"Ein guter Bürger willst du werden?
Pfui Freund!—Ein guter, Bürger—Du?
Das also war dein Ziel auf Erden,
Dem stürmten deine Lieder zu?
O nimm's zurück, das ekle Wort,
Wer mag sich so gemein geberden!
Nein, nein, mich reisst es weiter fort:
Ich muss Geheimer Hofrath werden!"[9]
In this poem, too, the last line of the first verse serves as refrain to all the others.
Two years later Dingelstedt was Privy Councillor, librarian, and reader at the court of the King of Würtemberg. Herwegh contented himself with reprinting the two poems side by side.
Franz Dingelstedt (born in 1814) represents one of the most curious types of the day. He is a revolutionary who ought to have been born in the purple, a Prince Pückler in the guise of a poor schoolmaster, a satirist who cannot dispense with appearances, a man of first-rate abilities with neither serious vices nor serious enthusiasm, but with ready wit and frequent poetic inspiration; early blasé, he retains a certain practical activity of mind to the last. He was born in the worst-governed country in Germany, Hesse-Cassel, under the hated administration of Hassenpflug, became master at one of its grammar-schools, aroused dissatisfaction by his emancipated opinions and conduct and the liberal tone of his poetry, was transferred and perpetually interfered with, and sent in his resignation in 1841, when he was twenty-seven. Only one year after Herwegh he published his first collection of political poetry, Lieder eines kosmopolitischen Nachtwächters ("Songs of a Cosmopolitan Night-Watchman"). Good verse, clever poems, a good idea. The watchman in his uniform, armed with his spiked mace, his horn in his hand, goes his nightly round, and, pausing outside the houses, tells us what he sees and imagines within.
He is a genuine night-watchman—thoroughly weary of the old woman at home, who is so ugly and so wrinkled, yet with whom he manages to live peaceably, for she sleeps by night and he by day; a genuine night-watchman, who sings the watchman's song about lights and fires; looks up at the prisoners, the political prisoners, peering through the iron bars and shaking them; shudders as he passes the cathedral with all its relics, where the wind is howling so loud in the organ pipes; and then laughs at himself for shuddering. It is twenty years since he was inside the building, he is none of your seat-holding church-goers.
And yet he is not a genuine night-watchman. He has feelings and opinions which are not those of a man in his station. In one house a ball is going on; he listens to the music, and describes the dancing and the behaviour of the fashionable company. What a sensation it would create if he, lantern and mace in hand, snow on his cloak and cap, his cheeks burning and frost on his beard, were suddenly to appear among all these shadows! Outside another house stands the carriage of the great, the all-powerful, Minister of State. The coachman is wrapped in furs, but the poor uncovered horses are trembling with cold whilst their master is playing cards within—just as if they could not revenge themselves when he comes:
"Ich rathe dir, lass die Karten ruhn,
Und hüte dich fein, Ministerlein!
Du hast es mit vier Hengsten zu thun,
Bedenk', dass es keine Bürger sein."[10]
There are many pathetic passages. In one of the suburbs the watchman passes a house where a poor wretch lies in his last agonies; he passes the lunatic asylum, and the dread of madness that always seizes him here is mingled with a strange feeling of attraction; he passes the cemetery, where his poor father, who took his own life, lies in a disdained, neglected corner; and on his way back he passes the palace, where the prince tosses sleeplessly on his pillow of down, while the sentry sleeps soundly standing in his box.
A night-watchman might easily have had some of these feelings—he would never have expressed them thus; the mask is perpetually falling off. There are one or two most masterly and natural expressions of popular indignation, for example the tirade occasioned by the sight of light in the sickroom of a cringing courtier whose extortions have impoverished his country:
"Warum er nicht schläft? warum er in Wuth die Spitzen am Hemde zerissen?
Ein gutes Gewissen schläft überall gut, und nirgends ein schlechtes Gewissen.
Er hat an des Landes Mark, die Schlang', sich voll gefressen, gesogen,
Er hat—ein Menschenleben lang!—gestohlen, gelogen, betrogen."[11]