Platen's letters show what dire offence he took at the two lines by Immermann in the Reisebilder, which might be construed as referring to his ghazels, and how determined he was to revenge himself ruthlessly. Great and serene in the region of pure art, and a manly champion of political liberty, he displays in his onslaught on the men who had insulted him, an offensively boastful degree of self-admiration and an insolence which is partly the arrogance of rank and partly the recklessness of wounded vanity. His letter from Rome of the 18th of February 1828, shows that he really knew nothing about Immermann's Das Trauerspiel in Tirol, which he had determined to attack. Der romantische Oedipus was almost finished when he wrote to Fugger: "Be sure to tell me something about Immermann's Andreas Hofer, something of the plot and any piquant nonsense. I need it for the end of my Fifth Act, where I make him go quite mad." The boundless contempt with which Platen treats Immermann in his play can thus, in spite of his protests, only be regarded as vindictiveness. As regards Heine, it is simply his Jewish birth with which Platen taunts him in both letters and play. In the play everything turns on this—Heine is the Petrarch of the Feast of Tabernacles, the pride of the synagogue. So personal is the satire that Nimmermann is made to say, that though he is content to be Heine's friend, he would not be his mistress, for his kisses reek of garlic, &c. From Platen's letters it is easy to see that he completely underestimated the strength of the antagonists whom he thus challenged. He feels that he is capable of "crushing that Jew, Heine," whenever he chooses to do so. When his friends try to persuade him that attacks on Heine because of his birth carry no weight, he replies, quite unmoved: "That he is, or was, a Jew is no moral offence, but a comical ingredient. Intelligent readers will judge whether or not I have turned it to account with Aristophanic cunning." So sure, so superior does he feel himself, that even in December 1828, immediately before he is utterly discomfited by Heine's return blow, he sees in him nothing but "an impudent Jew, a miserable scribbler and sans-culotte." His moral indignation at the first books of the Reisebilder was, however, so great that he calls the author and his like "veritable Satans."[2] The treatment he met with was not undeserved; scorn was returned for scorn, and his underestimation of Heine and Immermann was cruelly avenged. The scurrilous part of Heine's attack injured himself most by exciting the disapprobation of his own friends and admirers.
The fact that the names Immermann and Platen came to form a constellation of hate was actually due to the similarity of their natures, to the feeling of solitariness which, combined with a self-esteem that was always on the alert, made them prone to proclaim their own praises and to attack others with undue bitterness and with insufficient understanding. These two men, each in his own way, represent the transition from Romanticism to modern liberalism. Platen, who followed in the footsteps of the Romanticists in his assiduous cultivation of foreign forms, the oriental ghazel, the southern sonnet, the ancient Greek Aristophanic comedy and Pindaric ode, shortly before his early death wrote songs and poems (Political Poems, including the Polish Songs—posthumously published) which are on the highest level of spirited modern lyric poetry. And Immermann, who all his life had treated tragic or fantastic themes with Romantic extravagance or symbolism, not long before he died impregnated a piece of homely reality with a spirit of true poetry by which the following generation throughout the whole of Europe was influenced.
[1] Ludmilla Assing: Gräfin Elisa von Ahlefeldt, 1857.
[2] Platens Werke. Letters of 18th February, 12th March, and 13th December 1828.
[XX]
HEGELIANISM
It was the Hegelian philosophy, in combination with the Revolution of July, which drove thinking men to take their part in the stirring life of modern history and politics. Not that Hegel himself sympathised with the Revolution of July. Such a violent interference with what to him now represented the rational state of things, could hardly appeal to him, in his sixtieth year, as the great Revolution had done. In politics he had long been a strong Conservative.
But none the less certainly did the Revolution of July change the character of the Hegelian philosophy. It was the historical turning point, the historical crisis that was needed to transfer that philosophy from the lecture-room to the arena of life. One of the peculiarities of the philosophy was, that it was capable of diametrically opposite interpretations. From this time onwards we observe it to be one of the most powerful instruments in the remoulding, the reconstruction of life. We saw that it was so in the case of Heine, who never alludes to Hegel's conversion to Prussian Conservatism except to apologise for it; to him Hegel is always the great philosopher of the new era, the mighty sovereign of the realm of thought.