The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The former literary councillor in Leipzig, Rudolf von Gottschall, introduces a new biweekly publication called “Das litterarische Echo” with an essay bearing the above title. It is certainly not my intention to make life difficult for the new venture, despite the fact that the aforementioned speaker has quite tastefully concluded the article with an attack on the existing literary magazines. He probably considers the “Magazin für Literatur” to be one of those literary journals that he describes as “a hodgepodge of opinions and standards”, “a playground for a criticism that strays in all directions of the compass”.

It is not easy to discern from Mr. von Gottschall's article what he wants. He complains that general, humanistic education is on the decline. He even complains that “the Latin essay has been eliminated from the schoolwork of the higher grammar school classes”. I can only read one thing from Mr. von Gottschall's essay: He laments the extinction of literary orators of the type of the unctuous Moriz Carriere and of – Mr. von Gottschall himself, who have reached the pinnacle of wisdom by acquiring a few scraps of Hegelian philosophy and aesthetics, and who have not participated in the great revolution of the minds that has taken place through the scientific way of thinking in the second half of this century. It is quite characteristic of Mr. von Gottschall that he says: “On the whole, the main bearers of literary education are the women.” He is, of course, referring to the education of women, which has adopted the characterized aesthetic verbiage and from which women who understand the spirit of the present turn away.

If Mr. von Gottschall were to edit a literary magazine today, it would contain only opinions that could have been written quite well in 1832. Just as one finds only such opinions in the tedious four volumes of “German National Literature in the Nineteenth Century.”

The way of thinking and feeling that is possible on the basis of the century's scientific achievements is not there for Mr. von Gottschall. He has no sense of educating young people in this way of thinking; rather, he would like the Latin essay to be reintroduced into the schoolwork of the higher grammar school classes.

Mr. von Gottschall is one of those lucky people who know everything. They can tell exactly what is artistically valuable and what is not. They know how to classify. So they will edit a magazine as follows: I accept everything that meets my aesthetic judgment. Because I am right and everyone else is wrong. My magazine must have a uniform character.

We others are not as fortunate as Mr. von Gottschall. We have formed our views and perceptions under the influence of scientific progress. We have not remained untouched by the fact that Darwin has reshaped all the perceptions and ideas that have been cultivated over the centuries, as Mr. von Gottschall has. But at the same time, we know that the new worldview can take on different forms in different minds. We do not have any stereotyped views like Mr. von Gottschall. We also accept the views of others. We know that there is a struggle for the existence of opinions.

That is why we have to edit a magazine differently from the way Mr. von Gottschall wants. The editor represents his point of view with all the strength he is capable of. But he also allows other opinions to be heard. He is even proud to offer his readers a “playground for a critique that diverges in all directions of the compass”. He wants every opinion that is formed on sufficient premises to be represented. What Mr. Gottschall considers a disadvantage, I, for example, claim as an advantage.

I love freedom. I love it not only in the political sense, as I expressed it in my reply to J. H. Mackay's letter to me in issue 39, but also in the sense of the intellectual exchange that a magazine has to convey. And just as I am confident that people can thrive best in the sun of freedom in economic and ethical terms, I also believe that intellectual life fares best when opinions and views are allowed to battle it out in free development.

This is how I have done it since I have been editing the “Magazin [für Literatur]”, and this is how I will continue to do it, even if Mr. von Gottschall should contemptuously include this journal in the group of those that are a “playground” for “a criticism that strays in all directions of the compass”.

Maurice Maeterlinck is one of the most outstanding experiences of the modern soul. Those whose sympathies lie with the apostles of world worship, with Darwin and Haeckel, feel a deep satisfaction when the Ghent “mystic” tells them: “All our organs are the mystical accomplices of a higher being, and we have never known a human being, but always a soul.” And nothing prevents those who inwardly cheer the words of Zarathustra, the god-killer, from feeling secret pleasure when Maeterlinck speaks of the depths of the divine with religious devotion. Zarathustra says: “It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the heavenly and the redeeming drops of blood: but even these sweet and dark poisons they took from the body and the earth!” One can feel these words as a release from millennia of religious prejudice and yet listen with approving satisfaction when Maeterlinck says: “The gods from whom we come reveal themselves to us in a thousand ways; but this secret goodness, which has not been noticed and of which no one has spoken directly enough, is perhaps the purest sign of their eternal life. We do not know where it comes from. It is simply there, smiling on the threshold of our souls; and those in whom it smiles most deeply and most often will make us suffer day and night, if they wish, without our being able to love them any less."

Until recently, Maurice Maeterlinck seemed to be a riddle. The tone of the Christian mystics was thought to be discernible in his speeches; and the godless people of the modern scientific worldview could not resist the lure of these speeches. The power of the idea that man has developed from lower organisms according to thoroughly ungodly, purely natural laws and that only this earth, not a heavenly paradise, can be the source of our joys, did not protect them from the magical sound of Maeterlinck's words: “We may indeed already act like gods, and all our lives proceed under infinite certainties and infallibilities. But we are blind men playing with jewels along the streets; and the man who knocks at my door, the moment he greets me, gives out spiritual treasures as wonderful as those of the prince whom I have snatched from death."

Since Maeterlinck published his latest work, La sagesse et la destin&e (Paris, Librairie Charpentier) in October last year, it is no longer difficult to resolve the contradiction referred to above. In this book, we encounter a modern soul that has freed itself from the egg shells of mysticism. We believe we hear Zarathustra's wilful wisdom when Maeterlinck speaks to us: “The intellect and the will should become accustomed to living, like victorious soldiers, from what makes war on them.” And the confession of the reviled Max Stirner seems to speak anew from sentences like these: “But we are told: love your neighbour as yourself! But if you love yourself in a narrow-minded and sterile way, you will love your neighbor in the same way. Learn to love yourself in a broad-minded, healthy, wise and perfect way; that is less easy than you think. The selfishness of a strong and clear-sighted soul is of much more beneficial effect than all the devotion of a blind and weak soul. Before you can be there for others, you have to be there for yourself; and before you can give yourself away, you have to secure yourself. Be assured that the acquisition of a fraction of your self-awareness is ultimately worth more than the sacrifice of your entire unconsciousness.»

And Stirner, who sang the praises of egoism in “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” (The Ego and Its Own), would have to stand in awe of the idol of modern mystics when he says: “The soul does not grow greater through sacrifice, but in growing greater it loses sight of sacrifice, just as the wanderer, when he climbs higher, loses sight of the flowers of the valley. Sacrifice is a beautiful sign of inner compassion; but one should never cultivate compassion for its own sake.” Or: ‘The power that shines in our hearts should above all shine for itself. Only at this price will it also shine for others; and however small the lamp may be, let no one give of the oil that nourishes it, let no one give of the light that crowns it!’

Two years ago, when Maeterlinck's “Tresor des Humbles” appeared, the modern pagans had nothing to say to the mystics, who called the ecstatic Belgian one of their own. Today, after the publication of “La sagesse et la destinde”, the mystics will be less jubilant.

This peculiar development of Maeterlinck's should be pointed out here, in connection with the excellent German edition of “The Treasure of the Humble”, which has just been published (by Eugen Diederich, Leipzig and Florence) under the title: “The Treasure of the Poor. Translated into German by Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski.”

Today, modern free spirits read every sentence of this book differently than they did two years after its publication. At that time, they only had a vague feeling that this book would bring them a breath of fresh air, which, despite some adverse ingredients, would bring a fresh scent of fir trees.

And it is precisely their rare satisfaction in listening to this stammering sage that the free spirits understand today. For these free spirits are often confused with shallow rationalistic minds, to whom the voice of the heart does not speak. They only allow reason and understanding to work within them, and therefore remain unaware of the freer impulses of the human soul, the instinctive impulses.

The free spirits are accused of being dry and rational. And they themselves are constantly afraid that the sober logic could kill the most valuable forces that unconsciously rule in the human soul.

But this fear is an unjust feeling of the human soul. It is true that the language of the mind is also that of common and banal people. But this language is no less the language of the deepest secrets of the existence of the world.

And the words that now express the everyday results of stock market speculation can, in the next moment, be the interpreters of profound truths.

And there is yet another. The friends of the modern scientific creed are often called materialists and are denied a sense of the divine. It is considered appalling when they see nothing in man, who is supposed to have been given existence by a God from heaven, but that he is “three-quarters a column of water and has inorganic salts in him,” which are more capable of influencing his existence than all the spiritual powers dreamed of.

Nietzsche, the evangelist of this world, the despiser of all divine things beyond this world, says: “The inorganic conditions us completely: water, air, soil, soil structure, electricity and so on. We are plants under such conditions.”

In all of us there is still something of the belief that we are degrading the world to something base and common when we strip it of the divine and see in it nothing but what we really perceive with our senses and our minds. We imagine that we are making man into an almost disgusting being when we admit to ourselves that he is made of the materials of this world, and that these materials also obey the laws of nature of this world.

But the natural, the earthly-ungodly, is not contemptible: only the erring human spirit has made it contemptible, because it has become accustomed through a long education to always only get into a devout mood when imagining something beyond. Our best minds are sick because they can no longer believe in the divine in the hereafter and yet cannot perceive the earthly-real as a substitute for the lost divine.

Nietzsche proclaimed the sanctity and divinity of this world in his “Zarathustra”. And Maeterlinck did the same in his “Tresor des Humbles”. Basically, both spirits are saying the same thing. Only Nietzsche emphasizes: All that is worthy of worship, all that is sacred: it is not a heaven and not an afterlife; it is an earth and a here and now. And man should not long for his heavenly paradise of bliss; rather, he should be the meaning of the earth. And Maeterlinck says: The ordinary, everyday is the only reality, but this reality is divine. “Here is John, pruning his trees, there is Peter, building his house, you, talking to me about the harvest, I, shaking your hand - but we are brought to a point where we touch the gods, and we are amazed at what we do.”

I

There are poetic tasks¹ that any naturalism must fail to fulfill. These are the ones that relate to the struggle of eternal powers in the human soul. This struggle represents the entire development of the human inner life, from birth to death. This struggle is not exhausted in individual actions, moods or events. May the individual events that life brings to man find this or that, tragic or joyful outcome: the fundamental struggle that the eternal fights in the human breast always arises anew. Naturalistic art can only depict the individual, self-contained circles of struggle. For only these belong to the world of reality. In order to depict the primal struggles, the imagination must go beyond this reality. It must depict in a higher, ideal sphere as complete what reality never brings to a conclusion. The philosopher can do this in ideas, the artist in pictures. At a certain level of civilization, poetic imagination depicts these eternal struggles in the soul in the form of mythological and legendary figures. This divine or legendary world is nothing other than an image of what goes on at the bottom of the human mind. If the poet wants to depict the reign of the eternal, he must detach it from the contingencies of human life, from the joys and sorrows of everyday life. His figures will still be human, but human beings stripped of the contingent.

