The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 11. Francke Kuno
up his studies at the university – an audience which was repeated at the Court of Coburg in 1867, when Spielhagen came face to face with his literary antipathy, Gustav Freytag.
After three years of vacillation in his university studies, he finally made peace with his father, and decided to take his degree in philology. To this end he entered the University of Greifswald and began the more serious study of esthetics, starting with Humboldt's Esthetic Experiments, and developing his own theory of objectivity in the novel. Meanwhile he read the English novelists Dickens, Thackeray, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and the Germans Lichtenberg, Rabener, Jean Paul, Thümmel, and Vischer's Esthetics. His essay On Humor and other critical works owe much to these studies. After giving his interpretation of an ode of Horace in the seminary, he worked at his dissertation, and found in Tennyson the theme for his first finished work, Klara Vere.
Having left the university, Spielhagen entered the army for his year of service. Here he gained valuable experience and information, which stood him in good stead in his novels. During this year he found time to delve again into Spinoza, whom he had studied in Berlin. The doctrines of this philosopher now had a new meaning for him and offered him a philosophic mooring which he had so much needed in deciding upon his career. Commenting on his reading he says: "I wished to win from philosophy the right to be what I was, the right to give free rein to the power which I felt to be dominant in my mind. I wished to procure a charter for 'the ruling passion' of my soul." This charter he found in Spinoza's words: "Every one exists by the supreme right of Nature, and consequently, according to the supreme right of Nature, every one does what the necessity of his nature imposes, and accordingly by this supreme right of nature every one judges what is good and what is bad, and acts in his own way for his own welfare." This principle of "suum esse conservare" becomes the guiding thought in Spielhagen's life at this time. With this philosophic turn of mind came a reaction against Byron's immoral characters such as Don Juan.
He was now confronted with the problem of reconciling in his own life Freiligrath's words, "wage-earner and poet." His pedagogical faculties had been developed by the informal lectures which he had given to the circle of his sister's girl friends. After the manœuvres were over he took a position as private tutor in the family of a former Swedish officer of the "type of gentleman," as he says. In this rural Pomeranian retreat the instincts of the poet were rapidly awakened. Enraptured with the beauty of the country he adopted Friedrich Schlegel's practice of writing down his thoughts and shifting moods in the form of fragments. As the family broke up for the holidays, he strapped on his knapsack for a cross-country tour homeward, making a détour to visit an old friend at Rügen. It was here that he fell in love with Hedda, the heroine of the story On the Dunes. He felt love now for the first time in its real power, which was lacking in Klara Vere. But this new, strange passion left him only the more a poet. In one of his fragments he wrote: "The poet worships every beautiful woman as the devout Catholic does every image of the Holy Virgin, but the image is not the Queen of Heaven."
The vacation had made him discontented with his position. All the rural charm seemed changed to commonplace. He now felt a bond of sympathy with Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and George Sand, sought literary uplift in Homer, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, and extended his reading to Gargantua, Tom Jones, Lamartine, Madame Bovary, and Vanity Fair, but declares he would willingly exchange Consuelo for Copperfield. It was at this time when Spielhagen was in unsteady mood as to his future, that he saw for the last time his old Greifswald friend, Albert Timm, who in the last three years had sadly changed from the promising student to the cynic: "'Yes,' he cried (from the platform of the moving train) 'I am going to America, not of my own wish, but because others wish it. They may be right; in any case, I have run my course in Europe. Perhaps I shall succeed better over there, or perhaps not; it's all the same. * * * Somewhere in the forest primeval! To the left around the corner! Don't forget: to the left around the – ' and the train sped out of sight." These parting words of his shipwrecked friend reminded Spielhagen only too keenly of his own unsettled career.
At length Spielhagen decided to go to Leipzig to prepare for a professorship of literature in the university. After a tour in Thuringia, during which he saw in Ilmenau a gipsy troop which furnished him with the character of Cziska in the Problematic Characters, he again took up his study of literature and esthetics. His encounter with Kant's philosophy and Schiller's esthetic theories led him back to Goethe and Spinoza. In the midst of these philosophical problems, he received one day a letter from Robert Hall Westley, an English friend in Leipzig, "a gentleman bred and born," telling him of a vacancy in English at the "Modernes Gesamt-Gymnasium" at that place. Spielhagen accepted the position in 1854, and in good American fashion followed the method of docendo discimus. Thus he finds himself again a producer.
The first fruit of his critical studies during the early Leipzig period was the completed essay On Humor, which was now accepted and published by Gutzkow in Unterhaltungen am häuslichen Herd. This, his first printed work, gave him new courage. His studies in English led him again to the English and American poets. The offer of a Leipzig firm to publish a collection of translations of American poetry added new zest to his reading in American literature. The chief source of his translations was Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America. A specimen from Emerson's Representative Men will illustrate his skill in translating:
"O tiefer und tiefer
Muss tauchen der Geist;
Weisst alles du, weisst du,
Dass gar nichts du weisst;
Jetzt zieht es dich mächtig
Zum Himmel hinan;
Bist droben du, steckst du
Dir weiter die Bahn."
These translations appeared under the title Amerikanische Gedichte. In addition to selections from Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Bayard Taylor, and others, he translated also George William Curtis' Nile Notes of an Howadji, which was published with the title Nil-Skizzen.
His admiration for American literature was very great, as his own words will show: "But upon this wide, entirely original, field of poetry what abundance, what variety of production! Palmettos grow by the side of gnarly oaks, and the most charming and modest flora of the prairie among the garden flowers of magic beauty and intoxicating perfume." The American poems were followed by translations of Michelet's L'Amour and other French and English works.
Spielhagen connected himself with Gutzkow's Europa and devoted himself for a time to criticism. Among the essays of this period are Objectivity in the Novel, Dickens, Thackeray, etc. At the suggestion of Kolatschek, an Austrian Forty-eighter, who had returned from America and founded the periodical Stimmung der Zeit in Vienna, Spielhagen wrote a severe criticism of Freytag's historical drama The Fabians. This attack upon Freytag was occasioned by the severe criticism of Gutzkow's Magician of Rome, published in the Grenzboten, edited by Julian Schmidt and Gustav Freytag. It was Spielhagen's demand for fair play as well as his admiration for Gutzkow that drew him into the conflict.
The old home in Pomerania had been broken up by the death of his father and the marriage of his sister, and the events of his early life could now be viewed as history. Out of these events and his later experience grew his first great novel, Problematic Characters (1860, Second Part 1861). This novel deals with the conditions in Pomerania in particular, and in Germany in general, before 1848. The title is drawn from Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose: "There are problematic characters which are not adapted to any position in life and are not satisfied with any condition in life. Out of this arises that titanic conflict which consumes life without compensation." The hero, Dr. Oswald Stein, is the poet himself in his rôle as family tutor and implacable foe of the institutions of the nobility, "a belated Young German" and an incipient socialist. He falls in love with Melitta von Berkow in her Hermitage, with the impulsive Emilie von Breesen at the ball, and with Helene von Grenwitz, his pupil. Because of the latter he fights a duel with her suitor, Felix, and then goes off with Dr. Braun to begin anew at Grünwald. In the second part of this novel this unfinished story is carried to its tragic and logical conclusion, when Oswald dies a heroic death at the barricades. Although most of the chief characters drawn in