horace's famous mediocribus esse poetis. A bare mention of such names as Löschke, Levitschnigg, Wihl, Stieglitz and von Hermannsthal will suffice.[222] The last mentioned poet gives a striking illustration of the inanity of most of this kind of work. He uses the γazal form for stories about such persons as the Gracchi and Blücher,[223] and, what is still more curious, for tirades against the Oriental tendency.[224] A poet of different calibre is Daumer, whose Hafis (Hamb. 1846) for a long time was regarded as a translation, whereas the poems of the collection are in reality original productions in Hāfiḍ's manner, just like Rückert's Östliche Rosen.[225] Their sensuous, passionate eroticism, however, is not a genuine Hāfiḍ quality, as we before have seen. The same criticism applies even much more forcibly to Schefer's Hafis in Hellas (Hamburg, 1853).[226] Special mention is due to the gifted, but unfortunate, Heinrich Leuthold, whose Ghaselen deserve to be placed by the side of Platen's. Like Platen and Rückert, he too proclaims himself a reveller:
Zur Gottheit ward die Schönheit mir
Und mein Gebet wird zum Ghasel.—
But these Ghaselen do not attempt to be so intensely Persian as to reproduce the objectionable features of Persian poetry. Thus Leuthold sings:
Vor allem ein Lebehoch dem Hafis, dem Patriarchen der Zunft!—
D'rum bringe die liebliche Schenkin das Gold gefüllter Becher hinein![227]
Evidently the poet sees no necessity for retaining the sāqī, but makes the poem more acceptable to Western taste by substituting a "Schenkin" for Platen's "Schenke."
The Oriental story was cultivated by J.F. Castelli. Many of the subjects of his Orientalische Granaten (Dresden, 1852) had already been used by Rückert. Another Oriental storyteller in verse is Ludwig Bowitsch, whose Sindibad (Leipzig, 1860) contains mostly Arabic material. Friedrich von Sallet has written a poem on Zerduscht[228] which gives the Iranian legend of the attempt made by the sorcerers to burn the newborn child.[229] It would, however, lead us too far were we to mention single poems on Oriental subjects or of Oriental tendency.
Head and shoulders above all these less known poets towers the figure of Count von Schack, who, like Rückert, combined the poetic gift with the learning of the scholar, and who thus stands out a worthy successor of the German Brahman as a representative of the idea of the Weltlitteratur. A discussion of his work is a fitting close for this investigation.
FOOTNOTES:
[222] On these see Paul Horn, Was verdanken Wir Persien, in Nord u. Süd, Heft 282, p. 386 seq.