Ludwig Jacobowski has set himself such a supreme artistic task in his latest work: “Loki. Roman eines Gottes” (Bruns Verlag, Minden i. W. 1899). Two powers are constantly fighting in every human breast, a hot, heavy, life-and-death struggle. The one contains: kindness, love, patience, friendliness, beauty; the other: hatred, enmity, anger, hostility and the element that, in its strength, always forgets the soft forms of beauty. The poetic spirit of an earlier cultural stage contrasted the two powers in the Nordic deities Balder and Loki. Ludwig Jacobowski has depicted them again in his novel. The ancient Nordic deities served him as models for his characters. But the characters that the Nordic saga placed in these deities are no more than a starting point for Jacobowski. For the powers fight differently in the modern soul than in that of prehistoric man. Modern man leads a more profound life than that of prehistoric man. The man of an earlier age imagined the forces that ruled within him to be similar to the forces of nature that he perceived with his senses in the outside world. For the modern man, these forces take on a more spiritual content. This change in man's consciousness of himself corresponds to the transformation that Jacobowski's imagination has carried out with the figures of the saga. Loki's battle against the gods in the Norse saga appears like a natural process, invented by the imagination that feeds on sensual reality. Jacobowski portrays him as a personification of what moves the modern human soul. The poet has thus deepened the saga. He has described a battle that arises from love. Balder and Loki love Nanna. But Balder loves as love itself loves; he loves with a passion that is free of selfishness. With the love that Goethe has in mind when he says: “No self-love, no self-interest lasts, before their coming they have shrunk away. We call it: being pious!” Loki loves like selfishness loves, which celebrates the festival of the highest self-indulgence in love. The modern poet depicts the eternal struggle between egoism and selflessness. It is the struggle that the modern soul fights out in all its depth; the struggle that forms the content of the conflicting world views of the present. Jacobowski views this struggle with the calm that comes from the objective imagination of the true poet. And from this objectivity, he has created a philosophical work of the first order. He has thus found a higher expression for the modern soul than his contemporaries, who are forever groping and experimenting, can find.

Stuttgart 1898, Fromanns Verlag

One of the most interesting developments in the intellectual evolution of recent decades has undoubtedly been the change in our appreciation of “ideals”. Unconditional veneration has given way to doubt. Today we perceive this veneration as prejudice and ask about the conditions in the human organization that cause us to turn our feelings to a field that in reality corresponds to nothing. Even the highest of ideals, the concept of God, has become questionable to us. In her novel “In the Struggle for God”, which touches on the deepest tasks of contemporary culture, Lou Andreas-Salome& said: “The highest of human creativity is that it is able to create beyond itself, looking upwards.” The education of past centuries has worked hard to prevent the realization that the world of ideals is a creation of man. This world was to have an untouchable existence alongside and above natural reality, and the spiritual struggles were presented as humanity's striving to find harmony between ideal and reality. Indeed, if a conflict between these two realms arose, the ideal was always given the right of way and reality was expected to become more and more like it. Schiller, for example, felt the greatest happiness in fleeing from common reality into the lofty, pure realm of ideals. This has now changed. Reality has proven itself the victor in our consciousness. We only understand the ideal insofar as we can find its roots in the pure and natural. If such roots cannot be found, then the ideal appears to us as a lie or as an idol that the human spirit invents because it has a tendency to seek satisfaction in the illusory sphere that it cannot find in direct life. Truth is more important to us today than anything else. We want to reveal it without reservation, even if it means destroying goods that have been considered sacred to mankind for centuries.

Women are making a major contribution to this revelation in our time. They have had to turn their minds away from the true nature of life for the longest time and have attached their feelings to goods that reveal themselves as a sham when viewed impartially. Two books that have just been published are proof that women have revelations to make to us from the depths of their being: Rosa Mayreder's “Idole” (Berlin 1899) and Adele Gerhard's “Beichte” (Berlin 1899). Anyone who delves into these two books will feel, above all, that important things are being said here, because the courage exists to express, without reservation, what is going on at the bottom of the female soul. And the second thing we feel is the insight we gain from these works into the lives of noble women who lead a hard, honest and energetic struggle in life. Rosa Mayreder told us about this struggle in her earlier collections of short stories, “Aus meiner Jugend” and “Übergänge”. The only way to describe what is expressed here is to say that the heroic confronts us in the special way that it must take on in the highly-intelligent woman of the present day. In the “Idols” the essence of love is revealed, with the clarity of the psychologist and with the sincerity of the bold seeker of truth. Rosa Mayreder has the gift of seeing the world in terms of its greatness. Her writing is like a psychological discovery. We follow everything she says with open ears, because we soon realize that only she can tell us what she says. Adele Gerhard is of a different nature. She has no great revelations to make. Anyone who has looked around in life will have experienced countless times what she is talking about. But we have probably never looked at these things with the same degree of attention as this woman does. We are less interested in what she sees, but in how she looks at it. Much more interesting than these little stories that we have encountered everywhere, in contrast to which - we cannot deny it - we suffer from a certain blasé attitude, is the author's attitude towards things. We imagine we see the author's eyes, which look at the world very differently from our own. A free soul who finds it difficult to be free stands before us. For Rosa Mayreder, telling the truth seems to be a form of salvation, for Adele Gerhard a form of martyrdom.

I would like to suggest how the psychology of the modern woman's soul is revealed in the two books in a second article.

II

Rosa Mayreder's “Idols” are the product of the sentiment expressed in the old saying: “Man's most excellent study is man.” The value of this book lies in the fact that it presents the inner life of woman from the point of view from which the philosopher would most like to view the whole world. This point of view has often been expressed in the words: “from the point of view of the eternal”. But it would be better to say: “from the point of view of the meaningful”. Rosa Mayreder's own life is the source of deep riddles for her. And the answers she seeks open up perspectives into the abysses of human nature. On every page it becomes clear that this is a woman who has used a significant amount of strength to come to terms with her own experiences. But who also possesses this strength. As a result, the work exudes a peculiar ethical atmosphere that bears witness to the seriousness and dignity of life.

The secret that lies in the sexual relationship is at the center. It is the relationship that becomes so puzzling to those who reflect on the relationship between individuality and the whole. What is it in the opposite sex that draws us to it, in order to seek in it the completion of our own being? Rosa Mayreder presents the attraction to the opposite sex in all its power; but at the same time she shows the element that intervenes between the souls of man and woman. At bottom, individuality cannot go beyond itself. There is something that opposes the assimilation of the alien soul. It is the image of the other that comes to life in our own being. What happens when the cool, sober observer of the world compares his idea of a man loved by a woman with the image that presents itself in the female psyche itself as the reason for her love? This love awakens in one man, and it does not stir in countless others. That cool observer knows nothing of the cause of this love. And he cannot know anything about it. For what the woman loves is not an object of cool observation; it is a being that is born out of her love, it is not the strange man, it is the idol, the image of this man. Gisa loves Dr. Lamaris. “When this man entered, yes, the moment I saw him for the first time, he seemed so strangely familiar to me, so familiar, as if I had known him for a long time. And after he had spoken to me for a few minutes, polite, meaningless words, like any young man addresses to any young girl, I suddenly got the impression that I was having a great time, that the whole company, which was standing and sitting around rather leathery, was animated as never before. And how different the real Dr. Lamaris was from the idol Gisas! What a contrast there was between the two natures in all the moments in which they met! The “idea” of a radiant inner life often returned later, but never in his presence. It could not tolerate contact with reality. Reality stared at him with hurtful impressions that “burrowed into my soul like pinpricks.”

Gisa's entire world of perception is rooted in the view that the right person relates to the world in a way that corresponds to the most fundamental inclinations of his or her nature. The doctor, on the other hand, views all relationships from a different perspective. A girl should be pious because it is the best way for her to adapt to life. Gisa says: “You are religious or irreligious because of an inner state; but not because you should or shouldn't. So what does it mean to say that a girl should be pious?” The doctor, however, says: “It means that it is not beneficial for a female psyche to do without the aids that religion provides.” “So religion from the point of view of soul diet, of psychic hygiene?” the girl replies. This point of view is hateful to her. “It makes everything flat and philistine!” Lamaris knows only one thing: ”Nevertheless, civilized humanity will have to learn, if it is not to fall into complete ruin, to look at life exclusively from this point of view; it will have to re-evaluate all emotions from this point of view. Love too, and love in the first place. For since it is love that usually decides the fate of future generations, it happens all too often that the union of two people based on a love affair is something positively outrageous. It is a sentimental aberration to present love as the most desirable basis for marriage. The illusory character of this affection makes those who are affected by it completely incapable of making their choice according to rational reasons, namely in the sense of racial improvement.” One sees a second idol. The woman, whose sexual instincts have become spiritualized into a love fantasy, places her fantasy image between herself and the man she seeks. The man with the culture of reason places an abstract cultural idea in the same place. The rest of the story shows that Lamaris also has a deep affection for Gisa. However, he does not follow this inclination. This is because he comes from a family that includes mentally deranged members, and he himself has a profession that particularly demands his intellect. The spirit that lives in his organism must not be allowed to unite with that of a girl who also strives for spiritualization. That is why he marries a healthy girl with little education. It is precisely his principle that “men who live strongly at the expense of the brain should marry women from spared social classes – for the sake of the offspring.” The best way to see how this idol relates to his real emotional life is to see that his wife bears a striking resemblance to Gisa. His mind sought Gisa; his intellect determines his life.

The magic of Rosa Mayreder's book lies in the way the poet knows how to place human experiences in the great context of the world. Her artistic intuition always leads her to see a detail within a whole in a way that allows us to perceive the depths of life. The truly noble soul must be recognized in this. This is how I would like to justify saying that Rosa Mayreder sees things with greatness. The way she captures the problem of love seems to me to be different from that of other poets. Usually, we are presented with the external manifestations of love; Rosa Mayreder goes to the essence of love, one might say to its “thing in itself”. The enlightenment she has given herself about her own heart has sharpened her view of humanity as such. In the history of the development of the mind, one will no longer be able to ignore the form that this artist has given to human experiences.

