Many a confirmed wanderer upon Continental highways and byways may have been long since wearied by the conceitedly-vulgar airs in which old Father Rhine has indulged himself in latter years, and heartily tired of his bald vineyards, his melodramatic old ruins, and the make-believe majesty of his so-called mountains. But still there remained a sort of spurious halo about his very name; some kindly reminiscence of the time when, as an enthusiastic youth just escaped from the supposed commonplace of England, one gazed for the first time upon this famed show-stream of the Continent, and wondered, and admired, and poetised in spite of one’s-self, may have cast a charm of early memory upon its overrated allurements; and, of a surety, there must have been brought a comfortable glow of pleasure to the heart of any one, except that nearly-exploded animal, the exclusive exquisite, either male or female, in witnessing the happy gaping faces of the touristic hordes, who paddled up and down the well-known old banks—a feeling of ease, comfort, and even homeishness, in the modern luxuries of the hundred palace-hotels of the Rhenish towns and villages, in the contented aspect of the thriving landlord, welcoming the guests who brought him wealth, and in the ready alertness of the active and obsequious waiters. Well, Germany has taken into its head to follow in the lead which distracted France gave, when it madly beckoned with frantic finger to all the Continent to follow in its wild dance. Germany has caught the St Vitus of revolution, and danced off, if not as distractedly, at all events in less connected step, and less defined figure, than its neighbour: and in this revolutionary frenzy Germany has assumed so ungenial an aspect—a manner so doubtful, so unpromising, so uncertain, as regards the next step it may be inclined to take in the jerkings of its abrupt and unregulated dance—that the gentle tourist-seekers of ease and pleasure have turned away in disgust from this heavy Meg Merrilees, who has forgotten even her scraps of song, and her long-pretended spirit of romance, and declined to visit her until she shall have somewhat recovered from her drunken fit of revolution, and become more decently behaved. The Rhine, then, has lost the last charm of foreign bustle and movement, with which he decked his old head, as with a crown of wild flowers, not unbecoming his gray hairs. He looks sad, sober, discontented, disappointed, mourning his lost old joys, and his lost glories, of which young Germany, in its revolutionary excitement, has despoiled him. His hotels are empty; landlords, too, have a forlorn air, and take to rattling their last groschen in their pockets; and unhappy waiters get fat upon their inactivity, but, at the same time, pale with ill-humour at their diminished trinkgelder, and apprehension of losing their places altogether. Travellers’ visits have grown, like those of angels, “few and far between;” and as angels do the poor scanty tourists appear to be regarded—as munificent beings, in fact, from whom too much cannot be demanded and expected; for the Rhenish hotel-keepers, in pursuance of the system adopted by Parisian shopkeepers, in these days of revolutionary scarcity and destitution, seem determined to make those unhappy beings, who fall into their clutches, redeem the debt they appear to consider due to them from those absent tourists, who have not come to enjoy all the splendours prepared for them. Since Germany, with its newborn cry for imperial unity, has appeared inclined to turn back again, in new revolutionary spirit, to old feudal times, the Rhenish hotel-keepers seem to think that they ought to appear in the characters of the old robber-knights. This consideration, perfectly personal to a poor tourist, who has lately paid his löse-geld at many a modern robber’s stronghold on the Rhine, brings him round, however, to the question which he has been putting to himself, at every step he has been taking in Germany—“What would revolutionising Germany be at?”
What would revolutionising Germany be at? It is a question easily put, but very difficult to answer. The old joke, lately “freshed-up” to be applied to the French—namely, that “they don’t know what they want, and won’t be easy till they get it,” may, with still deeper truth, be applied to the Germans. In spite of much inquiring conversation with all men of all ranks, and in all positions of life, it has been quite impossible for an unimaginative English understanding to discover exactly, in the midst of all the vague rhapsody, florid discourse, and poetical politics with which it has been assailed, “what they want.” To judge by the fermenting spirit every where prevalent, the bombastic and unpractical dreams—for plans they are not—formed as regards the future, it would be difficult also not to suppose that “they won’t be easy till they get it.”
