The big, incredulous town of Berlin has become the home of miracles. For two whole days they have been shooting, storming, burning there without a pause; thousands are lying in the bloody dust. The King is distressed by what has occurred; he says: "The guns went off of themselves; the whole has been a misunderstanding."
In the old, incredulous town of Berlin strange tricks are being played; a King decks himself in black, red, and gold, and declares himself to be the leader of Germany, the arch-demagogue, chosen of heaven to bring about German unity. But Germany only laughs and shouts: "This is a misunderstanding."
[15] Then the last of the faithful, who had remained true to their saviour, scattered to the four winds of heaven, to proclaim the word of salvation, knowing full well that what awaited them was exile and poverty, want and suffering, torture, imprisonment, and death. "The word of salvation will survive them"; note this, ye slaves, ye bloody hordes: The word has become flesh, has become God.
[16] Rest peacefully, rest well, my Robert! No need is there for us to wish that light upon thy breast may lie the blood-drenched earth of Vienna, the soil thy valour captured. Thou art not dead, despite the loud laments and songs of mourning of the German people.... From mouth to mouth spreads the report: "Our Robert lives, that Robert Blum the tyrants shot"—and every German heart beats high. That precious blood has not been shed; hope whispers in our ears: "The tri-coloured standard is trailed in the dust, but Germany is not lost."... He is with us everywhere! With his spirit hands he turns back the bullets, or receives them in his breast—these bullets rained on us by our paternal rulers.... A wanderer he, until the German people have released themselves from the betrayer's grip, until he has cleared the sacred land of his fathers, of princes and of priests.
[17] In this same city of Cologne, 'mid moaning winds of winter wild,
To-day in deepest organ-tones resounds the grave-song of this child.
'Tis not the mother bow'd in grief who sings it o'er her fallen son;
Nay, all Cologne bewails the death of him whose toil too soon is done.
With solemn woe the city speaks: Thou who didst bear the noble dead,
Remain to weep within thy home, and bow to earth thine aged head;
I also am his mother! Yea, and yet a mightier one than I,
I and the Revolution's self, for whom he laid him down to die.
Stay thou within and nurse thy woe. 'Tis we will do him honour here;
'Tis we will watch and requiem sing for thy dead son upon his bier.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Why grasp ye not your swords in wrath, O ye that sing and ye that pray?
Ye organ-pipes, to trumpets turn, and fight the scoundrels with your breath,
And din into their dastard ears the dreadful news of sudden death,
Those scoundrels who the order gave, the cruel murder dared to do—
The hero leant him on his knee in that autumnal morning's dew,
Then silent fell upon his face in blood—'tis eight short days ago—
Two bullets smote him on the breast, and laid his head for ever low.
(JOYNES.)
[18] I see scientists and professors, presidents and assessors, wine merchants and editors, superintendents and accoucheurs; I see financiers and journalists; I see astronomers and tax-collectors, rag merchants and antiquarians; I see Messrs. Biedermann, Hansemann, Bassermann—but where are the men, the men?
[XXX]
CONCLUSION
It is a mighty panorama, this, which the study of the feelings and thoughts of Germany, first oppositionist, then revolutionary, between 1815 and 1848, unrolls to our view. We see the spirit of Metternich, a spirit of shallowness, brooding over Austria and the whole of Germany. We follow the new intellectual movement from the time when it first finds expression at the Wartburg Festival in 1817. We see how the assassination of Kotzebue gives occasion to the open persecution of Liberalism and introduces a long period of ruthless reaction and oppression, during which Goethe is regarded as the Quietist foe of liberty and lauded or denounced as such, and German philosophy under the auspices of Hegel becomes, in a rather questionable manner, conservative. The oppositionist tendency finds occasional expression in the writings of poets like Chamisso, Platen, and Heine, but the general intellectual condition is one of depression, relieved by outbursts of self-ridicule. The state of stagnation is put an end to by the news of the Revolution of July 1830, which electrifies public feeling and gives both poets and prose writers new courage and fresh inspiration. The remembrance of Byron's life and death influences men in the same direction, and the Polish revolt awakens sympathy and enthusiasm in spite of the part that Germany takes in the annihilation of Poland as a nation. Börne becomes the most eminent advocate of Liberalism in politics, holds high the banner of liberty and justice, shows a noble example in the matter of strength of character and conviction, but at the same time displays a naïve and fanatical optimism which proves that his is not the temperament required in a statesman. In Heine, the greatest poet of the period, we feel the vibration of its every nerve. In him modern poetry casts off the swaddling-clothes of Romanticism. In love, in appreciation of nature, in his political, social, and religious views, in his descriptive, poetic, and satiric style, he is the man of our own day—fitter, as we pointed out, than any other to grapple with modern life in its hardness and ugliness, its charm and its restlessness, and its wealth of violent contrasts. About the same time, in a different and yet kindred manner, Immermann, in his best book, marks the transition to a more realistic style of art.