III

Adele Gerhard's tasks are different. The four sketches “Beichte”, “Gönnt mir goldene Tageshelle”,¹ “Ebbe” and “Der Ring an meinem Finger” show that her interest is not in the colorfulness of life, but in the contours. These short novellas seem like [charcoal drawings]. And the intellectual conscience of the woman gave birth to them. The tragedy of female love is expressed in them. It arises from the contradiction between the situation in which women find themselves by virtue of their nature and the demands that life experiences awaken in them. Love draws women to men; they become attached. They impose duties on them that undermine their individuality. The woman described in the last story is the most significant from this point of view. “I am constantly looking for a way out, but I can't find it. The nights torment me with their heavy, exciting dreams. The ring on my hand starts to pinch me. I look at my child, it grabs my hand: Mama stays with Johanne. I kiss it. But I am also here, something inside me calls urgently, and I want my right - my right, which you call wrong.” Women who had to enter into a relationship as much as they had to long for it after they had experienced it are portrayed here. The author is a woman who recognizes the profession of woman as a way of life and who constantly feels the barriers that limit this profession. Here, nature seems to be hostile to man as a demon.

The poignant nature of this thought arises from the fact that there is no way to resolve the contradiction that has been identified. Has nature assigned the role of eternal martyr to women? I see that in these novellas this contradiction appears as terrible and tragic as possible; but I do not see any indication that would allow us to hope for a solution. Schopenhauer's philosophy, applied to the consciousness of women, is brought to life in this little book. Rosa Mayreder seeks to reveal the essence of love; Adele Gerhard portrays the catastrophes of the love idol. The fact that both books appeared at almost the same time is characteristic of the culture of the time. The “Idols” seem like an explanation of “Confession”. Is it any wonder that the “idea of a radiant inner life” cannot tolerate contact with reality and that the “hurtful impressions” of this reality bore into the soul “like pinpricks”? Dr. Lamaris finds: “For since it is love that usually decides the fate of future generations, it happens all too often that the union of two people based on a love affair is something downright outrageous.” Adele Gerhard starts from the point of view that such principled views appear shallow and philistine to women before they are married, because they are completely dominated by their idols. After marriage, reality pushes the idol back in two ways. The idol, to which the female personality has become completely lost, is destroyed, and the right of one's own individuality asserts itself again; and the prospect of the next generation, which before could only be a matter of the mind, then, when this generation enters life, becomes a matter of the heart. The duties towards one's offspring are now not only demanded by reason, but felt by the heart. And women are faced with the necessity of sacrificing their individuality to a foreign entity once again.

Laura Marholm has claimed that the women's issue is essentially a men's issue. She claims that women are naturally drawn to men in order to fulfill their essence. Rosa Mayreder shows that this search is influenced by an idol, thereby putting the “men's issue” in its place. Adele Gerhard speaks of the tragedy that the idol of love leads to; and with that it would be clear that men are an unsatisfactory solution to the women's issue.

• 1. We published this sketch some time ago in the “Magazin für Literatur> [No. 38, 24.9.1898]

I

Since the publication of his poem “Sturm” in 1888, John Henry Mackay has been called the “first singer of anarchy”. In his book “Anarchisten” (1891), which describes the social currents of the late 19th century in a way that is more transparent, comprehensive and based on a deep knowledge of the cultural factors of our time than any other book, he emphasized that he was proud of this name. And he has every right to be proud of it. For through him, the world view that is capable of freeing man from the fetters that prejudice and violence have imposed on him for thousands of years has found its poetic expression. What it means that he has put his poetic power at the service of this world view can be seen from the words with which he introduces his “cultural portrait from the end of the century: The Anarchists”. “In no other area of social life is there such a hopeless confusion, such a naive superficiality, such a dangerous ignorance as in the area of anarchism. The mere uttering of the word is like waving a red flag - in blind rage, most people rush at it without taking the time to calmly examine and consider it.” The anarchist's conviction is nothing other than that one person cannot rule over the thoughts, desires and feelings of another, that only a state of communal life can be fruitful in which each person is able to determine the direction and goal of his or her own actions. Until now, everyone thought they knew what was good for everyone in the same way. And they wanted to organize community life in such a way that the “ideal of man” that they had in mind would be achieved. But how can Hinz know whether it is right for Kunz to realize the “ideal of man” that Hinzianism considers to be the “truly ideal”? Religion, the state, laws, duty, justice, etc. have come about because Hinz believed he had to tell Kunz how he – Kunz – could achieve his goal. Hinz has thought of everything for Kunz, except for one thing: that if Hinz shows Kunz the way to his happiness, he takes away from Kunz the opportunity to take care of his own happiness. But that is precisely what anarchism wants to do: to make Hinz realize that he will best take care of Kunz if he lets him be happy in Kunz's way, not Hinz's.

J. H. Mackay has given this view a beautiful expression in the poem “Anarchy” (on p. 444 of this collection):

Always reviled, cursed – never understood,
you have become the nightmare of this age —
They call it the dissolution of all order,
you are and struggle and never-ending murder.

O let them scream! - To them who never sought
To find the truth behind a word,
The true meaning of the word is also denied. They will remain blind among the blind.

But you, word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
That says everything I strive for restlessly,
I give you to the future! - It is yours,
When everyone finally awakens to themselves.

Will it come in the sun's rays? — In the roar of the storm?
I don't know - ... but it appears on earth! —
“I am an anarchist!” - ‘Why?’ - ”I do not
not rule, but also not be ruled!» —

It is sad that it has to happen: But it is necessary to say it again and again that true anarchism has nothing to do with the ridiculous behavior of those unfortunate and unclear fellows who seek to overcome the current social order by force. No, this “anarchism” is nothing more than the docile pupil of these same social institutions, which have always sought to make people understand their ideals of “religion, nationality, state, patriotism, law, duty, right, etc.” through inquisition, cannon and prison. The true anarchist is opposed to all measures of violence, even those that impudently claim the title of “anarchism.”

True anarchism wants the same opportunity for the free development of the personality. And there is no greater restriction of the personality than to try to teach it by force what it should be.

It is not my intention here to refute the objections of all the clever people who regard this avowal of the anarchists as a “pious belief” and point out that the whole of political economy demonstrates the refutation of this belief. Anarchism has a large body of literature that builds its economic foundation better than the advocates of state socialism or any other form of socialism are able to do for theirs. One need only read Tucker's excellent writings to be convinced of this.

But it is not the foundation of true anarchism that interests me here, but J.H. Mackay's position within it.

It is a stroke of luck of the first magnitude that this anarchistic world view has found a singer in Mackay. It may be left to future ages to judge what the enthusiastic and inspiring poems of this man have contributed to the world view of the future. But it behooves us to say that this man, who has undergone difficult and rare struggles to rise to the anarchist confession, should not be taken one-sidedly as a “poet”. John Henry Mackay is a cultural factor within the current development of the European intellectual life. And he has every right to say of the volume of his poems under discussion here: “More than once a sentimentality, a self-deception, an exuberance has elicited a smile from me as the pen went through the pages, changing a word here and there - but always only a single one on purpose - into another. But this volume represents a development, and for that very reason, arbitrary gaps should not be torn into its independently created structure, quite apart from the fact that it was the desire to give a complete picture of this development that this edition owes its existence to in the first place. Therefore, the stronger may try to hold the weaker or the one may fall with the other – in any case, the claim should appear fair to the discerning: that a whole person may demand to be taken as a whole.»

In a future essay, I will show to what extent this statement is justified, especially in the case of J. H. Mackay.

II

It is the energetic struggle of a strong personality that is expressed in J. H. Mackay's “Gesammelte Dichtungen”¹

We are confronted with the noble sensibilities of a man who can only be satisfied when he has reached the height of human existence, where he can feel his own worth as clearly as possible. The highest nobility of the human soul does not lie in a humble, devoted attitude. It lies in the proud awareness that one cannot place oneself high enough. People with such a consciousness feel the great responsibility that the personality has towards itself. They do not want to omit anything that is suitable for developing all the wealth of their talents. For them, human dignity consists in the fact that man must give himself his own value, his own meaning. Humble, devoted natures seek an ideal, a deity that they can worship and adore. For they feel, by their very nature, small and want greatness to be given to them from outside. They do not feel that man is only the pinnacle of nature when he makes himself into one. Their estimation of the world is not the highest. Those who choose a hero “to whom they work their way up the paths to Olympus” ultimately value existence as being of little worth. Those who feel the obligation to make the most of themselves so that their essence contributes to the general value of the world, value it more highly. This obligation is the source of the self-respect of noble natures. And it is also the source of their sensitivity to any foreign intervention in their own self. Their own self wants to be a world unto itself so that it can develop freely from within. Only from this sacred regard for one's own personality can the esteem for the foreign ego also arise. Those who want the possibility of free development for themselves cannot even think of interfering in the world of the foreign personality. And with that we have given the anarchism of noble natures. They strive for this world view out of inner, spiritual necessity.

We follow the path of such a nature in J. H. Mackay's poetry. Only people with a deep soul and fine sensibilities follow this path. It is their nature to see everything in its true greatness. That is why they are also allowed to seek the greatness of their own self. It is true that proud natures usually grow out of a sentimental mood of youth. That they become effusive when they express their feelings towards things. And this sentimentality, this exuberance, is a feature of Mackay's youthful poetry in abundance. But it would be a sad state of affairs for a youth that could not be sentimental, not exuberant. For in such a disposition of mind it is announced that man will recognize the true meaning of things in his later development. He who does not see things in their romantic splendor in his youth will certainly not see them in their truth later. The great things in the world will only escape us if our soul's eye is not attuned to their greatness. But such a disposition leads people in their youth to see things in a more ideal light than they really radiate. And when we can feel with Mackay when he says: “I do not love this youth. It was not cheerful, not free enough, not open enough,” we feel no less his other words: ‘But I have respect for it, for its tireless struggle, its silent self-confidence and its lonely struggle.’ It is precisely the exuberance of youth that gives him the right to feel self-sufficient today. A self-confidence that does not arise from such a disposition inspires us with little confidence. Only those who feel the need to see the world as something lofty and worthy of veneration will have the strength to seek the valuable within themselves. A sober youth will develop into a maturity that underestimates things; an exuberant youth will develop into a true appreciation of the whole world.

This is how Mackay's later, self-liberated nature is foreshadowed in his youthful poetry. His descriptions of nature show his tendency to see things in the light of greatness. When he sings of Scotland's mountains in his first poem, “Children of the Highlands”, it sounds like a demand of the later life ideal:

Like a virgin untouched,
never seduced by love,
To give herself to a man
and to bow her head,
So proud and stiff, so powerfully strong,
Her noble limbs full of marrow,
And never faltering in her courage
In silent splendor Mull rests island.

