And is not the poet himself, on his Pegasus in this petty modern social world of ours, the living representative of "the last Centaur"?
X.
I have noted down some expressions of opinion concerning Heyse, favorable and unfavorable all mixed together.
"Heyse," says one, "is the woman's doctor, the German woman's doctor, who has thoroughly understood Goethe's saying—
'Es ist ihr ewig Weh und Ach
So tausendfach u.s.w.'
That he is no poet for men, Prince Bismarck has rightly felt."
"On the contrary," says another, "Paul Heyse is very masculine. He is pronounced weak by some because he is pleasing, because a finished grace has lent its impress to his creations. People do not realize how much strength is requisite in order to have this exquisite charm!"
"What is Heyse?" says a third. "The denizen of a small town, who has so long played hide and seek with Berlin, with the social life of the world, with politics, that he has estranged himself from our present, and only feels at home among the troubadours in Provence. I always scent out something of the Provençale and of the provincialist in his writings."
"This Heyse," remarks a fourth, "in spite of his fifty years and the maturity of his authorship, has the weakness to wish to persuade us throughout that he is an immoral, lascivious poet. But no man believes him. That is his punishment."
"I have never in my life been so greatly envied," once said a lady, an old friend of Heyse's youth, in my presence, "as I was to-day, in one of our higher schools for young ladies, which I was visiting, when the rumor was circulated that I was about to pass the evening in a circle where I would meet him. The little damsels (Backfische) unanimously commissioned me to carry to him their enthusiastic greetings. How gladly would they one and all have thrown themselves into his arms! He is and always will be the idolized author of young maidens."
"One can define Paul Heyse," said a critic, "as the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy of German poetry. He appears like Mendelssohn when compared to the great masters. His nature, like that of Mendelssohn, is a German lyric, sensitive temperament, permeated with the most refined Southern culture. Both men lack the grand pathos, the energetic power, the storm of the dramatic element; but both have natural dignity in earnestness, charming amiability and pleasing grace in jest, they are thoroughly cultured in regard to form, they are virtuosos in execution."
[1] One's movements, step by step to measure, Mars all one's chances. Who dares not follow one's own pleasure (sich gehen zu lassen) Not far advances.—P. H.
[2] Gesammelte Werke, iv. 135.
[3] Ibid., v. 199.
[4] Kinder der Welt, ii. 162.
[5] Kinder der Welt, iii. 210, 242, 256.
[6] Kinder der Welt, iii. 109.
[7] Kinder der Welt, i. III; Gesammelte Werke, vi. 206.
[8] Gesammelte Werke, iii. 300.
[9] Kinder der Welt, ii. 47.
[10] Gesammelte Werke, v. 201. On page 175 the word "vornehm" is used by her.
[11] Gesammelte Werke, viii. 44, 246, 321.
[12] Kinder der Welt, ii. 355. "That you are the best, deepest, purest, noblest of women"—"Poor, brave, free-born breast—bow well it has preserved its patent of nobility." Kinder der Welt, iii. 309.
[13] Im Paradiese, iii. 6.
[14] Gesammelte Werke, v. 197.
[15] Gesammelte Werke, ix. 73.
[16] Gesammelte Werke, viii. 168.
[17] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 71: "I have been sold once in my life. How mankind will now blame me if I give myself as a free-will offering in order to suppress the anguish of that disgrace!"
[18] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 40.
[19] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 5.
[20] Heyse und Kurz, Novellenschatz des Auslandes, Bd. VIII.
[21] Heyse und Kurz, Deutscher Novellenschatz, Bd. I. s. xix.
[22] Kinder der Welt, ii. 265.
[23] Did not a critic of this sort take it upon himself to get up a "warning" in the same style, against Goethe's "Faust"? "The purport of this immoral work," he wrote, "is the following: A physician (Dr. Med.), already pretty well advanced in years, is weary of study, and hankers after carnal pleasures. Finally he signs a bond with the devil. The latter leads him through divers low diversions (which, for instance, consist in making half-drunk students still more drunk) to a burgher's daughter, a young maiden, whom Faust (the doctor) at once attempts to seduce. A couple of rendez-vous at the house of an old procuress prepare the way for this. As the seduction, however, cannot be brought about speedily enough, the devil gives Faust a jewel-case to present to the young maiden. Wholly powerless to resist this gift, that is to say, not even seduced, simply purchased, Gretchen yields to Faust; and in order to be all the more undisturbed with her lover she doses her old mother with a narcotic, which kills the old woman. Then after being the cause of her brother's death, she destroys her child, the fruit of her shame. In prison she employs herself in singing obscene songs. That her lover left her in the lurch we cannot wonder when we consider his religious principles. He is, as the scene in which his donna questions him about his faith clearly proves, no Christian; indeed, he does not even seem to believe in a God, although he endeavors to grasp at all sorts of empty subterfuges to conceal his absolute unbelief.
"As this wicked book, notwithstanding all this, finds, as we hear to our astonishment, many readers, indeed, even lady readers, and is in constant demand at the circulating libraries in our city, we beg of all fathers of families to watch over the spiritual welfare of those belonging to them, to whom such profligate reading is all the more dangerous because its immoral teachings are veiled in a polished, insinuating form."