In 1856 he was again stricken by what seemed to be the same mysterious illness, never fully explained, that had befallen him in Leipzig. He recovered, to be sure, for the time being, but his ailments returned again and again. From about 1860 Ludwig practically never was a well man. Confined to the house and soon to his bed, he slowly wasted away. The tenderest care of his devoted wife and the affection of a few loyal friends could do but little to relieve the most excruciating pain or to keep away the actual want that began to knock at his door. Ludwig had never learned to look upon his art as a commercial asset; his few published works had never brought him much return, and his own slender means had for some time been exhausted. Some gifts of honor were bestowed upon the invalid by authors' societies and princely patrons, but they came too late to prevent the inevitable. As late as 1859 Ludwig still had hope for the future. "I see before me," he wrote in his diary, "a veritable world of conceptions and forms which I might conquer if, freed from the weight that keeps me down, I could take wings again. I believe it would not be too late yet." It was not to be. Successful production of a high order would probably have been impossible under such circumstances in any case. With Ludwig it was further prevented by an obstacle of a psychological nature. As the feeling of health and strength and ease of mind departed from him, there came in its place an ever growing, almost morbid, spirit of self-questioning criticism and doubt. As the springs of creative energy ceased flowing, Ludwig thought he could replenish them by turning to theory and analysis. In the free intervals between the attacks of his illness, when his mind worked as vigorously as ever, the luckless poet filled volume upon volume with esthetic and ethical reflections upon poetry and literature. From Shakespeare especially he thought he might be able to wrest those last secrets of an art which tantalizingly hovered before his vision. In these studies, fragmentary, ill-organized, not prepared for publication as they are, we nevertheless possess a veritable treasure-house of soundest reflection and subtlest intuition on many of the fundamental questions of poetry, especially of the drama. They have often been compared with Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy, of which, in many respects, they are the worthiest continuation. But in this unequal struggle Ludwig became less and less able to give life and color to his own conceptions or to be satisfied with his results when he had done so. How many could safely try to measure up to a standard taken directly from Shakespeare! Plan upon plan was started and laid aside. A field of ruins, disquieting, threatening, piled up around the lonesome fighter who slowly succumbed beneath the crushing greatness of his vision. Noble, but also tragic beyond words it is when, shortly before his death, Ludwig declared to one of his friends that even in his suffering no poet had ever been to him such a source of strength as Shakespeare, to whom he owed far more than the clarification of his ideals of art. Thus the mariner sang the praises of the ocean as it was about to engulf his shipwrecked craft. Ludwig died in Dresden in February, 1865, fifty-two years of age. Of his three surviving children, two sons came to this western hemisphere and attained, in successful business and professional life, to positions of honor and influence among the German element of Southern Brazil.
Aside from the posthumous Studies just spoken of, Ludwig's fame as a writer rests entirely on the two dramas, the Hereditary Forester and The Maccabæans, and on the two long novel-like stories, the Heiterethei and Between Heaven and Earth. They represent practically everything that he ever published during his lifetime. The few insignificant lyrics, the additional dramas and stories, partly completed and partly fragmentary, which have become known after his death, have added no new traits to the picture of Ludwig as it will remain in the history of German literature, and they can well be omitted from consideration in this brief appreciation. It must be admitted that it is a rare phenomenon to see lasting fame and influence built on such a slender amount of work and on so brief a period of productivity. But within this limited range Ludwig must be recognized as a writer of unusual powers of observation and sympathy, of imagination and embodying execution. Truthful to himself and to the ideals of his art, uninfluenced by the popular demands of the day or by any desire for gain or fame, free from everything that smacks of sham or artifice, he succeeded in creating works that speak to us with the robustness and authority of life itself and yet are ennobled by the graces of a selective and restraining art.