A poem such as “Über allen Wipfeln” seems to us to have been inspired by a true piety that has the need to be everything to the world that it can be. The poet wrote it during a visit to Ilmenau, in memory of the feelings that Goethe's soul experienced in the same place:

Are these the paths? And you may walk them
Is that not great, unnameable happiness?
And do you not feel how the breath of these winds
carry you back to that distant time?
- You think - and silently you walk the old tracks;
A song hovers on your lips - a song!
You feel the melancholy, how it gently, gently
once surrounded him – and now surrounds you too.

Anyone who can feel the greatness and beauty of the world in this way also has the full right to speak the words that we encounter in Mackay's “Storm” (1888) in later years:

I lift myself up! - Above the others
Rises high and free my proud self!
How long has it taken - after how long a journey?
until I finally found myself!
Now I wander alone. The world seems different to me
The world since I no longer give myself to it:
No laughter laughs to me, and no weeping weeps to me,
I am no longer a “one” - only I am I!
I know nothing more today of that delusion,
the last that forced me into its yoke:
The flag that is called love fell from the tired hand
is called love. - You laugh? Crush me, then!

Anyone who has been able to appreciate the world will also respect the part of the world that he himself is allowed to work on, if it is worthy of appreciation: his own self.

The depth of Mackay's empathy with every human personality is demonstrated by the deeply moving poem “Helene”. It describes a man's love for a fallen girl. If you follow the human ego into such depths, you will also gain the certainty of finding it on the heights.

The only thing that is justified about the belief in God is the human feeling that is inherent in it, which strives for a saint. Only a person who has the need for holy, pious feelings also has the right to atheism. Anyone who denies God only because he does not have the urge for the holy, his atheism appears stale and superficial. One must be capable of being pious, according to one's disposition: then one may be content with the de-divinized world. For one has not simultaneously eradicated the greatness of the world with the divine. What great religious sentiment lies in Mackay's poem “Atheism”.

Perhaps when once the weary eyes break,
When the dark night of death descends,
That a prayer then my lips speak,
that never in life the mind had thought.

Perhaps that I depart with a lie
from a being that has only known truth,
When I suffer the last pains of life
in fear and night and madness bound.

Then my spirit succumbed; then my will broke!
Then reason fled! - But if I can,
Then the last cry, the shrill one, will still be heard,
Then the last beat of the heart will still proclaim:
“I never believed in a God above,
The liar or the fool only give us. I die – and I know of nothing to praise
Perhaps only one: that we live only once!"

We are born into a world that wants to sweep us away with its eternal waves. The thoughts and will of those who came before us live on in our blood. The ideas and power of those around us exert countless influences on us. In the midst of all the hustle and bustle around us, we become aware of our own selves. The more we manage to take the rudder of our life into our own hands, the freer we are. The man who presents us with his poems here strove for such self-liberation. And he considers it his good fortune that he has found himself:

O world, how far you are!
I am drawn over your mountains.
But time, the minion, holds me back.

O man, how small you are!
you can only lift yourself up high
When you have learned to live only for yourself.

O illusion, how great you are!
I never gave myself to you,
And I conquered the fate of silence.

My ego, you raise your head!
You were a child and became a warrior.
He who always believed in himself remains the victor!

This poem from the last part of the “Collected Poems” from the “Strong Year” expresses the attitude of a person who has found himself.

It is from such feelings that a deep resentment of a social order arises that seeks the salvation of the world in erecting all possible barriers around man. The poet Mackay wages war with such an order, the noblest, bloodless war, which fights only with the one weapon that brings people to recognize their true nature. For such a war is nourished by the belief that people free themselves to the extent that they feel the need for their freedom.

A dog is one that knows a master!
But we are not masters and we are not servants!
impudent insolence dares to call
another man, who has the same rights
as he once had in the cradle of life!
— Let everyone see if he can walk,
But no one should be so dog-like as to bend
His knee in fear of another man.

Let every man's forehead be raised equally high,
Whether it be poor or rich!
I will have my right, you may praise yours:
For me, for you, for all it is the same...

(Collected Poems, $. 445)

Mackay may be quiet when others call him a poet of tendency, because as an artist he expresses a world view. Whose whole personality is so intertwined with this world view as his, he expresses it like another person expresses the feeling of love that he feels. For whoever has fought for a world view expresses it as his own being. And truly, it is no less worthy to express humanity's deepest thoughts and feelings than the inclination towards women or the joy of the green forest and the singing of birds.

We see the creator of the great cultural painting “The Anarchists” growing in the volume before us. Those who want to get to know him, how he struggled to realize the ideas in which he sees the liberation of humanity, should reach for these “Collected Poems”. They will feel that clarity is born out of suffering and disappointment. But they will also see the great path of liberation that alone brings man the self-satisfaction that can establish his happiness.

• 1. . Unfortunately, the title of the book discussed here was omitted in the first part of this essay. I am adding it here: “Gesammelte Dichtungen von John Henry Mackay. Mit der Photogravure des Dichters” (Zurich and Leipzig, Karl Henckell & Co).

Until now,¹ he who sought a book on the literary development of Germany in the first half of this century, despite the many excellent achievements of others, had to resort to Georg Brandes' «Hauptströmungen der Literatur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert» (Main Currents of Literature in the 19th Century). For only here was the connection between literary phenomena and the whole of intellectual life presented by a strong personality who had a relationship to the ideas of the time, to the moving psychological and ethical forces. It is now safe to say that S. Lublinski's work “Literature and Society in the Nineteenth Century” changes this fact. We believe that this will become the book that satisfies all those who have previously only found what they were looking for in Brandes' work.

It was unfortunate in two respects that Brandes' work was decisive in the sense described. Even though the Danish literary historian has, in a rare way, placed himself in the [intellectual life] of Germany, he still takes his point of view from outside it. In the end, he describes as a Dane must. There is another, more important point. Brandes is a fine psychologist. But a psychologist who has been completely unaffected by the insights of modern scientific observation. For him, the mind is still a being in its own right. The soul has something ineffable about it. The piece of physiology that the new natural science has incorporated into psychology is missing from his work. He describes the leading figures as if they were purely spiritual beings. For example, he has given an incomparable account of the psychology of romanticism. But the Romantics have something shadowy, ethereal about them. Everything is motivated by the spiritual in itself. That is no longer possible today. Our psychological insight has gained consistency through natural science. Therefore, some things in Brandes' psychology seem to us like an arbitrary apergu. The view of the “eternal, iron laws” according to which the spirit of its existence must also complete circles is missing.

S. Lublinski is a modern, educated man. He relies on the insights provided by natural science and sociology. It is apparent everywhere that he represents the spirit of the departing century. One would certainly like to see more natural scientific knowledge. The educational element that has emerged from the solid German cultural development of the first half of the century is evident in the book, as is the approach that one gains from an insightful immersion in German philosophy. However, this was also present in the minds of such people as F. Th. Vischer, Carriere and Hettner. What was missing in their case was the influence that natural and social science can provide today. Lublinski has incorporated this influence into his approach. We would like to see this to an even greater extent. From some of the statements taken from the field of natural knowledge, it is clear that our author is not yet fully at home in the way of thinking of modern world view. But this is insignificant in view of the fact that he has a modern view of nature in his body.

In addition, the book is written by a man who has something to say about the things he writes about. We are interested in the author of the book, not just in the content of the work. This is what makes Lublinski's presentation a modern creation.

The special chapter “Literature and Society” grows out of the whole of cultural life. Nothing is missing that needs to be drawn upon to explain the activity of the leading minds on the one hand, the physiognomy of taste on the other. With fine tact, science, philosophy, politics, and social life are called upon to give the overall picture its external colors. Lublinski is a master at drawing upon illustrative examples. He seems particularly adept at citing facts that serve to substantiate the truths he expresses. For example, how vividly the German public is characterized by the position it took towards Kotzebue! How subtly Heine's idiosyncrasy is pointed out by a statement that this poet made to Adolf Stahr. And yet, as is the case with so many literary historians, the author's preliminary work does not intrude on us in an obtrusive manner. Lublinski has allowed the results of this preliminary work to mature and bear fruit before presenting them to us.

In contrast to the ingenious Brandes, we can apply the epithet ingenious to Lublinski. A sense of solidity runs through the work. The point of view is lofty, and yet it reads like a simple story. Such books are proof that we have once again reached the level of descriptive art that makes Gutzkow's literary-historical writings so delightful.

We have here a subtle observer and a courageous critic. It is by no means common to find these qualities united. One's own judgment is all too often clouded by devoted contemplation. Or contemplation suffers from the obstinacy of an often quite arbitrary aesthetic standpoint. The editors of literary history have achieved the most incredible things in these two directions, especially in our time. In Lublinski's work, the judgment arises from calm observation, and no prejudice can disturb his immersion in the facts.

Lublinski never allows the greatness of the personalities he portrays to overwhelm their individuality. He presents Kleist as the first great, perhaps the greatest, “poet that the nineteenth century produced in Germany”, but that does not prevent him from pointing out the poet's faults. A remark like this gives us a glimpse of how deeply Kleist's character was: “Kleist was undoubtedly the first pinnacle of Romanticism. He fulfilled almost all the requirements of the school: he unleashed the darkest, most mysterious forces of human nature, which he simultaneously subjected to the rigid constraints of a concise, chiseled art form with tremendous willpower. He was at the height of his age's education, he mastered Greek and Christian mythology, Hellenic and modern art forms, and in his greatest achievements he knew how to melt these fundamentally different elements into a new whole. However, there were certain limits to this path, and the cracks and chasms and contradictions that sometimes emerged could not be completely concealed, even by mysticism and the temporary destruction of the art form, because he, as a mystic and destroyer, kept himself completely away from the fog of clichés of a Zacharias Werner or the witty, scornful, playful high spirits of the other Romantics. He had not become a romantic out of weakness, out of a feminine desire for self-irony, but because terrible painful experiences had taught him to believe in the mysterious and in chaotic confusion.»

