spirit in overrunning Germany with the doctrines of Naturalism as taught and practised by Zola and his group. A brilliant hand of writers gathered round M. G. Conrad and his paper, 'Die Gesellschaft: Realistische Wochenschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentliches Leben.' They declared open war on the writers on whom the mind of young Germany was then feeding -Heyse, Dahn, Spielhagen-even on Fontane, even on Gottfried Keller. These writers, it was declared, were not originators, only continuators; at best tüchtige Ausarbeiter' of a material and a technique inherited from an age with which young Germany had little in common. But the attempts to naturalise Naturalism on German soil-let the reader glance at Hermann Conradi's brutal story, 'Adam Mensch '—had no lasting success. When Naturalism came to German literature after 1870 it came in quite a different guise; it came with Arno Holz and Schlaf, who repudiated the ideas of Zola, and with their disciple, Gerhart Hauptmann. What the Gesellschaft' group really did was rudely to shake German literature from its complacent contentment with a kind of poetry which had simply learned the technique of Weimar but had not one serious thought or sincere observation to record. 6 Yet the war and the stimulus which it gave to the spiritual life of the nation were by no means so negligible as is often supposed. One of the first results, however, has to be looked for outside the political limits of Germany. It is strictly true, as the old song has it, that the German Fatherland, in the spiritual sense of the word, is bounded only by the limits of the German language. A Swiss or a Viennese writing in German always thinks of himself and is thought of by others as contributing to German, not to Swiss or Austrian literature. And one of the first effects of the war of 1870 was to win for this spiritual Germany a very distinguished Swiss writer who at that time might just as easily have gravitated to the French side of the Alps. We have it in his own words that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was moved by the events of that year to range himself definitely as a German poet. He felt that these events had given him a Germany to belong to. '1870 was for me the critical year,' he writes; it decided a war in my soul.' His fine historical poem on Ulrich von Hutten, 'Die Traube,' 'Die heut gekeltert wird und morgen kreist was the first-fruits of this new and ardent sense of How delicately and profoundly in this lovely image is suggested the eternal give and take, the interchange of action and repose, in the life of the universe! It is a monumental yet vital thing, like the object which it describes. Meyer was an artist of the purest type, but he hated to be labelled with that title, and avowed views of his craft which those who rejoice in the label commonly repudiate with fervour. Je ne suis pas du tout un artiste,' and again, ' je n'écris que toutes les fois qu'un fait moral me frappe ou même m'a ébranlé.' The lines 'In Harmesnächten' are written out of a deep experience; and we may ask if ever that experience, common yet profound, was expressed with a finer simplicity: 'Die Rechte streckt' ich schmerzlich oft In Harmesnächten, Und fühlt gedrückt sie unverhofft Von einer Rechten Was Gott ist, wird in Ewigkeit Kein Mensch ergründen, Doch will er treu sich allezeit Seeking for another contemporary name to put beside that of C. F. Meyer, we inevitably think of his countryman, Gottfried Keller, 'the most creative spirit,' it has been said, 'that has appeared in German literature since Goethe.' Meyer belonged to a well-to-do family of the old civic aristocracy of Zürich. Keller was the son of an artisan, brought up in desperate poverty and fighting his way slowly to recognition and reward. He has nothing of the classic quality of Meyer; his style is rich in metaphor and image, sometimes prolix, full of local colour, charged with quaint wisdom, loving to linger with epic particularity on the details of action. But in one thing they were both united; alike they repudiated the notion of a poet as living and working for an abstraction called 'art.' 'I hold it the duty of a poet,' wrote Keller to Auerbach in 1860, 'not only to make the past illustrious, but so to strengthen, so to ennoble the present and the germs of the future, that people may come to believe that even thus they themselves are, even thus do things really happen. Let a writer do this with a certain benevolent irony, so as to prevent the reader from being moved by any false pathos, and I believe that a people will, at last, visibly and outwardly, come to be that which it good-humouredly fancies itself, and which, in its inward dispositions, it really is already.' Both Keller and Meyer were deeply stirred by the events of 1870; on Meyer, as we have seen, they wielded a decisive influence at a critical period in his life as a writer. But a more immediate product of that period was the great lyrical poet, Detlev von Liliencron, whose first work in verse, 'Adjutantenritte,' though it did not appear until 1884, was, as its name implies, directly inspired by the war. Liliencron was an example of a type of artist which is not common nowadays-the artist who has lived the things he writes about. He was born in Kiel in 1844, and came of a noble family of Danish origin. His grandfather had transgressed the laws of his caste by wedding a peasant-girl, one of the serfs on his own estate; and the poet's father was on that account rendered incapable of inheriting the family property. Detlev therefore grew up in modest circumstances, but he contrived to enjoy to the full his master-passions of field-sports and of war. The latter he saw in Prussian service, both in the war with Austria and as an Uhlan officer in 1870. It was a time for him of high-strung passion and delight, and of something more as well. 'O my lieutenant days,' he cried afterwards, 'with your gay freshness, with your keenness, with all those splendid friends and comrades, with all your days of roses, with your sense of duty strung up to the sharpest, with your stern self-discipline!' Lieutenant days do not last for ever; and, when the war was over, he fell into an unhappy love affair, and then into debts which piled themselves ever higher above his head. He had to throw up his commission and thought of taking service in America, where his maternal grandfather, one of the intimate friends of Washington, had been a general. The mere sight of New York drove him back in despair, but he found fresh encouragement and joy in a new love followed by a happy marriage. He now received a modest official appointment. He had thought deeply and read widely upon poetry and art. A religious tendency now came to the surface; he longed to feel himself a member of an organic religious body, and had a strong inclination to join the Catholic Church. But this mood passed and turned into a sombre pessimism, tempered indeed by his indomitable lust of life in which he remained a child to the end of his days, and consoled by the unfailing anodyne of toil. He filed, he polished, he weighed each word in his vivid lyrics and ballads; and the sight of his scored and interlined manuscript was, as a friend has reported, a rebuke to facile writers who think a happy phrase or two enough to carry off a poem. There was nothing he did not write -dramas, stories, lyrics, and even a sort of fantastic epic, ein kunterbuntes Epos in zwölf Kantussen.' They had little success in his own day. The waves of debt rose higher and higher; he tried to cope with these by giving readings of his works-an experience which he described as a veritable torture. His last prose work is a kind of veiled autobiography, full of charm and of romance. It was offered in vain to seventy German periodicals. A book of poems, entitled 'Goodnight,' followed. He was now a broken man; and a pathetic consciousness of this drew him with his wife and child in 1909 to pay a visit to the battlefields about Metz, where he had played a worthy part in Germany's greatest hour. He died in the summer of the same year, without fear,' as Richard Dehmel said in his funeral address, 'of the eternal night, without hope of a resurrection day, but with a pure untroubled reverence for the unsearchable, inexhaustible Power through which we live and die.' One cannot read Liliencron's verse-of which some racy translations will be found in Mr Pollard's vivacious book, 'Masks and Minstrels '-without being reminded of the fierce and tender strain' of Burns. Let us recall Mr William Watson's fine appreciation of the latter poet : 'He came when poets had forgot How rich and strange the human lot; And what makes Truth divine, and what A ghostly troop, in pale amaze We seem to hear The crackling of their phantom bays For, 'mid an age of dust and dearth, The Spring began. A mighty mother had brought forth It is Liliencron and his time to the life! And much in |