Now he tells the story of a society amour. In England, at a ball, the poet meets a lady of Hindoo blood, but English in every other respect. She is spiritually akin to himself, gloomy and cold and weary of life. They fall in love:
"Wir klammerten uns, ob aus Zeitvertreib,
Ob aus Verzweiflung, an einander an,
Sie, ein verlornes, neugebornes Weib,
Ich, ein verlorner, neugeborner Mann."[14]
The word "Zeitvertreib" (pastime) is a little too weak, the word "Verzweiflung" (despair) is a shade too strong. There is German puerility in this insistence upon fashionable frivolity and blank despair. So much is certain; the two fall in love. We have plenty of passion, hot and wild—more of sensuality in it than love, voluptuous nights, secret pleasures, and coldly cynical front shown to the world; then separation, farewell, and oblivion; until one day in a conservatory in Amsterdam the decaying smell of a dead lotus-plant makes him feel faint. He is reminded of her, and presses one of the dead leaves to his lips as if it were the hand of a corpse.
Such characters as Dingelstedt significantly illustrate their age, they do not create it. They are not the builders of the palace, they are its gilders. No doubt the work of the gilder first attracts the eye, and attracts far more eyes than the work of the builder, who in laying the foundation of the palace determines its whole construction; but there is also no doubt as to whose work is of the more importance.
These pleasure-loving poets, often disillusioned so young, with no principles except the political convictions of which they sing and boast, and to which they generally prove unfaithful, are of social importance from the fact that they create the opinion of the moment, general political opinion, and thereby accelerate the slow reorganisation of society. But this outward reorganisation is not itself the principal matter; political opinion is not the prime mover. The outward revolution is a result of movements going on much deeper below the surface. Perhaps the most powerful impulse is given by philosophy with its quiet revolutionising of the religious view of life.
In this domain of philosophic agitation there appeared in the summer of 1841 (the year in which Dingelstedt's first book was published, the year following the publication of Herwegh's first) an epoch-making thinker. In the work entitled Das Wesen des Christenthums ("The Nature of Christianity") he formulates great thoughts, founds and expounds a philosophy of life which makes its influence felt in the spoken and written words of all who come after him, all at least whose minds attain their fullest development. Ludwig Feuerbach is the foundation-stone upon which for the next twenty years every one builds, everything is built.
When I say of him that he was great, a great man and a great thinker, I myself resent the platitude. Great is a term which we hear so constantly applied to this, that, and the other thing, that we have come to be unaffected by it. There is not even any very keen appreciation among us of the quality of greatness. The sense for it is deadened by the cold, clammy manner in which the intellectually great are handled by those who write learned treatises on their work. Take up a history of philosophy, and you will find them all arranged and labelled, one looking exactly like the other. There they stand in a row, all treated with the same respect, and regarded with the same interest—Schelling, who was a genius and a charlatan; Trendelenburg, who accepted his appointment from Eichhorn and improved his opportunities after the death of Altenstein; Strauss, who was a second-rate thinker, and a bit of a pedant; Karl Vogt, who was a gifted gourmand; Lotze, who was an excellent professor of philosophy, but nothing more; and amongst the rest Feuerbach, one of a list, possibly labelled as inferior, onesided men, calling themselves ideal realists or something of the sort. The effect is demoralising.
He was great. This means that there is a wide, open space round him on every side. It means that if we would understand him, we must separate him clearly in our minds from all those men, all those facts that jostle him in lesson-books and hand-books. That he was great means, that he is altogether upon another level. The moment we catch sight of him as he stands there alone, reverence takes possession of us.
Simply natural as he was in intercourse with friends, there was yet something awe-inspiring about the man. Look at that face, in every feature of which there is genius and character—obstinate, energetic character. There is character in the mighty brow, in the small eyes, in the big, fan-shaped beard. There is power in it all, power and nobility, and manly beauty, stern as though cast in bronze.
Himself a genius, he belongs to a notably talented family; the father one of the most distinguished criminal jurists of Germany; brother, sister, nephew, all gifted. He is born at Landshut in 1804; studies at Heidelberg; turns his attention to theology, first from the orthodox, afterwards from the critical standpoint; then to philosophy, first abstract, afterwards realistic, ever more realistic. He publishes his Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit ("Thoughts on Death and Immortality") anonymously. The book is at first confiscated, but subsequently allowed to circulate. After it becomes known that he is the author, he applies in vain for professional appointments at several of the South German universities, and similar attempts made somewhat later in Berlin, France, Switzerland, and Greece prove equally fruitless, in spite of the support of noted savants. From 1836 onwards he lives a retired life in the country—till 1860 at Brückberg, near Ansbach, afterwards at Rechenberg, near Nuremberg. In his later years it is the life of a hermit. He corresponds with friends of his own class and stamp, and also with men of the people (such as Konrad Deubler of the Salzkammergut), who sometimes understand his writings better and feel them more deeply than the so-called cultivated class. In 1837 he married the love of his youth. It was not without influence on his life that, in the beginning of the Forties, a young girl, daughter of one of his friends, was for a time passionately attached to him, an attachment which he returned.