The author attempts to characterize the influence that the philosophical movement had on literary life at the beginning and in the first third of the century by providing, as it were, popular extracts from the philosophers' views. He undoubtedly also served the overall tendency of his book in this way. Nevertheless, the connoisseur of the history of world views cannot agree with these extracts. I believe that I have experience in these matters. I know that there is no philosophical truth that cannot be presented in a popular form, in a few short sentences, with a limited number of words. However, Lublinski's extracts hardly ever seem to me to correctly reflect the philosophers' train of thought. For example, in the case of Kant, he places the main emphasis on the fact that this thinker referred human knowledge to experience. The wise man from Königsberg is said to have taught the unknowability of the thing in itself only so that man would be satisfied with the investigation of this world and would not concern himself further with the hereafter. But it seems to me to be quite certain that Kant betrayed his main goal with the words: I sought to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. He wanted to preserve people's belief in God and immortality; that is why he sought to prove that knowledge does not extend to the realm from which these otherworldly elements originate. Fichte's great way of thinking is also not characterized by Lublinski's sentences. I admit that the Romantics understood Fichte in the form reproduced here. But he himself would undoubtedly have objected to this interpretation. The Fichtean ego had to be misunderstood by the Romantics in order to form the basis of the so-called irony. I would make the same comment about Lublinski's presentation of Hegel. It is questionable to me whether it is permissible to present the views of a thinker in the form in which they are reflected by contemporaries with unclear vision. For it is precisely the way in which the genuine form can be transformed into a false image and function as such that is interesting and important in terms of cultural history. However, this way can only be understood if one is familiar with the genuine form.

I would also like to mention that Goethe is not given enough credit in the book. This makes Romanticism seem like a bolt from the blue. However, it is nothing more than the elaboration of an element of Goethe's view of the world. The distance from reality that Goethe experienced after his Italian journey fascinated some of his contemporaries. Goethe wanted to live in a higher world, above the everyday world. He sought the typical, because the common reality with its individualities did not seem to him to give the deeper truth of nature. What he sought, after he had passed through the full experience of reality, was what Romanticism wanted to achieve without such a prerequisite, through its irony based on mere arbitrariness. Goethe wanted to make himself at home in the higher lawfulness, because the everyday necessity was not enough for him. The Romantics confused lawlessness with the higher lawfulness. The whole of Romanticism is, at bottom, Schiller's misunderstood sentence, which he wrote to Goethe in connection with “Wilhelm Meister”: “Man is only completely human where he plays; and he only plays where he is human in the highest sense of the word.” The Romantics only adhered to the first part of this sentence. But first, man must rise through the highest culture to a level of education that makes his play appear as the highest seriousness. He must feel the necessity within himself, have realized it within himself, then he will playfully give birth to it again with freedom.

Goethe's position within literary life in the first third of the century is so outstanding that he must indeed take up more space than Lublinski allows him.

However, these exhibitions are not intended to minimize the value of the book. If the author succeeds in completing his task in the same way as he began it, that is, if he presents the last two-thirds of the century to us in as satisfying a manner as he has done with the first, then he will have created a work that can serve the widest circles in the best conceivable way.

Without doubt, however, the part that has been published so far can be seen as a significant addition to the history of literature, both in terms of the mastery of the material and the way it is treated.

• 1. «Am Ende des Jahrhunderts. A Review of 100 Years of Intellectual Development.» Vols. XII and XIII. S. Lublinski: «Literature and Society in the 19th Century». Berlin, Verlag Siegfried Cronbach

There is much ¹ debate today about scientific methods. It is often believed that fruitful scientific work is only possible if the methods are established. Those who are really concerned with the matter in any area of natural or spiritual life can gain very little from all the disputes about methods. Only a new observation, a new thought that sees things in a context that has been ignored until its appearance, can be truly fruitful. Every time I have come across a piece of work that has revealed remarkable aspects of a subject, I have observed how little the worker cares about the dispute over methods. But I have also always observed how utterly insignificant are the works of those whose authors tie themselves into the Spanish boots of a particular scientific method. But what is absolutely necessary in order to treat a field of natural or spiritual life fruitfully is a free, unbiased mind that sees things without being influenced by conventional judgments - I deliberately do not say prejudices - and one's own view of life. Only someone who has such a view of life is able to tell me something about a thing that I consider worth reading or listening to, if the things themselves are accessible to me. I will also read a travelogue of a country unknown to me by a person who is insignificant, as well as a report on a geological excursion that I cannot make myself. But if someone presents me with the development of “literature and society” in the nineteenth century, I demand that he interest me as a unique personality through the possession of a world and life view. With such an attitude, I approach a book like that of S. Lublinski, “Literature and Society in the Nineteenth Century.”² whose first and second parts I have already reviewed in this journal, and whose third and fourth parts I would like to discuss here. I have rarely put down a book on literary history with such satisfaction as this one. A subtle observer of intellectual events and an original thinker's physiognomy speaks to me.

It is precisely these two qualities that enable $. Lublinski to identify with a sure instinct the great, impersonal currents of the times that absorb and sweep away individualities, while at the same time assigning to these individualities themselves the right share in progressive historical development. How clearly this emerges in this book in the treatment of Börne, Gutzkow, Treitschke and others. Nowhere is the historical background from which it grows overlooked by prejudice for the rights of the individual; but nowhere is the individuality of the personalities lost sight of out of a preference for the necessary historical course of events. Lublinski owes the best that he is able to bring us through his book to this impartiality.

The very first chapter of the third volume, “Menzel, Börne and Goethe”, is a perfect example of what has been said. Wolfgang Menzel is sketched out with a few, but all the more characteristic strokes. “[...] Menzel was the first to apply the standard of the student fraternity to German intellectual history. At the same time, he was the first of the new generation to confront the old generation in a resolute ‘clear fighting position.’ The position of Menzel outlined in these sentences is characterized brilliantly. The traditional judgments about Ludwig Börne are put into perspective. Up to now, Börne's critical-aesthetic view has been presented as an outgrowth of his political views. Lublinski shows that the energetic, belligerent Frankfurter is an opponent of Goethe as an aesthete, that he is the founder of a new aesthetic. From this point of view, Börne's relationship with Jean Paul appears in a new light. “It has become a fable convene of literary history to attribute Börne's enthusiasm for Jean Paul entirely to the tiresome politics. Nothing could be more wrong or at least more one-sided.” No, it is the “intimate art” that Börne saw Jean Paul as the “prophet and revealer” of.

I am in a special position here vis-à-vis Lublinski. I do not even agree with him on the facts. I believe that the basis for Börne's entire work must be sought in the political impetus. However, “the political” must be understood in a much broader sense than is usually the case. Lublinski himself says: “Börne, in contrast to Heine, was a thoroughly social person, a born publicist, but not a born writer or even a poet. He only felt comfortable in the midst of the people and did not like to dissect and explore the soul of the masses, because he would then have had to take a superior position to them.” A mind that can be said to have such a view is a thoroughly political one. Nevertheless, Lublinski gains a thoroughly new and justified judgment of Börne by emphasizing the non-political. This enables him to reject the narrow-minded politics that were emphasized in Börne's attitude. I would like to go into this point in more detail, because it shows me how the thoughts of another can become meaningful to me even if I want to grasp them differently, provided that this other person views his subject from truly meaningful thoughts.

The judgments that Börne passed on Schiller's “Tell” and on King Claudius in Shakespeare's “Hamlet” are aptly cited by Zublinski. He rightly claims that there are deeper motives behind Börne's condemnation of Schiller's poetry than those cited by the author himself. It was not Tell's dishonesty towards the bailiff, nor the murder and treachery that led Börne to his harsh judgment; rather, it was the fact that Schiller created a hero in Tell who did not make the fate of the Swiss people his own and the driving force behind his actions, but who basically only represented his own personal interests. “He who has only enough strength to cope with himself is the strongest alone, but he who has a surplus of strength after self-control will also control others and become more powerful through association.” The same reason that led Schiller to create Tell not as a figure through whom the spirit of the Swiss people would work, but as a character with very general human interests, was the same reason that led Börne to condemn this character; for Börne's political pathos demanded not an individual, private personality, but a public, political one. And from this point of view, Hamlet was also repulsive to him. This man seemed to him to be rootless in his whole attitude within the social conditions that surround him. He seems to see neither right nor left, but only to know the impulses of his own soul. Börne himself preferred the villain Claudius, who is “not bad for his own sake alone”, who belongs to the type of Shakespearean villains that Börne describes as follows: “They form a species, they bear the mark of Cain on their foreheads, the title page of the book of sins of humanity, which is not responsible for the content that it indicates.” The general human nature that Goethe sought to achieve when he sought to reach the level of classicism, which Schiller followed him in: Börne had no sympathy for this. Goethe and Schiller ultimately felt it to be a falsification of general human nature when something adheres to it from the “accidental” influences of the immediate environment into which it is born. They therefore seek to lift their characters out of this randomness. Börne seems to have perceived this urge for a higher nature in man as a lack of interest in the actual suffering and joy that man encounters at every turn. And this perception probably stems from his political pathos, just as the Goethe-Schiller ideal of the general human being stems from an apolitical, purely aestheticizing pathos. There is a great difference between the attitude of Goethe, for whom the outbreak of the Paris July Revolution is an uninteresting event compared to the simultaneous dispute between two French naturalists about animal organization, which deeply moved him, and that of Börne, who feverishly devoured every news item that arrived from the Paris uprising in 1830. In contrast to this, I would not subscribe to Lublinski's statement ($. 43): “It is a strange coincidence that Börne, this Goethe-hater, was at the same time the first Goethe philistine in Germany, or, which is the same thing, the first philistine of humanity.”

Despite the fact that Lublinski's point of view for judging Börne is somewhat crazy, the overall characterization of this personality is clear, sharp and too accurate. I followed his characterization of Young Germany and Gutzkow with even greater sympathy. Here one has the feeling that Lublinski is describing a current of thought in which he is not only thoroughly at home, but intimately familiar. Gutzkow's very own individual essence is portrayed in just as characteristic strokes as his relationship to Hegel, Goethe and the political and social movements of his time. An excellent light is cast on the aesthete of Young Germany, Ludolf Wienbarg, and on Heinrich Laube as well.

Here Lublinski shows himself to be an historian of unusually fine tact. The subject he has chosen, “Literature and Society”, requires him to weigh up the effects of contemporary trends in the individual personalities in a sometimes quite subtle and dynamic way. He has now succeeded in characterizing in the most tactful way how Hegelianism, Goetheanism, historicism, romanticism and other currents of the time were perceived by the leading minds in the second third of the century.