What would revolutionising Germany be at? In spite of all one sees and hears, or rather does not hear, it is impossible not to recur to the question again and again; for, after all, in Germany we are among thinking men, and, children as they may be in political life, thinking men they are; and, surely, thinking men must have some definite end and aim to which their thoughts, their hopes, their aspirations, and their efforts are directed. All the Utopian schemes, all the unpractical theories of all parties, who put themselves forward in the revolutionary movement, be their tendencies monarchic, constitutional, or republican, aspire, then, to the setting up of the ill-defined idol of modern German political fancies—“German unity”—“One great and powerful united Germany”—“One great united German Empire”—or whatever name, designation, or varied shade of name the idol, whose pedestal is “Union,” may bear. This was the great fancied panacea for all evils, for which men clamoured, when, in imitation of that distracted city of Paris—so worthy of imitation, forsooth!—they got up revolutions, and tried their hands at building barricades. This has been, in truth, long since the watchword of the German student, when, in the recesses of his beer-cellar at the university, he collected a set of fellow fancied enthusiasts around the beer-jugs, imagined this species of club to be a wonderful conspiracy, because he designated it by the forbidden name of “Burschenschaft,” and deemed himself a notable and formidable conspirator, because he drank off his krug of beer to the cry of “Perish all Princes—es lebe hoch das Deutsche Vaterland!” The princes, by the way, were highly complimentary to such conspirators, in considering them dangerous, and forbidding the existence of the Burschenschaften, which were pretty safety-valves enough to let off the exuberance of studentic steam. Whether the cry for a “United Germany” first proceeded again from the mouths of these fantastic enthusiasts, who, when they found out, to their surprise, that the parts they had been acting in their mimic dramas of the beer-cellars might be acted to the life and under the open sky of heaven, became in most parts of Germany the leaders of the mobs, or the heroes of the barricades, matters but little; nothing is more like a flock of sheep—although the term of “a pack of wolves” might often appear more applicable—than the general herd of men in moments of revolutionary excitement; whatever conclusion, however far-fetched and fantastic, any old revolutionary bell-wether may jump at, the flock is sure to follow and jump after him. It matters, then, but little how or by whom the cry of “United Germany” was first raised—the whole revolutionary flock immediately set up the same “baa!” and in each convulsion of each German State, great or small, in which a revolution may be said to have taken place, among the grievances which mobs, deputations, or delegates laid before German princes, as necessary to be forthwith amended and rectified, was the immediate and indispensable want of a “United Germany.” A somewhat more decided and definite step towards the possible realisation of this tolerably vague and indefinite desideratum, in the amendment of people’s wrongs, was taken by the call for the meeting of one united German parliament, for the purpose of considering and regulating the affairs of all Germany in this revolutionary crisis; but more especially of effecting that union in one empire, under one head, or under one form of government, which appeared to be the great desire of those who now put themselves forward as the expression of the will of all the German nation, either as a whole, or in its parts; and which seemed to be considered as the great unknown remedy for all evils, real or imaginary. The meeting of the first illegal and self-constituted body, which, in its impatience to be ruling the destinies of the nation, assembled at Frankfort under the name of a Vor-Parlement, or preliminary parliament, and, although originally only emanating from a club of revolutionary spirits at Heidelberg, contrived to impose itself upon Germany and its princes, and sway the destinies of the land, in opposition to the old German Diet assembled in the same place—the proceedings of the Ausschuss, or select committee, which the members of this Vor-Parlement left behind them, to follow up their assumed authority, when they themselves dispersed,—the constitution of the present National Assembly, sanctioned by most of the German princes, and acknowledged as fully legal and supreme in its authority, its members being elected by universal suffrage,—and its meeting in time to put a stop to the wild democratic tendencies and reckless proceedings of the Ausschuss, are all matters of newspaper history, and need here no further detail; they are mentioned only to show what revolutionising Germany fancies and pretends it would be at, as far as any idea can be formed from its actions—and the means it would employ to arrive at its ends. We have got thus far, then, in the solution of our question. Revolutionising Germany desires, above all things, one great and powerful union of all its several parts,—the how, when, where, &c., being as yet very indefinite and unintelligible; and the General National Assembly is there to settle those important preliminaries. Let us content ourselves awhile with this very vague and uncertain answer, and return to old Father Rhine and his neighbourhood, to have some further idea of the physiognomy of the country under the present revolutionary auspices, and with the soothing hopes of the realisation of the grand desideratum of union before the country’s eyes. After taking this superficial survey of the “outward man,” and judging as far as we can of his character and temper therefrom, we may then speculate, perhaps, a little upon his tendencies in his present course; and even go so far as to attempt to take his hand, and try a trick or two of palmistry in fortune-telling—not pretending, however, in true gipsy spirit, to infallibility in foretelling the future, however knowingly and mysteriously we may shake our heads in so doing.