In his Hereditary Forester Ludwig produced one of the best middle-class tragedies of modern literature, combining in it, as indeed he had set out to do, highest literary merit with impelling effectiveness upon the stage. "It is exceedingly easy," he said, "to write a poetic drama if one does not care to keep an eye upon the stage, or one that is a successful stage play, but without poetry. * * * I shall do what I can to help create that really healthy condition of the drama which consists in the intimate union of poetry and the stage." Following in the footsteps of Schiller in his Intrigue and Love and of Hebbel in his Maria Magdalena, he has not attained, it is true, the massive solidity of the latter, nor has he breathed into his drama that lofty spirit of social challenge that wings the former. On close inspection, the construction of Ludwig's drama shows undeniable flaws of motivation. The playwright has allowed too free a play to chance and slender probability. The spirit of the revolutionary unrest of 1848 is in the background, especially in the tavern scene of the third act, but it does not in any way organically connect the family tragedy which we witness with the broad movements of contemporary public life. But the play is indeed, as Ludwig desired it to be, "a declaration of war against the unnaturalness and conventionalities of our latter-day stage literature." The life-like characters which it portrays, the convincing language which they speak, the carefully drawn milieu in which they move, the intense struggle of passions in which they are engaged-these are all handled with a skill as rare as it is artistically true to life. And even though the atmosphere enveloping it all seems to combine the realism of Ludwig's maturity with the romantic pre-disposition of his earlier works, it remains in fine keeping with that shadowy forest-world which forms the setting of the play.
Ludwig's next drama, The Maccabæans, was of a radically different mold. From prose we pass to verse, from humble middle-class life to the traditional grandeur of classical tragedy, from the narrow circle of domestic happenings to a Shakespearean canvas of broad historical associations, from contemporary Germany to those heroic struggles in which, in the second century, B.C., the Jews under the leadership of Judas Maccabæus defended their national and religious freedom against Syrian oppression. In this drama also, certain faults of construction are evident. There is a lack of central unity of interest, in part due, no doubt, to the long processes of development which the play underwent before completion. But again, there is the same masterly technique in all matters of detail, a wonderful strength and beauty of language, subtle and convincing character-portrayal and a splendid realization of that ethnic atmosphere of Jewish life and character in which the drama moves and from which its conflicts spring.
Of the two stories of Ludwig, the Heiterethei is in every way the lighter; nevertheless, it is one of the best of those famous stories from peasant life in which German literature is so rich. More artistic than Jeremias Gotthelf and in a deeper sense truer to life than Auerbach, Ludwig has here created a popular tale of great charm and power. The "poetic realism" of his manner and the subdued ethical didacticism of his purpose have been skillfully united in forming an excellent example of truly popular art. The story is that of the gradual mellowing and final happy marriage of two young people who, with the best of hearts, are veritable firebrands of self-willed defiance to everything suggesting outside interference. The nickname of the girl, "Heiterethei," given her on account of her bright and sunny disposition, explains the title of the story. And it must not be left unsaid that, despite the underlying seriousness of the character-development portrayed, the story as a whole is characterized by a sovereign play of humor, at times a bit grotesque and boisterous, maybe, but none the less irresistible in its quaint charm and deeper meaning.