To give just one example, Lublinski describes the influence of Hegelianism on Young Germany. “What seemed so terrible to the young people about Hegel's system was the master's stony tower, this mighty colossal pyramid, for which he used not ordinary stones, but historical ages, all peoples and people of the globe. A young person was confronted with the following: you belong to the nineteenth century, the last step of the pyramid... Luther lived in the sixteenth century, so he made the Reformation. The mysterious metaphysical law that built the tower had the reformer by the collar, and it was not his choice, it was not his personal matter of conscience to make the Reformation or not to make the Reformation.” What matters for Lublinski's task is not that this is a completely misleading view of Hegel's world view, but that it correctly reflects this view in the minds of the Young Germany. For only because this image lived in his mind was Gutzkow able to say, with regard to Hegel's ideas: “Did a concept or a great, noble, generous soul die in Cato? Was Philip II, was Robespierre without moral accountability? Was the world spirit the prompter of all the great words spoken by men? The prompter of Arria's non dolet, of Huss's sancta simplicitas, and even of that wistfully bitter saying with which a gladiator greeted the emperor: Caesar, moriturus te salutat? This philosophical schematism cheats humanity out of its exaltation.» Gutzkow may be thoroughly wrong in characterizing Hegel in this way: he does so because the creator of the “time novel” is working his way up in him, who longs for people who carry the spirit of their time as their temperament, as their passions, as their ethos, who want to be shaped by this spirit of the time, not comprehended by the great world idea. We find the social factors, the social milieu, in the effects when we study the individual soul of the personality. What takes place at the bottom of the individual soul is to a great extent a result of the power factors in the environment, in the political circumstances of the individual in question. To understand and shape people from the ethical, religious and social factors of the people: that was the tendency that worked its way up in Gutzkow. We recognize this tendency already in his first novel “Maha Guru”; we also find it in his “characterizations”. Lublinski says of Gutzkow's latter works: “He preferred to choose characters who were either strange and abnormal or at least living in strange circumstances, which he sought to capture in their innermost essence, faithfully, conscientiously and poetically. This essence was transferred to his style, which was also of a demonstrative and explanatory nature and here and there added the peacock feather of colorful punch lines... He never made a joke for the sake of a joke or with the intention of fighting and destroying; instead, the main thing was always to explain and illuminate a strange character in a purely objective way.” In another passage, Lublinski gives further reasons why the Young Germans were particularly successful with character sketches. “Of course, the Hegelian dialectic that they had been taught, this mental gymnastics that had been transformed into psychological insight, came to their aid. And since they were portraying public characters, the principle of the interaction between social conditions and the character of the individual personality arose quite naturally."

Lublinski continues in the same style of characterization, which is both astute and finely nuanced, in his descriptions of the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s. Readers with a more aesthetic disposition will notice the author's fleeting passing over purely artistic and aesthetic questions. Lublinski focuses more on the content of artistic phenomena than on form. This historian follows what is firmly rooted in the culture of the time, what is the expression of a characteristic stage of the zeitgeist, down to the finest ramifications; the purely artistic sometimes comes up a little short. I would not call that a criticism, but rather a virtue of the book. It seems to me much better for someone to do what they can do excellently according to their own individual abilities than to submit to some so-called “objective” methodology. It may seem strange to some that Lublinski says in the preface to the fourth volume: “A Ernst von Wildenbruch could be passed over here, where the interaction between literature and society is concerned, after I had already mentioned the most concise literary representative of the new Prussian Teutonism: Heinrich von Treitschke.” I find it perfectly justified that Lublinski should assert such a subjective maxim. What he had to say could be better illustrated by Treitschke than by Wildenbruch.

The chapter entitled “The Silver Age of German Literature” is also a masterpiece. He uses this term primarily for the time of Hebbel, Otto Ludwig and Keller. In the case of Hebbel, it is particularly striking how Lublinski is able to follow this poet into the grandiose dialectic of his imagination, how he is able to characterize the “high tragedy”, the “great form” of this powerfully struggling spirit. I would like to quote just one excellent passage from this characterization (IV, p. 23): “Hebbel had come to civilization and morality from the primeval forest as a first discoverer and lawmaker, as it were. He still felt the forces of nature boiling in his organism, while his eye read with delight and terror the flaming words of law on a stone tablet, behind which the brooding thought sensed cultural treasures that could not be found in the jungle. That was the rigid and elemental, if you will, the Nordic-Atavistic in his nature. For it happened to him, as it did to the North Germans in general, when they received the moral law as Christianity in ancient times. Hebbel also took the law into his innermost being, which began to split as the young cultural element came into violent conflict with ancient racial instincts. The consequences of such struggles are well known: mysticism, moral anguish, hair-splitting casuistry, tireless probing and pondering, demonic wrestling for a solution to the riddle of the world.»

The figures of Gustav Freytag, Julian Schmidt, Paul Heyse and Friedrich Spielhagen are explained in razor-sharp lines from the conditions of their time; at the same time, their significance is weighed with a sure sense. Lublinski also proves to be a good observer when he describes the influence of the emergence of the “new empire” and the spread of socialist propaganda on the development of literature and society.

The author is more reserved and sketchy in his description of the literary currents of the recent past and those that are still continuing today. He has a feeling for the uncertainty and incompleteness that is expressed in these currents. This prevents him from overestimating individual phenomena, in relation to which the judgment of other contemporaries becomes considerably questionable. “So far, it has not been possible to produce works of high art, monumental poetry that belong to world literature or even come close to the best creations of narrower German literature, as they were produced [in] the classical period or in the 1850s.” This is how Lublinski expresses his opinion of contemporary literature. Whether he is right or not, I will refrain from passing judgment. It would be pointless to discuss whether the author of this book has the necessary distance from the present that is doubtless to be granted to him in relation to older phenomena.

• 1. S. Lublinski: Literatur und Gesellschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Volume 3 and 4 (from the collection “Am Ende des Jahrhunderts”. Volume XVI and XVII) published by S. Cronbach in Berlin
• 2. To reinforce and illustrate what has been said here, an essay by $. Lublinski

Volumes XI1, XII, XVI and XVII of the collection «Am Ende des Jahrhunderts. Rückschau auf 100 Jahre geistiger Entwickelung.» Berlin, S. Cronbach

The author of this book has set himself an important task. He wants to present the literary phenomena of the nineteenth century in their context with social life. There is little preparatory work for such a task. Literary historians have so far regarded literature as a world in itself. They sought methods to create scientific order in this world. But they did not consider that this world is connected with the whole of social life. Lublinski is deeply convinced that only those who have an eye for the whole of life understand what is happening in the world of poetry. He traces the threads that connect literature with life, from economic phenomena on the one hand to philosophical currents of thought on the other. It must be admitted that Lublinski's attempt to treat the chapter “Literature and Society” as part of cultural history has been surprisingly successful. What is usually disturbing about works of this kind is that their authors have something individual to say only about one or the other, and that for the rest they lead us through broad areas in which we can only admire the skill with which they apply their “method” to a subject that is indifferent to them. One cannot absolve Georg Brandes, the ingenious interpreter of the literary “main currents of the nineteenth century”, of this fault. For example, he has said things about German Romanticism that only he could say in this way. But he has also applied the method, which reveals the psychology of Romanticism in a magnificent way, to “Young Germany”. There it fails. Lublinski cannot be accused of such a thing. He does not have such a one-sided, universal method. Because he regards literature as only one element of the whole of culture, he always finds the point from which a literary phenomenon can be viewed within the whole context of life. It can be said of him that he has a unique method for every phenomenon. For example, he does full justice to the individual personality when this really has the driving element in itself and in [its] individual development; and he then sheds the right light on the “milieu” when the personality is only the expression of certain trends of the times. The characterizations of Heinrich von Kleist, Heine, Friedrich Hebbel and the depictions of the milieu in the chapters “Intellectual Structure of Germany around 1800”, “The Audience”, “Tendencies of Young Germany”, “The Silver Age of German Literature” and “The Bourgeoisie” are particularly successful. A highlight of the entire work is the description of Gutzkow. It cannot be denied that many literary phenomena can only be seen in their true light if one follows the lines that Lublinski has indicated so far. It is in the nature of things that one can object to much in the book. One often has the feeling that a path has only just begun and that a considerable distance still needs to be covered if a reasonably certain result is to be achieved, where we now encounter a mere assumption. But that cannot be otherwise. Lublinski has set himself a task that probably cannot be fully solved even if three or four decades are spent on it. It is therefore all the more commendable that he has achieved what he has. We need books like this, which, while not conclusive, are highly stimulating. There are certainly many literary historians in Germany who have a broader knowledge than Lublinski; but there are few who have such a comprehensive education as he; and there is no one so far who would know how to combine all branches of the sociological structure in the sense of the modern scientific way of thinking as he does. Compare Lublinski's book with that of a mere aesthete, such as Rudolf von Gottschall's “Die deutsche Nationalliteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts”. Gottschall also ventures beyond the realm of fine literature. But he is only interested in philosophical and, to a lesser extent, political currents; however, he is only interested in these to the extent that the aesthete speaks of them. The aesthetic judgment becomes sovereign in the intellectual organism of such personalities. For Lublinski, the aesthetic judgment is only a part of his overall evaluation of things. He is not only concerned with whether a work of art is significant or insignificant. For him, the real problem only begins at the moment when he has finished with the aesthetic value judgment. Then he asks himself: why was it possible for a significant work to be created in a certain period and by a certain personality? One would not be wrong to claim that Lublinski has significantly deepened the problems of literary history through his questioning.

Recently, Ludwig Jacobowski ¹ with his “Loki” a narrative poem that depicts in symbolic acts the heavy, hot struggles that take place at the bottom of every human soul that does not merge into the hustle and bustle of everyday life, but leads a deeper life. Those who immerse themselves in this “novel of a god” will be captivated by the poet's deep insight into the workings of the soul and his powerful sense of everything that shakes, elevates and plunges the human heart into abysses.

Now Jacobowski has followed up this creation with his “New Poems”*. Through them we can look into the depths of his own soul, into the experiences of his inner life, into everything that has lifted him up to the high vantage point from which he surveys the world and its mysteries in “Loki”. The great, free worldview that we encounter in the novel is deeply rooted in the poet's nature. Two character traits are inherent in this nature, which, in their harmonious interaction, always determine the significant personality: a fine, receptive sense for all the individual things that confront us in life, and a mind that grasps the great connections between the details in their true significance. We owe the fresh, rich colors that shine out at us from Jacobowski's poems to his receptive senses; and it is through his mind that the poet always points out to us what “holds the world together at its core”. In the “Shining Days” we never miss the great view of the essence of the world that lies behind the eternal flow of appearances. Rather, these poems constantly direct our feelings and our imagination towards this essence. One always has the feeling that this poet draws from the eternal source from which the best content of life flows to us.

For those whose spirit is directed in such a way, life is not easy. For every step means a test for them. The world has many secrets to reveal to them. But nature does not give anything away voluntarily. It wrings everything from us in a hard struggle. It paves the way to every goal with suffering and deprivation. But the essence to which it ultimately always leads us is that which satisfies the heart and mind. The mists of existence dissolve; and the sun of life smiles upon us. The true artist shows us this sun. Because it is the sun that, as a spiritual bond, causes the connection of things. All genuine art is therefore “cheerful”. And a sunny cheerfulness, a cheerfulness born out of the difficult struggle of life: these are the things that flow from Jacobowski's poems to us.

