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:—