Although the Germans cannot be said to have the capabilities of acting any new part, that they may pretend to take upon themselves, to the life—and even to the death—with all that reality and energy for which the French have such an inborn talent, yet they may be looked up to as a still more symbol-loving people than the latter; and although perhaps not quite so much “up to” correctness of costume, at least quite as fond of parading the dress of the new part upon all occasions. The first thing, consequently, that strikes the tourist, on entering the Germany of 1848, is the ostentatious display of the new-old imperial, so-called national cockade, the red, black, and gold colours of the old German empire. It is not only upon the caps of vapouring students, who begin to consider themselves more or less the masters of the world, or upon the hats of hot-headed, soi-disant-enthusiastic, poetico-political young men that the new cockade is now to be seen; it stares you in the face from the head and breast of almost every man you meet—gray-beard, middle-aged, or youngster. It is generally from the centre of the cap or hat, and thus just upon the forehead, that it glares upon you, like the dark, red, gleaming eye of a new race of Cyclops: almost every male individual looks like a political Polyphemus. The soldiers are, one and all, adorned with two cockades, the one of the colours of the individual country they serve, the other of those of Imperial United Germany. They have thus two staring, distorted, and unmatched eyes, one over the other, in the centre of their foreheads. With their two eyes they ought, one would suppose, to see farther in the mist of the political storm than other people. The military, however, influenced perhaps by the example of their aristocratic young officers, have shown themselves, generally speaking, and markedly so in Prussia, where the revolutionary movement has been the most decided, recalcitrant towards the so-called progress of the day, anti-popular in their sympathies, attached only to the king and individual country they serve, disdainful of the new central power, the authority of which they do not and will not comprehend, and of its representatives, whom they regard as a herd of insolent schwätzer, or chatterers—in fact, anti-revolutionary, or, as it is called in the pet political phrases of the day, which the Germans have, now more than ever, shown themselves so foolishly eager to borrow of the French—retrograd and reactionär.
This position of the military, which appears, generally speaking, to be the same all over the country, is, to say the best, a very ticklish and equivocal one, and promises but little for the future internal peace of United Germany. Orders, however, have been given by such authorities as still are,—and in the first instance by weak, uncertain, vacillating, and now disappointed Prussia,—that the military should do their homage to the ideas of the day, by wearing the imperial cockade, if not in lieu of, at all events in addition to, that which they had heretofore considered as their national symbol: and the double Polyphemus eye of the soldier is one of the most striking and startling evidences of the unsteady and contending spirit of the times, that meet the eye of the tourist in Germany of to-day. Even more than the students—who are still, however, sufficiently remarkable both in costume and manner in these days of unrestricted movement and opinion—you will find a certain set of men, whose physiognomy of race is so strongly marked by some indescribable peculiarity of type, whatever be their colour or form of feature, as to render them unmistakeable, and who make the most flaring display of the imperial national colours, now so strangely converted into the symbol of a revolutionary spirit, be it in cockade, or band, or button-hole decoration. These are the Jews. They are positively lavish in their display of ribbon. Ever since the revolution has begun its dubious and unsteady course throughout Germany, it has been, invariably and everywhere, the Jews who have displayed the strongest revolutionary spirit, the most decided republican tendencies, the most acrimonious hatred against the “powers that be,” and the most virulent efforts towards the subversion of the existing state of things. What may have been the cause of the outburst of this spirit in an essentially trading and money-getting people, whose commercial advantages, in whatever branch they may lie, must be so completely compromised, if not altogether ruined, by revolutionary movements and their consequences, it would be difficult in a superficial sketch to say: it may be conjectured to have arisen simply from a spirit of revenge against the exclusive upper classes of Germany, who have so long treated their sect, proud of its wealth, and seeking influence from its power, with cutting repulsion and contempt. The fact, however, is as stated; the most active revolutionary spirits engaged in the task of pulling down and destroying, as far as was possible, have been every where the Jews; the avowed republicans may chiefly be found among men of their persuasion; the clamour, the attack, and the denunciation, chiefly still proceed from Jewish mouths and Jewish pens. Those who now march forward, then, the most boldly, hand in hand in strange conjunction, along the precipitous path of revolutionary movement, are the students and the Jews. If you unwisely allow one of the latter to lay hold of an unlucky button of your coat in a steamboat, he will be sure to endeavour, with his peculiar twang, to insinuate into you all the wildest ultra-revolutionary doctrines: the former will keep more apart from you, and herd in knots; but, when they get drunk, instead of vapouring vague, incomprehensible, soi-disant Kantian philosophy, as of yore, they will bellow still more vague and incomprehensible political theories about United Germany. It is these two classes of beings, then, who make the most ostentatious parade of the national cockades that flash across our eyesight.
The fate of this cockade has been a very strange one, by the way, in latter years. The red, black, and gold combination was long formally proscribed in universities, as deleterious and dangerous, and typical of the forbidden Burschenschaften: it was worn only in secret and by stealth, by recalcitrant would-be revolutionary students. All on a sudden it has been raised on high in flag and banner, waving not only in revolutionary procession, but from palace walls, and tops of public buildings. The cockade has not only been authorised, but enjoined; and in a late reactionary movement in Berlin,—when, out of jealousy and spite towards a central power, that had chosen its executive head from southern and not northern Germany, a considerable public feeling was exhibited against the imperial national flag, and in favour of the Prussian colours exclusively—the government, or rather the king himself, was obliged, for fear of an outbreak of the students, to command the resumption of those colours in flag and cockade, which, but a little while ago, he himself had proscribed. The pride of the young soi-disant heroes at being openly able to parade that symbol which they cherished only heretofore as fancied conspirators, may be easily conceived: and, now these boy-men find that they can dictate to the princes of the earth, not only upon the matter of flags and cockades, but upon matters of far graver note, there is no knowing to what height of presumption this pride may not still further lead them.