Oh, our shining days
Shine like eternal stars.
As a consolation for future lamentation
They glow from a golden distance.

Don't cry because they're gone!
Smile because they have been!
And even if the days are gloomy,
our stars will redeem them!

Jacobowski introduces the collection with this poem, as if with an artistic gospel, and he ends it with the confession:

Sinking arms,
folded hands,
Around me the warm,
land illuminated;
Eyelashes closed
In the flattering light,
flowing around
The brown face.

Stand in the sun
that I fade away...
Wistfulness becomes bliss,
And bliss becomes woe!
If only I had grace
And kindness and pleasure,
To bathe in the glow
The darkest breast! ...

Shining days,
Now you sink slowly!
Alas, without complaint
I look after you.
Secret glow,
That so surrounds me,
Shines forever
The blooming world!

The liberating keynote that resounds throughout the book is expressed in these verses. However powerful the individual experiences may be that inspire the poet, his mind always pushes him towards the heights of existence, towards those bright regions for which the transience of everyday life is only a metaphor. Just as every individual experience becomes a symbol of the eternal ideas of world events for the philosopher, so for the true lyricist every individual feeling, every particular mood becomes a symbol of the entire fate of the soul. And Jacobowski is a true lyricist in this highest sense. See how in the following verses ($. 56) a single feeling comes to life in a universal one.

Brown twigs protrude from a white vase
And drag heavily on the densely filled lilac.
Bright green leaves push through
through the brown branches. The wind gently brushes the blossoms,
A scent runs up and down in shivers.
The whole room drinks itself full of lilac,
And even the soul feels the blossoms softly.

Once I was so happy in my heart
suck sweets from lilac stems. —
Oh, I do it again and make children's eyes
And feel the youth in the sap of the blossom!

This diversion of the individual experience into the general is a fundamental trait of Jacobowski's personality. It works in him like a natural process of life in the human organism. He does not seek depth anywhere, he does not strive beyond the individual. This lives in his soul in an immediate way, as the individual plant appears before us as a representative of its entire species. One need only compare his poetry with that of Richard Dehmel to grasp the immediacy of his universal feelings. In Dehmel's work, the path from the individual experience to the great world connections always leads through the idea, through abstraction. In Jacobowski's work, this is not necessary. For he feels universally. He does not need the world of imagination to rise to the primal facts of the soul; every experience of the soul has for him the character of the eternally significant.

This trait in Jacobowski is inextricably linked to another, without which greatness in the human soul is not possible. This is the feeling for the great, simple lines in the world. Everything great in the world is simple; and if someone does not feel the simple greatness of the simple, but seeks the significant in the strange, in the so-called secrets of existence, this only proves that he has lost the sense of the great that meets us at every moment of life. The sins of some modern poets, who seek salvation in random, remote moods because they lack a sense of the simple, the “simple-minded”, are far removed from Jacobowski. Just as in a folk song, an everyday event can trigger a gigantic strength of feeling, so in Jacobowski's work a simple event becomes great because he transports it into the sphere of his mind. It is the simplest thing in the world; and at the same time it is one of the deepest experiences that can happen to a person, as is shown in the poem “The Old Woman” (p. 207):

The old woman

I

I have an old woman,
She lives right next to heaven,
For it is exactly ninety steps,
And children on it, a real muddle.

In her little room, clean and bright
The loud echo of the streets resounds. And slowly night falls in
Darkening on the masses of houses.

The full moon climbs over the roof,
the stars shine in a circle,
The wall clock ticks only slowly...
We sit there motionless and silent.

II

What do I have in common with the old woman?
I don't know exactly.
It can't be her coffee,
she puts too much milk in it,
I only love her baked apples,
She cooks them for me in the oven."
What do I have in common with the old woman?
That makes a narrow grave far away. There she laid her hopes,
A slim, blonde maiden. She went through life quietly,
And thought of one and that was me. And no one else realized
That she was the sweetness of my life. When I feel life is confused and rough,
Then I climb up to the old woman.
For her modest little chamber
Holds my soul's blossom within.
And when I come to her, I feel pain. And only when I leave her!

The following lines will describe the outstanding place that Jacobowski occupies among contemporary poets and present the character of his lyrical creations in detail.

II

Looking back on the “Shining Days” as a whole, after enjoying the individual poems, a unified, self-contained work of art stands before the soul. All the lyrical creations form a stylish harmony. The circle of human soul life passes before us. The feelings that are aroused in us by the sublimity and perfection of the whole world, the relationship of the soul to the world, human nature in various forms, the joys and sorrows of love, the pain and happiness of knowledge, the social conditions and their repercussions on the human mind, the mysterious paths of fate: all these elements of the life organism find expression. Nothing is alien to the personality that lives itself out in this book; it is at home on the heights and in the depths of existence. And one has the feeling that in this personality every feeling is given the right measure, the right degree. None pushes itself forward at the expense of the others. A harmonious universality, radiating from the central interests of life, is Jacobowski's essence. And his feelings are driven by these interests in life with a warmth and strength that have a personal and immediate effect in the most beautiful sense of the word. What moves all of humanity becomes, in a truly lyrical way, a matter of its own for this poet. We do not need to put ourselves in the place of a single individual in order to understand his creations; he guides us to our own inner selves. He expresses in his own way what moves us all. He has the magic wand to strike poetic sparks from life everywhere, and therefore does not need to look for peculiarities. Sentimentalism is as foreign to him as delicate sensitivity is his own; he is not a dreamer, but a powerful grabber. A rare confidence in his spiritual direction, a sure, firm feeling of the fruitfulness of his striving speaks from his poems. There is something pithy and delicate at the same time in his nature; he is like a tree that is exposed to strong storms, but is firmly rooted in the ground. He knows that he can abandon himself to life, to the everyday, because he finds treasures everywhere, even on the most trodden paths.

Compare Jacobowski with contemporary poets of note. How many believe that they will only find what is valuable if they search for the shells and extract rare, precious pearls from them. Jacobowski is not looking for shiny pearls; the seed that he reaches for, the common flower at the edge of the meadow, is enough for him. If one wants to name contemporary poets who, after having delighted us with his “Shining Days”, now stand with him in the front row, then only two names will come to mind: Detlev von Liliencron and Otto Erich Hartleben. The differences between the three poets are, however, great. And it is difficult for us to assess them when they are still in the prime of their lives, still stirring up new feelings in us every day. We can only give a provisional and very subjective judgment. Otto Erich Hartleben, the lyricist, seems to me like Goethe's description of the artist in “Winckelmann”. With his admirable taste and his cult of beauty, he communicates something to us that flows over us like ancient art. In this respect, he stands so much alone that we would rather isolate him than compare him. Detlev von Liliencron is the lyrical master of detail. His eye sees every thing in the light of the eternal. But his mind knows nothing of this eternity; that is why he tells us nothing about it. With Liliencron, it is as if we had to hear a second voice if we are to understand the coherence of his images. We must have a kind of second sight with this poet: then we will see what he gives us in the light of the eternally meaningful. Jacobowski has this second sight himself. And with it he achieves something that only poets achieve who create from a worldview, and what I must regard as the hallmark of the true poet: that the philosopher must call him a “brother poet” and at the same time that the simplest mind finds itself in him. The simplest nature and the highest spirit that can be drawn from this nature are one and the same.

Jacobowski's poetry will pass the highest test there is for a poet: to be equally appealing to the man who goes to work in the morning and can only use the festive moments on Sundays to let the serene realm of art work its magic on him, and to the true philosopher who is on familiar terms with the eternal riddles of existence. Like the philosopher, Jacobowski is a world thinker. See how he translates the great idea of Indian wisdom, that everything in the world is only an illusion and therefore need not touch us, into a very individual feeling:

“It's nothing! Just walk past the world!”

This strange word does not set my heart free.
How gladly would I pass by the world,
But, alas, the world does not pass me by!

For even if I stand in hiding like children,
fearfully turned away from the dance of the days, —
They drag me out of the corner by force,
And each one presses pain into my hand.

In a poem like this, the highest wisdom seems like the most charming naivety; the three most monumental forms of the soul reveal their innermost relationship: the childlike, the artistic and the philosophical.

Because Jacobowski unites these three forms in the most original way, I believe that as a poet he surpasses his contemporary Dehmel. He is a complete poet; Dehmel is half poet and half thinker. And two such halves make as little of a whole as a half lens and a half bean. In Dehmel's work, you will look in vain for a poem as simple as the following, which could almost serve as a motto for many of the greatest philosophical creations:

Soul, tell me, what are you struggling for?
“I am of the earth, but I long to be of heaven!"
Soul, you only achieve night and death?
“A morning red glows over nights!"

In a beautiful psychological study in “Pan” (1898, 3rd [issue, 4th year]), the brilliant Lou Andreas-Salome hit the nail on the head when she said: “In our time, many, and not the worst, turn away from the whole outer life and even despise it as a mere occasion for personal activity and self-realization, because they feel themselves hemmed in and robbed of their individual existence by the entire cultural conditions in which we live. [...] There is a search and longing for solitude in the most advanced people, in all those who carry something within themselves that cannot be born on the market, in all those who carry hope and future within themselves and secretly fear that these could be desecrated. They know full well that the great works that stride across the earth with brazen steps of victory and ringing music, century after century, arise from full contact with the full breadth and depth of real life, but until then – they also know this – many other, quieter works must precede them in white robes, with shy buds in their hair, and testify that there are human souls that are festively dressed and willing and ready for a new beauty in their lives.” On the other hand, it is safe to say that in the future, people with white robes and shy buds in their hair will be interesting symptoms of the end of the nineteenth century, people who will be studied for their peculiarity, but that the real signature of this period will be the spirits with healthy senses, with developed blossoms in their hair, who love fresh colors and not the pale, sickly white. We count Jacobowski among them.

