A word or two, however, may be given to the arch-heretic in this division—the interesting Herr Rümelin.[[1064]] I find, in relation to this subject, a MS. note, of no matter what author, which may deserve quotation, despite the impropriety of its phraseology: “Asinus Rumelinus. Asinity much invited by precedent asinity on the other side.” And really there is something in this. It is not merely that Herr Rümelin’s essay sets forth his thoughts as those eines Realisten, and thus declares its author a reactionary partisan against Idealism and Romanticism. By a quaint, but not uncommon, “suck of the current” he has adopted not a few of the fallacies of the school he combats. It is their Shakespeare, not the Shakespeare of Shakespeare and eternity, that he is belittling. We have seen how a sensible German like Grillparzer treated Gervinus’s boast about Germany as Shakespeare’s prophet. Rümelin’s demonstration that Shakespeare was forgotten in England for 150 years is only this same boast altered a little. It is, as every child ought to know now, and as I shall not here waste time in proving, an absolute falsehood: but it could be of no importance to the true critic if it were true. Gold scarcely ceases to be gold during the time that it is, or because it is, irrepertum: and perhaps the only thing that retains the slightest interest in this part of Herr Rümelin’s examination is his use of the argument that Bacon does not mention Shakespeare—a fertile source since of the finest mare’s-nests. But the Essay is a really interesting one, and might have done—though I do not know that it has done—much good to the chatterers about Shakespeare. The Southampton chatter, the chatter about the greatness of the Elizabethan period in connection with politics, &c., the chatter of Gervinus, the chatter of the Romantics—against all these Rümelin directs an anti-criticism, easy enough and sometimes not ineffective. As a Realist he does not (we can easily see why) like the character-play. As a Preceptist, he holds that Tragedy must not individualise, and that scarcely one of Shakespeare’s dramas contains a wohlgefügte pragmatische denkbare Handlung. As a mid-nineteenth century Liberal he is pained to find that Shakespeare was a Royalist and an aristocrat of the purest water. Comparing Shakespeare and Goethe (for there is much mere Chauvinism in Rümelin), he finds that the one “flashes on things like a rocket or a blue light,” while the other “shows them in a clear mirror.” But after all he admits “the joy in the poet.” So perhaps this poor heretic was not quite so far from the Kingdom of Heaven as Gervinus and Ulrici, for in reading them you are seldom invited to consider “the joy in the poet”—the Poetic Moment—at all.
We may conclude this chapter with notices of three later German critics, who are, in different ways, interesting and characteristic—the novelist Freytag; the cosmopolitan polygrapher, Karl Hillebrand; and the greatest, if the maddest, man of letters of modern Germany—Nietzsche.
Freytag.
For the first, Gustav Freytag’s Technik des Dramas[[1065]] could hardly lack mention here as the principal contribution to criticism of the chief novelist of Germany during the later nineteenth century, and as itself one of the main contributions to a division of our subject which comes direct from one of the main fountainheads, the Poetics of Aristotle. Freytag, however,—and the explicitness of his title bars any complaint on the subject,—occupies himself almost wholly with the theatrical side of the matter—such questions as that of verse or prose and the like being relegated to the close, and very briefly handled. Had he written three hundred years earlier we should have had more room for him. As it is, the chief thing noticeable, and that not favourably, is his adoption of that Goethean utilitarianism which we have stigmatised before. He says nothing, he tells us, about French classical drama or the drama of Spain, because “we have nothing more to learn and nothing to fear from them.” That, it need scarcely be said, is complete heresy according to the view of criticism maintained in this book. What you have to “fear” hardly in any case matters; and you have always something to learn.
Hillebrand and cosmopolitan Criticism.
Karl, or, as he sometimes called himself, Carl, Hillebrand is an interesting figure, and withal a typical one. He invented, I think, a useful word—“xenomania” or Fremdensucht—which was very proper for the nineteenth century: he attracted the notice, in his own country, of such a formidable and considerable person as the young Nietzsche; he wrote in several languages and lived in more countries, especially England and Italy. There was a time, which I can remember very well, when he “seemed to be a pillar.” But I am not so sure that he was one. He prided himself on his cosmopolitanism: and one of his best-known pieces, addressed to the editor of The Nineteenth Century and reprinted in the great collection of his miscellaneous works, entitled Zeiten Völker und Menschen,[[1066]] deals with the presence of Fremdensucht and insularity combined in Englishmen. We were, thought Herr Hillebrand some twenty or five-and-twenty years since, interesting ourselves in Continental matters at last, but we were not doing it in the right way. Frenchmen thought we interested ourselves too promiscuously in their men and matters; so did Germans. We put [did we?] Mérimée and Octave Feuillet on a level; Rachel and Madame Sarah Bernhardt. We distressed Herr Hillebrand’s cosmopolitanism and his particularism equally.
This is a sufficiently interesting and distinct point of view to have a few words here, especially as it has been often taken since. I venture to disagree with it in toto. It is very well, if your sight is weak, to have the best spectacles adjusted to it that art can adjust. But you will very seldom better your sight by taking somebody else’s spectacles; and if you borrow the spectacles of several other people and combine or frequently substitute them, you will very soon see “men as trees walking.” To the process of having spectacles made for yourself corresponds that of studying foreign literatures as widely as possible and as carefully as possible; the process of adopting French points of view of Frenchmen, German of Germans, and the like, answers, I think, to the other. There is a wrong interpretation of Sportam nactus es, but also a right. And I think Herr Hillebrand’s own results bear out what I have said. His critical work is very extensive; it had much, and still has some, interest. It is the work of a man of certainly more than average cleverness and of much more than average information; of a man with a really fair knowledge of literature and more than a fair knowledge of institutions, customs, national mores generally. Herr Hillebrand would never have made some, or many, of the little slips at which we laugh so much in other people, and at which other people laugh in us. But his cosmopolitanism, I think, eviscerated and emasculated his genius. In re-reading essays of his which I have read before, I have found them faded, tame, “fushionless”; in reading others for the first time they produce the same effect without the contrast. The satirist was justified in making fun of the “temptations To belong to other nations”; but, in a sense of which Mr Gilbert was not thinking, and of which I doubt his making fun, it is to credit and to advantage that an Englishman shall remain an Englishman, a German a German, and so forth. There is a moral in the story of Antæus.
Not that there is not in Hillebrand work still interesting (though it is usually rather too contemporary as well as too cosmopolitan) when he is dealing with Fielding and Sterne and Milton, and Machiavelli and Rabelais and Tasso, as well as when he is dealing with Doudan and Renan and Taine. He was for an age: but for rather a short one. And one of his papers is an awful example. It is entitled Delirium Tremens, and it characterises the work with which it deals as a “distressing aberration.” That work is analysed with considerable skill, and the article contains some shrewd remarks, notably one on the invariable tendency towards “charcoal-burner” faith of some kind even in the most free-thinking Frenchman. Hillebrand’s strength lay in things of this kind. But the instance shows where his strength did not lie, and that this was in the direction of literary criticism. For this “distressing aberration,” this effect of delirium tremens, is one of the capital imaginative works of the later nineteenth century—the Tentation de Saint-Antoine of Gustave Flaubert.