If, now, we look around us to note the general physiognomy of the people, we shall find many other little traits, that mark these revolutionary times in Germany. The common people, more especially upon the Rhine, and in many parts of the duchy of Baden—the common people, formerly so smiling, so ready, so civil, perhaps only too obsequious in their signs of respect, have grown insolent and rude: ask them a question, and they will scarcely deign to bestow upon you an answer: in many instances they will shrug their shoulders, laugh in your face, and then turn their back upon you. On the contrary the public officials, the government beamten, have considerably lowered that arrogance of tone for which they formerly possessed a not unmerited evil repute, and will answer your inquiries with civil words and smiling faces. Such, however, is the natural see-saw movement of manners in revolutionary times, in the lower and lower-middle classes; and as far as regards the latter effect of revolutionary movement, no tourist in Germany will be disposed to complain of the change.
Over the middle and upper classes, at the same time, there has fallen a very visible gloom. That uncertainty of the future, which is proverbially far more difficult for moral strength to bear than any certain evil, has had the very evident effect, to the least observant eye, of depressing the spirits of “all manner of men.” The hope appears to exist only in the theoretical fancies of the excited liberal politician,—the enthusiasm only in the wild dreams of the declaiming student. The prevailing impression is one of all the dulness of doubt and the stupor of apprehension. Talk to people of the state of the country, and they will either shake their heads with a grunt, or openly express their fears about the future: and those fears are none the less active because they are so vague—none the less depressing because they wear the mysterious, visionary, and consequently awful form which the dim distance of complete uncertainty imparts.
Another change, again, in the manners of the people, is in the politicising spirit, so uncongenial in times gone by to the Germans, which, in most great towns, seems now to have so completely absorbed them. It is to be found not only in the low clubs, and in the insensate pothouse debates, but in the eagerness to crowd round the revolutionary addresses, which are posted by ultra-liberals at street corners, in the anxiety to read the last revolutionary disquisition of the new radical journal, in all its glory of large sheet and full columns, which has taken the place of the innocent and patriarchal little Volks-blatt, that was before the study and delight of the humble burgher; and in the malicious enjoyment with which the political caricature, railing at prince or men in power, is studied at the shop window, and the feverish importance that is attached to it.
All these characteristic signs and changes will meet the eye of the tourist if he even go no farther than the confines of the Rhine, and the old city of Cologne. There at once is that depression visible to which allusion has already been made. It is visible in the aspect of the fallen half-ruined shopkeeper, of the disconsolate master of the hotel, and, above all, of the anxious labourer upon the progress of that mighty work, the completion of which evil times seem again to render an impossible task—the Cologne cathedral. Funds for the further progress of the great undertaking already begin to fail; and these are not times to seek them from the munificence either of states or private individuals. The Baumeister, who has spent the greater part of a life upon the wonderful task of working out the completion of this miracle of Gothic art,—whose whole soul has been concentrated upon this one object,—the breath of whose very existence seems to depend upon the growth of this foster-child of his fancy, for which alone he has lived,—now shakes his head, like the consumptive man whose presentiments tell him that his last hour is nigh, and who despairs of escaping his doom. The revolutionary wind has blown like the plague-blast over the land: he feels that his hand must soon fall powerless before the neglect, or even ill-will of the newborn age of revolutionary liberty, and that he must disperse abroad that band of artist-workmen whom he has fashioned and educated to the noble work, and whom, in their completeness of artistic intelligence, none perhaps, in future years, may be able again to collect together. The cathedral, however, has proceeded to a certain point, at which the whole interior may be enclosed; and there, in all probability, the progress of the works will be checked for the present. The consecration of the new part of the building, in this state, has already taken place; but, even in these ceremonies, the revolutionary modern spirit of Germany has not forgotten to assert its influence: the deputation sent to them by the Prussian Assembly refused to join to itself a Catholic ecclesiastic; and yet it was seriously proposed at the same time, by the arrangers of the ceremonial programme, that the monarchs who were expected to be present upon the occasion should mount upon the roof of the cathedral, and there take an oath to preserve the unity of Germany, which oath was to be blessed and ratified by the Pope, who was to be invited to come over to Cologne for the purpose. The Pope has had other deeds and other revolutionary tendencies to bless or to ban in his own dominions; but this little trait, culled from the first programme of the consecration of the Cologne cathedral, may be taken, at the same time, as a slight specimen of the wild poetico-political freaks of theoretically revolutionising Germany.