Our healthy thinking has given rise to Darwinism and all its consequences in the second half of the century; on the paths along which this healthy thinking and healthy feeling walks, we also meet poets like Jacobowski. Alienated from the world, lost in aesthetic and philosophic-mystical quirks, we encounter poets with white robes and shy buds in their hair. Artificial poetic forms are of little value, as are bizarre, ingenious ideas. Both, however, always arise in times of powerful spiritual struggle. However, they never appear in the case of strong, original, independent minds, but rather in the case of weak, dependent minds that cannot produce original content from their souls, that have to extract everything from themselves with pliers and pumps, but that would still like to participate. Such minds are not equal to the demands and tasks of the time. They do not know any simple, straightforward answers to the questions that are buzzing around us. That is why they seek the abstruse, the sophisticated. The profound connoisseur of the workings of nature, Galileo, spoke the wise words that the true is not hard and difficult, but simple and easy, and that in all its works nature uses the closest, simplest and easiest means. Only the mind that knows how to use the simplest and easiest means, just like nature, truly lives in harmony with nature. Jacobowski appears as such a mind among the host of contemporary poets. Dehmels' artificial forms and artificial feelings seem like a departure from natural simplicity.

III

What a mistake it is for individual contemporaries to seek the salvation of poetry in formlessness and to believe that the “old” forms have been used up is best shown by contrasting the creations of these enthusiasts of formlessness with poems such as those of Jacobowski. The philosopher Simmel has written an interesting essay about a follower of formlessness, Paul Ernst. According to Simmel, this formlessness represents progress in that the artist no longer seeks the higher, the divine in art through artificialization, through the manipulation of immediate natural phenomena, but rather sees a divine significance in every experience that takes place before our senses, a significance that deserves to be captured in this immediacy. On the basis of such views, poetry that is nothing more than prose divided into verses is considered “modern” today. Those who hold such views live in the mistaken belief that the “old” forms are something that the artist arbitrarily adds to the phenomena of nature from his subjective essence. He does not realize what Goethe repeatedly explained in the most illuminating way, that the external course of events is only one side of natural existence, the surface, and that for those who look deeper, higher laws of form are expressed in nature itself, which they recreate in their artistic forms. There is a “higher nature” in nature. What Goethe has the Lord say to the angels in “Faust”: “But you, the true sons of the gods, rejoice in the living, rich beauty! That which is becoming, which eternally works and lives, embrace with the love of gentle boundaries, and what floats in a wavering appearance, fasten with lasting thoughts,” expresses the artist's mission. Only the “shaky appearance” presents itself in formlessness; the eternal becoming is full of form; it is inwardly, through its essence, bound to form. The rejection of form is nothing more than an expression of the inability to see the “higher nature” in nature, to find the subjective, stylish expression for its innermost harmony. In the face of all such aberrations of the time, Jacobowski, out of an inner necessity of his artistic sensibility, takes the safe path of the artist. One can see what he achieves with the proven “old” forms in a poem like “The Four Robbers”, which forms the conclusion of “Shining Days”. In this legend, simple simplicity is combined with symbolic allusions to the deep connections of world events and with a noble, closed form. What I said at the beginning of this essay about Jacobowski's poetry, that this poet draws from the eternal source from which the best content of life comes, is the reason why he stands out as such a pleasing, refreshing poet from other fellow poets. These others, however, only know derived sources. They are driven by a purpose in life that is unable to fulfill them. At best, they see branches and shoots, but they are unable to penetrate to the fertile, constructive elements of the life organism. Only those who direct their gaze to these fertile beings will find life's higher justification. When it is so often said that spiritual greatness leads to loneliness, one must reply that the proud, necessary loneliness that arises from the feeling of the eternal in the world has nothing to do with the accidental loneliness that arises from someone withdrawing into some isolated corner of existence. If he sees nothing in this corner but “what lives in a fluctuating appearance”, then his report cannot captivate us, even though he speaks of things that are hidden from the everyday eye. The cultural content of the world is not enriched by adding isolated phenomena to the old stock, but by leading the eternal becoming to a new stage of development. The way in which an artist who is capable of such things relates to life phenomena that appear new and “modern” in his time is evident in the part of “Leuchtende Tage” entitled “Großstadt” (Big City). Here, a spirit speaks of the social life of our day that does not see it in the perspective of the moment, but rather in the perspective that arises from the contemplation of the great laws of the world. The singers of social passions and conflicts often see only a few steps ahead. The light that falls on contemporary phenomena when they are placed in the context of a world view is what gives our feelings about these phenomena the right nuance. Modern big-city life, for example, is given such a nuance in Jacobowski's poem “Summer Evening”:

Summer evening. —
The air is soft and warm;
a distant scent from a garden,
The wide expanses of the sky are still pale,
here and there pale traces of stars;
On the street, the crack of whips and noise,
boys who are infatuated with young girls;
Children play with hoops in front of the doors,
coachmen knock their pipes;
knights on steeds, who are thinking of love,
honestly endeavor to win the favor of the ladies on bicycles, ...
And all the soft, warm air,
And from gardens a stray scent.

The poet experiences a “modern” situation; he portrays it in the context of the whole world. We do not see the city scene in isolation, but in such a way that the rest of the world plays into it. In this sense, “The Soldier, Scenes from the Big City” is a truly modern creation, in which the fate of a person transplanted from the countryside to the big city is described. Moving images pass before our soul, and from them we see the suffering of a man who is caught in the snares of eternal, gigantic fate, with the part of unreason that is in the world, and crushed. A poem like this teaches us how much a person's attitude, such as Jacobowski's, can deepen their feelings about modern life:

The mother once carried vegetables,
And when the cherry harvest came,
Then dear Liese stole for me,
as much as her little apron could hold.
How we feasted in the fields and meadows!

Mother sits in front of her baskets;
Now she is old, but happy in her mind,
So she boasts to her neighbor:
“My girl can't go wrong,
For she knows how to earn
And still puts something aside for later!"

I gave her a present yesterday
And recognized her face at once.
I stood in silence in the crowd,
until her Rembrandt feathers faded
In the street bustle slowly faded.

I couldn't move from the spot,
Her gaze burned into me.

IV

Jacobowski's ability to see the deeper connections of existence in the individual experience makes it possible for him to also poetically shape what reveals itself to us in life as chance, as blind necessity. In such poetic creation, the senseless approximation then appears as the expression of a meaningful guidance in world events. The kind of poetry that arises from such a view is usually called symbolist. A versatile nature like Jacobowski's will always push towards the symbolic representation of certain experiences. The serious play of the imagination will seek eternal laws even where they do not impose themselves in reality. But it is precisely this universality that prevents symbolism from being exaggerated in a one-sided way. For the harmonious personality always feels more or less what Goethe felt when he saw the Greek works of art in Italy: that the true artist proceeds according to the same laws as nature itself when creating its creatures. When the imagination of such a poet works symbolically, it does not do so in the obtrusive way in which many contemporary symbolists would like to force their subjective and arbitrary ideas on us as revelations, but with that spiritual chastity that allows nature itself to speak in the symbol, without distorting or contorting the inner truth of its expressions. In this beautiful sense, Jacobowski's “Frau Sorge” is a symbolizing poem:

A couple walks through the evening light,
he is a blacksmith's apprentice, she is a seamstress.

"Rosel, when we both pull a cart,
It's twice the joy and half the effort!"

And she leans wearily against her beloved;
A tear now and then runs down her cheek.

"Rosel, stop crying for your daily bread;
If it was enough for one, it's enough for two!"

He took her in his arms, asked no more questions,
caressed her warm, glowing face...

Gradually the light faded and they walked far

A woman sat down in the same place,

Looked with a gray gaze, raised her withered hand,

Threatened with the crutch, murmured and vanished...

The couple strode into the city,
Mrs. Worry was already sitting in the middle of her little room.

Jacobowski's imagination has a similar symbolic effect on the phenomena of nature. This is also evident in his prose stories. It appears so enchanting in his “Loki”. The spiritual in him grows out of the natural, as it were; it reflects its soul-stirring power back onto nature and receives from it a firm basis in reality. In the “Shining Days”, this trait is particularly evident in the section “Sun”. I will quote the poem “Shining”:

Just now, when the sun is shining,
my darling is walking across the field;
A glow passes over the field,
Catches itself, as if it were meant for her,
shining in her blonde hair.

Just now, when my sweetheart is running
over the blooming field,
Where her laughter falls down,
the stalks glisten like dewdrops,
The flowers glisten in the grass.

Just now, when the golden trace
Brightly glows in my eyes,
I see only blessings, only love, only happiness,
I see only a single glow
over the blossoming world.

And the poem “Maienblüten” seems to me like a bond that nature and the soul form in the imagination – in the best sense of a symbolist inspiration of nature:

Bear it silently when from the branches,
From the overfilled branches,
flowers blow into the pious hair,
And gently bend over,
So in thirst, lean over,
lips to lips
. See, a sweet and wondrous tremor
runs through the rows of leaves,
All the blossoms that they scatter,
they scatter blessings on you and me.

If we let the various currents of modern poetry pass us by, we are sure to encounter many a magnificent blossom. But we see only too often that beauty in the individual must be paid for with one-sidedness. It is harmonious universality that makes Jacobowski significant. He knows no poetic dogma; he knows life, and his interests end where life ends.

• 1. Not«Leuchtende Tage». New poems (1896-1898) by Ludwig Jacobowski. J. C. C. Bruns Verlag, Minden in Westf.

Born on January 21, 1868. Died on December 2, 1900

Preface to Grimm's Fairy Tales

This issue has to be launched with a sad preface. Ludwig Jacobowski, who founded the wonderful enterprise “German Poets in Selection for the People”, is no longer with us. Death took him from his promising plans on December 2, 1900. This booklet is one of his legacies. The publication of the “Fairy Tales” is one of his last works. The name of the poet Ludwig Jacobowski, the creator of the novels “Werther, the Jew” and “Loki”, and the poems “Leuchtende Tage” will always have a place of honor in German literary history. But these creations are only a part of Jacobowski's achievements. His love of the people, his zeal to care for the spiritual needs of broad sections of society, led him to work that stands alone. From his earliest youth, one of his favorite pastimes was to immerse himself in the spirit of the people. He constantly pondered and researched how the people think and write. Hand in hand with this pursuit went his efforts to make the great treasures of poetry accessible to the people. He collected the best contemporary poetry and published it in a booklet entitled “New Songs by the Best New Poets for the People”. He then set about giving the German poets to the people. A booklet entitled “Goethe” and a second entitled “Heine” have already been published. This fairy tale booklet is the third. Many wonderful things were to follow. The people responded to the laborious undertaking with the most beautiful reward. The ten-pfennig booklets were distributed everywhere. And Ludwig Jacobowski received signs of the most grateful recognition from all sides. He experienced the great joy of finding full understanding for his deed. The letters that expressed to him the benefit he had provided to those whose means did not allow for large expenditures on books arrived at his home daily. He achieved more than he had hoped. He had built on the ideal attitude of the people; and it has been shown that he found a secure foundation. - The enterprise will be continued in his spirit.