Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century: Literary Portraits. Georg Brandes
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her father is being murdered before the church door—to be driven to proclaim from the altar the new gospel of reason, which she herself has once mockingly designated the world's law that two times two make four. This drama appears to me of far greater value as a contribution to the psychology of its author than from a poetic point of view.
Nevertheless, it would be an injustice to Heyse to infer from what has hitherto been made prominent, that he recognizes nothing higher than elemental nature and its impulses. By the word instinct is meant something wholly different from isolated impulses. Instinct is the inner need of being true to one's self. Therefore, it is that Heyse can consistently permit an independent sympathy to triumph over the ties of blood, and even over the closest bonds of relationship. In the novel "Der verlorene Sohn" (The Lost Son), a mother conceals, and tends unawares the innocent murderer of her son, and after he, through his amiability, has won the heart of the mother as well as that of the daughter, the poet makes him lead home the daughter as his bride. "The lost son" had been killed in honorable self-defence in the midst of great peril, and his opponent did not even know his name. Even when the mother learns the particulars concerning the death of her son, she places no hindrances on account of them in the way of the marriage, but bears alone, and without confiding her secret to a living mortal, the misfortune that has befallen her. Here, then, with the full accord of her character, a purely spiritual tie enters into the place of the ties of blood; the mother adopts as a son him through whose hand her own son has fallen; but in so doing she acts in harmony with the depths of her nature, and preserves her soul intact. It is the same in all cases where Heyse allows the personality, through considerations of duty, to repress a genuine passion, a deep love. Wherever this takes place (as in the drama "Marie Moroni," in the novelette "Die Pfadfinderin"—The Path-finder—or in the romance "Die Kinder der Welt") it is in order to maintain loyalty to self, in order not to forfeit the unity and healthfulness of the individual being, and duty may be seen to flow freely forth from the well-springs of one's own nature, inasmuch as the command not to be at variance with self is esteemed the highest law of duty. So far is Heyse removed from conceiving nature to be inimical to spirituality and duty.
In his eyes nature is all-embracing; everything that lies within the range of our possibilities, all that we perform or achieve, so far as it be of any value, bears infallibly her stamp, and over all which is not within our power, over our entire hereditary destiny, she rules directly, immediately, all-powerfully, and absolutely. Even the most unfortunate character which Heyse has portrayed, however badly fate may have dealt with him, finds consolation in the fact that he is a child of nature; that is to say, that he has not been shorn of his birthright. "If the elements of my being, which exclude me from happiness, have met and become intermingled through a great blind dispensation of the universe, and if I be doomed to ruin because of this combination, it is an unpleasant, but by no means an unendurable thought. On the other hand, a Heavenly Father, who de cœur léger, or perchance through pedagogic wisdom, would permit me, poor creature, to drift about so sorrowfully between heaven and earth, in order to accord me later a recompense throughout eternity, for my wasted time—no, dear friend, all the royal or unroyal theology in the world cannot make that seem plausible to me."[6]
Thus with Heyse, even he whose life has been the most aggravating failure, takes his refuge in the conception of nature as the last consoling thought; and thus he himself, in the most painful moments of his life, takes refuge therein, and to this the marvellous poems "Marianne" and "Ernst," the most profound and most touching of all his writings, have remained as witnesses. Nature is his starting-point and his final goal, the source of his poetry and its last word, his one and all, his consolation, his creed.
III.
What he honors, worships, and represents, expressed in a general way, is, therefore, nature. Now as he follows his own nature, it is his own nature which he represents, and its fundamental trait is to be elementally harmonious. Such a designation is very broad and vague. In its indefiniteness it may make Heyse seem, at first, like a follower of Goethe, and would be equally appropriate for the great master himself. This harmony, more closely defined, is not a world-embracing one, however; it is one that is comparatively narrow, it is an aristocratic harmony. There is much which it excludes, much which it fails to conciliate, does not, indeed, come into contact with. Not as a naturalist, but as a worshipper of beauty does Heyse contemplate the motley doings of life. It is plainly manifest that he fails to comprehend how an artist can take pleasure in depicting forms that in real life he would close his doors upon; in fact, he has himself, with great frankness, declared that he has never been able to draw a figure devoid of some lovable trait, or a female character, in whom he was not, to a certain degree, in love.[7] That is the reason why his entire gallery of human forms, with but few exceptions (such as Lorinser or Jansen's wife), consists of homogeneous characters. They have not only lineage, but noble lineage, that is, innate nobility. The quality they have in common is what Heyse himself calls nobility (vornehmheit). How does he understand this word? Nobility in all his characters is the inherent incapacity to commit any low or base deed; in the child of nature this is regulated by the simple goodness and healthfulness of the soul; in the person of culture, by the conscious sense of his human worth, mingled with the conviction of the privileges of a full, vigorous, human life, which bears within itself its norm and its tribunal, and rather dreads incompleteness than error. Heyse himself once defined his favorite terminus. In Salamander we read:[8]—
"I never yet of virtue or of failing
Have been ashamed, nor proudly did adorn
Myself with one, nor thought my sins of veiling.
"Beyond all else betwixt the nobly born
And vulgar herd, this marks the separation—
The cowards whose hypocrisy we scorn.
"Him call I noble, who, with moderation,
Carves his own honor, and but little heeds
His neighbors' slander or their approbation."
And in almost similar words Toinette, once so blinded by aristocratic display, expresses the following fundamental thought: "There is but one genuine nobility: to remain true to one's self. Ordinary mortals are guided by what people say, and beg others for information regarding how they themselves should be. He who bears within himself the true rank, lives and dies through his own grace, and is, therefore, sovereign."[9] Genuine nobility is the stamp borne by the entire race of beings that has sprung from this poet's brain. They all possess it from the peasant to the philosopher, and from the fisher-maiden to the countess. The simple barmaid in "Der Reise nach dem Glück" expresses a conception of life fully coinciding with what has just been stated;[10] and any one who will take the pains to turn over the leaves of Heyse's works will discover that the little word "vornehm" (noble), or an equivalent, is always one of the first the author brings forward as soon as he makes any attempt to characterize or to extol. It is sufficient to examine a single volume of his "novellen" to see how the word "vornehm" is applied to the external appearance, look and bearing: in "Mutter und Kind" (Mother and Child); in "Am todten See" (On the Dead Lake); in "Ein Abenteuer" (An Adventure).[11] Or in order to be convinced of the thrilling significance of this characteristic, it is only needful to glance through Heyse's two romances. In his "Kinder der Welt" all the personages that appeal to the sympathies of the reader, respectively call each other noble spirits: Franzelius styles Edwin and Balder "the true aristocrats of humanity"; Edwin in his most extravagant transports of passion can find no more exalted praise for Toinette and Lea than that they bear the impress of nobility, and when Toinette, after her interview with Lea, acknowledges the latter to be the worthy wife of Edwin, it is the same expression which as a matter of course presents itself to her; in her letter, she designates Lea "Edwin's noble, wise, and most charming life companion."