Laube as theatre director.

His plays.

Die Karls schüler, 1847.

Graf

Essex, 1856.

T. Mundt, 1808-61.

To Laube, as to all writers of that time, Paris was an irresistible centre of attraction; but he was not able to visit it until 1839. His residence in France was of special importance to his subsequent work as playwright and theatredirector. On the first of January, 1850, he entered upon his duties as artistic manager of the Burgtheater of Vienna, and with this appointment, reached the goal of his ambition. He remained in Vienna until 1867; a couple of years later, he undertook the direction of the Municipal theatres in Leipzig, but in 1871, was again in Vienna, this time at the head of the new "Wiener Stadttheater." His books on the theatre (Das Burgtheater, 1868; Das norddeutsche Theater, 1872; Das Wiener Stadttheater, 1875) are valuable contributions to modern dramaturgic literature.

As a playwright, Laube rivalled Gutzkow, and even his first dramatic attempts-such as the unpublished tragedy, Gustav Adolf (1829)-revealed an instinctive knowledge of stagerequirements. Mondaleschi (1839) was a drama of promise, but his name did not become known before the production of Struensee (1847), a clever piece in the manner of the French dramatists, to whom he looked up as unsurpassable models. Laube also wrote two "literary" comedies, Gottsched und Gellert (1845), and Die Karlsschüler (1847), the latter, a play which may still be seen on the German stage. The subject of Die Karlsschüler is Schiller's flight from the Karlsschule in Stuttgart, and the author took advantage of the opportunity to express the political sentiments of his School. The piece is theatrically effective, but full of a vague pathos, which has aged more rapidly than the bourgeois humour of Gutzkow's drama on Goethe's childhood. Laube's ablest drama is Graf Essex (1856), in which Queen Elizabeth's favourite is drawn with real psychological insight. The construction of this work is solid and regular, but it is in verse, and verse was not Laube's strong point; he could be declamatory, sententious, epigrammatic, and witty, but he was seldom or never a poet.

Of the minor writers associated with the school, little need be said. A. Lewald (1792-1871) and H. Marggraff (1809-64) were no more than journalists, while the wit of M. G. Saphir (1795-1858), a Hungarian Jew, illustrates to what depths could sink the brilliancy of a Börne and Heine.

Theodor Mundt (1808-61), who was mentioned in the decree against the School, was Professor and University Librarian in Berlin, and remained practically the man of one Madonna, book, Madonna, Unterhaltungen mit einer Heiligen (1835), 1835. which, on its appearance, created an extraordinary stir. This was partly due to the doctrinaire fashion in which Mundt championed the "Kinder der Welt" against the "Kinder Gottes," and set forth the Young German ideas on emancipation of the senses, but also because the book was associated with an incident much discussed in the capital. A Berlin teacher, Heinrich Stieglitz (1801-49), who had published four volumes of indifferent poetry (Bilder des Orients, 1831-33), believed that he was born to great things, and, towards the end of 1834, his wife, Charlotte, killed herself, in the hope Charlotte. that a deep sorrow would awaken her husband's genius. Stieglitz. After Charlotte Stieglitz's suicide, Mundt, to whom she was bound by a Platonic friendship, wrote a book about her (Charlotte Stieglitz, ein Denkmal, 1835), and it is evident that she also sat for the portrait of his "Madonna." Neither Mundt, however, nor his friend Gustav Kühne (1806-88), the author of numerous stories and sketches, had much talent or distinction.1 Georg Büchner (1813-37),2 on the other hand, is still remembered by a powerful drama on the French Revolution, Dantons Tod, which was published by Gutzkow in 1835.

Between 1830 and 1848, Goethe stood by no means high in his countrymen's favour; his ideas and personality were both distasteful to the Young German School, although only Börne had the courage to attack his reputation. But to disparage Goethe was also a natural consequence of the Hegelian philosophy; in the Geschichte der deutschen Nationallitteratur (1835), for instance, by G. G. Gervinus (1805-71), who, him- G. G. self a disciple of Hegel, constructed his book according to Gervinus, his master's philosophy of history, Goethe is not spoken of with enthusiasm. The most characteristic expression of this antipathy to the poet is to be found in the writings of Wolfgang W. MenMenzel (1798-1873), a hot-headed graduate of the patriotic zel, 17981873. student-clubs, who tilted in stormy wrath, not only against

1 On Mundt and Kühne, cp. E. Pierson, Gustav Kühne, Dresden, 1890.

2 Sammtliche Werke, ed. K. E. Franzos. Frankfurt, 1879.

3 Cp. V. Hehn, Gedanken über Goethe, 4th ed., Berlin, 1900, 156 ff.

1805-71.

