Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 6. Young Germany

by Georg Brandes

"We will sorrow for him whom we have lost, and for those who have not lost him. For he did not live for all. But the time is coming when he will be born for all, and then all will mourn for him. He stands with a patient smile at the gates of the twentieth century, waiting till his lagging people overtake him. Then he will lead the tired and the famishing into his city of love."

And there is clever character-drawing in such lines as the following:—

"In countries the towns only are counted; in towns, only the towers, the temples, and the palaces; in houses, their masters; in nations, parties; and in parties, their leaders.... By narrow, overgrown paths Jean Paul sought out the neglected village. In the nation he counted the human beings, in towns the house-roofs, and under every roof each heart."

It was possibly Jean Paul's political attitude which first brought Börne under his spell. Jean Paul early took his place in German literature as the inheritor of Herder's cosmopolitan sentiments and doctrines. Herder had persistently exalted love of humanity, at the expense of patriotism and national antipathy. Jean Paul continued to proclaim the common brotherhood of man. All his writings were, moreover, pervaded by a general spirit of political liberalism, resembling that formulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which had electrified him; and he treats of sovereigns, courts, and the great world generally, in a tone of sustained irony. At times he regards as close at hand a coming golden age, in which it will no longer be possible for nations, but only for individuals, to sin, and from which the spectre of war shall have disappeared; at other times he relegates it to a very far off future; but the rapidity of what was and is called historic progress induced both him and his disciple to imagine that universal brotherhood was not very distant.

It was, however, not only his grand conception of the future that made Jean Paul so attractive to Börne, but also the idyllic and satiric qualities of his talent. Börne adopted some of his comical names of places (Kuhschnappel Flachsenfingen), and as a young man imitated his humorous style. Many of the short tales and sketches contributed to periodical literature—the comic Esskünstler am Hoteltisch, Allerhochstdieselben, Hof- und Commerzienräthe, Die Thurn und Taxissche Post (the postal system of the day), &c. &c.—are in Jean Paul's manner, though Börne keeps closer to reality both in his facts and his local colouring than Jean Paul does. Börne attacks State, Church, executive, manners, and customs in Jean Pauls farcical fashion; but he has not his predecessor's stores of observation to fall back on, and does not approach him in variety of knowledge.

By way of compensation, his style is in many ways superior to Jean Paul's.

Börne, who was not gifted with any profound artistic feeling, or delicate appreciation of style, admired the inartistic in Jean Paul as being unartificial. He did not feel that the profusion of imagery was collected from here, there, and everywhere, and was seldom the natural outgrowth of the subject it adorned. That Oriental wealth of simile, that flowery luxuriance of language, pleased his taste as being poetical; and the want of harmony in the periods, the heavy ballast of the innumerable parenthetic clauses, were to his ear only evidences of the naturalness of the style. To him, too, Goethe's plastic art was only coldness, while the impersonal style of Goethe's old age was a horror. When he read Jean Paul's works, the living, restless ego in them came forth to meet his own warm-hearted, passionate ego.

He unconsciously remoulded Jean Paul's style on the lines of his own individuality, that individuality which discloses itself in his earliest letters, and whose distinguishing traits were modified or developed, but never altered. There were no wildernesses, no primeval forests in his mind, as there were in Jean Paul's. He did not think of ten things at a time, all inextricably entwined. No; in his case both fancy and reasoning-power were clear, and concise in expression. His acquaintance with Johannes von Müller's works early produced a propensity for pithy, Tacitus-like brevity. From the first there was a half French, half Jewish tendency to antitheses and contrast in his style. He loved symmetry of thought and symmetry of language; his spiritual tempo was quick; as a writer he was short-winded. Hence short, sharp, strong sentences following each other at a gallop; no rounded periods. Metaphors abound; yet they are not so numerous as to jostle each other out of place, and all are apt and suggestive; he did not ransack note-books for them, like Jean Paul; they presented themselves in modest abundance. He employed similes freely; but in his clear-headed fashion he arranged them almost algebraically in his sentences, so that they produce the effect rather of equations than of scattered flowers.

By degrees his decidedly marked individuality took shape in a decidedly individual humorous style. Jean Paul's humour spreads itself throughout lengthy and discursive investigations, narratives, romances; not so Börne's. He was never able to produce a political, poetical, critical, or historical work of any length; he could not write books, only pages. His was an essentially journalistic talent.[6] And this determines the character of his humour.

Playful humour was his, but also that sarcastic wit which stings like a lash, and yet thrills and touches by an indirect appeal to the feelings; his that bitterness of complaint and accusation which assumes the conciliatory form of an attempt to comfort; and that melancholy, which with a smile and a whimsical conceit rises above time and place. But something similar to this might be said of other great humorists. What distinguishes Börne (from Sterne, Jean Paul, and others) is, in the first place, the strength, the violence of the reaction produced in him by all the occurrences of the day which came within the bounds of his horizon. A comparatively trifling incident in real, and especially in public, life is sufficient to set all the chords of his being in vibration. The second peculiarity is that all occurrences directly act upon one and the same point in his spiritual life, that passion for liberty which was born of the keenest sense of justice. One of his critics, Steinthal, explains in a masterly manner the connection between this fact and the fact of his inability to produce a great work. He never thought systematically, never combined with each other all the many things that one after the other occupied and affected his mind, but looked on each separately in its relation to the centre point of his being.[7] His humour brought the miserable reality into juxtaposition with the ideal demand of his intellect; but he gave no picture of the different elements of reality, he merely focussed them.