In Between Heaven and Earth, Ludwig finally achieved his masterpiece, creating a work in which vision and workmanship are both on the highest level and thoroughly worthy of each other. No "hero" in the traditional sense, no glamor of what is commonly regarded as "poetic," no broad social background, no philosophic outlook, but within a narrow, and if you will, commonplace range, the author here permits us to get same of the profoundest glimpses of human life and character. It is a story of slaters working on steep roofs and tall church spires; and as does their scaffolding, so the poet tries to move along "between heaven and earth," his feet and eyes firmly fastened to life's realities, his heart and soul lifted into the realm of the ideal, the eternal. Thus interpreted, the title of the story may indeed be taken as a symbol of that principle of "poetic realism" which Ludwig strove for and of which the story is one of the best embodiments. The technique of the work, to be sure, is that of Ludwig's day, not of our own. There are long descriptions and reflections and a good deal of direct psychological analysis, in all of which the narrator does not hesitate to speak from his subjective point of view. Such a method modern theorists would feign stamp as a crime against the spirit of epic art, as though a novel were a drama, and genuine narration did not by nature participate of both the objective and subjective manner of presentation. But even if these things were undeniable flaws of technique, which we are far from admitting, they certainly cannot mar genuine art in its essential beauty and appeal. The Thuringian landscape and the life of the small town embedded in it, the tragic happenings in the Nettenmair family, the slow processes of soul-life in the two hostile brothers and the martyred woman between them—all this is made to live before our eyes with such simple and yet absolutely adequate means that we get from it that deep and satisfying feeling of harmony of content and form that characterizes a true masterpiece of art. Character drawing and milieu painting, always Ludwig's strong points, have again been most felicitously handled. With equal success the author has developed the plot of the story which, in a few memorable scenes, attains to truly dramatic scope and power. More admirable than everything else, however, is the subtly realistic treatment of the psychological processes in Fritz Nettenmair. His gradual deterioration, step by step, from self-indulgent joviality, through envy and jealousy, to the hatred of despair that does not even shrink from fratricide, is depicted with masterly insight and consistency. This phase of Ludwig's art strikes us as fresh and modern today, and it must have appeared like a revelation to a generation that did not yet, know Flaubert's Madame Bovary or George Eliot's Adam Bede.
Considered in his totality as man and as artist, Ludwig cannot be counted among the names of the very first rank in German nineteenth century literature. To him cannot be assigned the unequivocal greatness of a Kleist, a Hebbel, a Keller. The narrowness of the circumstances of his life and the invalidism of his mature years combined with, and no doubt were aided by, an apparent lack of robustness and forcefulness of character and temperament, and thus conspired to keep him from attaining that victorious self-assertion, that sovereign balance between volition and power, without which true greatness in the full sense of the word is impossible. But among the leading names of second rank, his will always occupy a place of distinction. If his was not the work of a Messiah, it was that of a John the Baptist. Having been nurtured in the traditions of the romanticism of Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, he was one of the first to experience the artistic charm and possibilities of unidealized reality and to respond to its call. It was he who seems to have coined the phrase, even if he was not first to formulate the principle, of that restrained or "artistic realism" that tries to set its standards half-way between subjectively idealistic and objectively naturalistic art. Even his extravagant admiration for Shakespeare was chiefly due to the fact that he saw in his art the supreme embodiment of this principle. Ludwig did not renounce beauty of art except where it infringed upon the one thing needful—essential truthfulness to reality, especially in all that pertains to what Hebbel called "the laws of the human soul." Many of the utterances of Ludwig's Studies are as startlingly modern, not to say Ibsenesque, as similar ones in Hebbel's Diaries, in their frank recognition of the solemn claims of reality, even ugly reality, upon the honest artist who endeavors to interpret life in its entirety. For art, too, like all other achievements of human culture, according to Ludwig, must render service unto life. It is its function to furnish insight into life, mastery over life. "Rather no poetry at all," he exclaims, "than a poetry that robs us of the joy of living, that makes us unproductive in life, that, instead of nerving us for life, unnerves us for it."
In German literature Ludwig thus occupies a not unimportant place. Far more penetrating and far more artistic than "realists" like Auerbach or Spielhagen he paved the way for the coming of Anzengruber who, in turn, anticipated the realism of the moderns in more, ways than is generally recognized. Ludwig will always be a figure of prominence in the history of the modern middle-class tragedy, in the development of the story dealing with village life, in the efforts to emphasize the value of a literature close to the native soil, in the attempts of German criticism to fathom the secret of Shakespearean art. More than that, however. When the final account of the gradual evolution of nineteenth century realism will some time be written from another than a one-sidedly French point of view, a place of honorable recognition will be due to the thoughtful and forceful author of the Studies and Between Heaven and Earth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: The extracts from The Prince of Homburg are taken from
Mr. Hagedorn's translation, Volume IV of THE GERMAN CLASSICS.]