Arnim,

1785-1859.

Goethe, but against the Young German coterie itself: it was Menzel, in fact, who was chiefly responsible for the decree of 1835. While most of this author's voluminous writings are forgotten, his Geschichte der Deutschen (1824) has still some value as an example of the form then taken by German patriotism, and his Deutsche Litteratur (1827) is an interesting document of the literary tastes of the age.

But Young Germany's indifference towards Goethe was counterbalanced by the warmth of the Berlin circle, over which Varnhagen von Ense presided. In 1834, the latter had written an appreciative memoir of his gifted wife, Rahel, ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde, and in the following Bettina von year, Bettina von Arnim (1785-1859),1 Achim von Arnim's widow, published her first book, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. This is one of the most beautiful books of the whole German "Romantik," and an excellent illustration of the unsophisticated Romantic temperament. But enthusiastic adoration alone could not have raised so fine a monument to Goethe's genius; Bettina was herself a poet. A similar delicacy of feeling is to be seen in her book on Karoline von Günderode (1780-1806),2 Die Günderode (1840), the unhappy poetess and friend of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who killed herself in 1806. In a later work, Dies Buch gehört dem König (1849), Bettina von Arnim showed how easy it was for the warm-hearted Romanticist to champion those very ideas for which Young Germany was fighting. Dies Buch gehört dem König is a political book of liberal ideas; it was wrung from Bettina's sentimental soul by the sufferings of the Silesian weavers, by the oppression of the lower classes, by the rise of industrialism, and the change of social conditions,—and all this, in naïve Romanticism, she lays before the king-he alone is able to help and relieve. Thus Romanticism could, at this late date, be invoked in the service of political and social reform.

Dies Buch gehört dem König, 1849.

From the Revolution of 1830 to that of 1848, German literature was practically dominated by Young Germany; but

1 Sämmtliche Werke, in vols., Berlin, 1853. Cp. M. Carriere, Bettina von Arnim, Breslau, 1887, and M. Koch in D.N.L., 146, 1, 2 [1891], 441 ff.

2 Cp. L. Geiger, Karoline von Günderode und ihre Freunde, Stuttgart, 1895.

from about 1841 onwards, a change came over the aims and methods of political literature. The vague theorising of writers like Börne yielded to definite revolutionary principles, and the "Ritter vom Geiste," to whom Gutzkow looked for Germany's political regeneration, gave way to blue blouses and red caps.

518

CHAPTER IX.

J. L. Uhland, 1787-1862.

As the reader will have gathered from the preceding chapters, the most natural and enduring expression of the German Romantic spirit was the lyric. The Romantic drama never gained a footing on the national stage, and soon ceased to be more than a literary curiosity; the Romantic novel, although it gave a stimulus to the fiction of the succeeding period, had little value in the eyes of the younger generation; but the lyric remained romantic, even after Romanticism, as a creed, had lost all hold upon the nation; and it found a refuge in South Germany from the storms of the Revolution. The Swabian poets,1 who have now to be discussed, were virtually the heirs of the "Romantik"; they carried the Romantic traditions across the uninspired period of political journalism, which arose under "Young Germany," and kept the line unbroken between the first leaders of Romanticism and masters like Storm and Keller in the following generation.

The acknowledged head of the Romantic circle in Würtemberg was Johann Ludwig Uhland.2 Born in 1787, at Tübingen, where his father was secretary to the university, Uhland showed, as a boy, unusual talent, and was early sent to the university to be trained as a jurist. The rich stores of poetry which the Heidelberg Romanticists had

1 Cp. R. Krauss, Schwäbische Litteraturgeschichte, 2 vols., Freiburg, 189799, 2.

2 Gesammelte Werke, ed. H. Fischer, 6 vols., Stuttgart, 1892; also by L. Fränkel, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1893. A critical edition of the Gedichte by E Schmidt and J. Hartmann, 2 vols., Stuttgart, 1898. Cp. K. Mayer, L. Uhland, seine Freunde und Zeitgenossen, 2 vols., Stuttgart, 1867, and H. Fischer, L. Uhland, Stuttgart, 1887.