Germany, from 1760 to 1814 : or, Sketches of German life, from the decay of the empire to the expulsion of the French

Preface

The materials out of which this little book is chiefly made are as follows.

Three Articles which appeared in the c Edinburgh Review/ in the years 1842,, ,1844, and 1847, respectively ; together with some part of an Article, on the Life of StefFens, printed in the e British and Foreign Review ; in 1841 ; and lastly, a fourth unpublished Article, suggested by the third, and intended as a sequel to it. I had long ago been compelled by illness to lay it aside, and had nearly forgotten its existence, when the appearance of several new and important works relating to the period of which I had intended to speak, made me think that such an account of them as I could give might not be wholly unwelcome to the English public,

a 2 vi

PREFACE.

It then occurred to me to consider these trifles as a sort of whole ; connected together by slight and irregular links, it is true, but still pervaded by one predominant interest, and tending to one important point, — the influence of the social and domestic life of a nation on the great collective life called its History, and, on the other hand, the effect of the political character and fortunes of a nation on the lives and characters of individuals.

These are considerations of so high and serious a nature, that I should have shrunk from any attempt to deal with them, had it been proposed to me in the outset. But they grew, out of my subject; I was led into them by imperceptible degrees, and I now find myself — not without some alarm— far beyond the modest limits I had originally prescribed to myself. Yet, as will be seen by those who have the patience to go to the end of my solemn and eventful story, I have, as much as possible, kept to my calling of translator ; and, at the risk of wearying them with extracts and quotations, have secured myself behind the welcome defence of inverted commas.

It is probable that by putting all these bits of ore into the crucible, and casting them into one sym-

PREFACE.

Vll metrical mould, I might have made a more readable book, and one which I might with greater show of justice call my own. But I have an unconquerable prejudice in favour of the genuine and authentic; I have no ambition to call original what must in fact be borrowed ; and in the choice of many an eloquent and touching passage I have, I confess, been led, not only by the matter, but by the form. I have indulged myself in what I may call the dilettantism of a translator.

I quote chiefly from Autobiographies. Their value, even to the historian, is more and more appreciated ; and for one whose sole aim is to give glimpses of the internal life of a people, they are the only sources to which to repair. Till within the present century Autobiographies or Memoires were rare in Germany : she had nothing to oppose to the abundance, variety, and charm of the literature of that kind for which France will ever stand unrivalled. I remember hearing Tieck assert that there is no such thing as an uninteresting autobiography, if it be but tolerably true ; and I am inclined to agree with him. Unquestionably this is one of the manifestations of the reigning desire to occupy the attention of the public with the viii

PREFACE.

person of the author ; but it is the most unaffected, sincere, and innocent. In novels, poems, travels, note-books, etc., the reader is, in the first place, cheated, — for the work professes to treat of external things, and not of the author's idiosyncrasies; and, secondly, the writer escapes responsibility ; he is J anus-headed, and can always turn to the reader his real or his poetical face, as it suits his purpose.

But the fashion of writing autobiographies which has for some time prevailed in Germany is not to be ascribed solely to the garrulous self-display of the age; it has another and a more respectable source. The men are fast moving off the stage of life who have lived through the two greatest revolutions that Germany ever knew, — the revolt against established opinions and tastes which dates from the youth of Goethe, and the revolt against foreign domination and internal misgovernment, which may be regarded as a consequence of the former. The few remaining actors in these scenes have lived through times which can never return: they have seen the subjugation and the deliverance of their country; and we cannot wonder if they are reluctant to leave the world without recording every link by which their indi-

PREFACE.

ix vidual existence was connected with the great life which developed itself with so much energy and with such important results.

As a further apology for venturing on so grave a subject as the War of Liberation, I must add, that it was impossible to live in Germany, and in intimate intercourse with Germans, many of whom had acted and suffered in that war, so long as I did, without catching some of the enthusiasm with which they spoke of it. And accordingly, during my residence at Berlin in the winter of 1842-43, I read everything I could find on that subject, and listened with unwearied interest to the conversation of those who had shared in the ruin and the restoration of Prussia.

In other parts of Germany, though the subject was less prominent than in Prussia, allusions to the fe French times 99 were of continual recurrence ; and thus the dismal picture of a conquered people was filled up by what I gathered in the South.

In retracing these scenes, I have been surrounded by those sadly-pleasing ghosts of the Past, which people the solitude of one to whom the Present can hardly be said to exist; and words which I heard

X

PREFACE.

long ago have come back to me with such vivacity that I have not been always able to resist the temptation of recording them. Few, alas ! of the persons I have ventured to quote are living to receive my apologies. Those few will, I trust, if they know of my offence, forgive me. They must remember that they, and such as they, inspired me with the strong affection for their country, the deep interest in her past fortunes, and the indestructible confidence in her future greatness, which have found an imperfect utterance in these pages.

My German readers, if I have any, will doubtless find many errors in them ; they will find no wilful perversions, and I have had too much experience of their indulgence to fear that it will be withheld from me now.

I know that it may be objected that the splendid display of patriotism herein exhibited led to a very incomplete result, and that the remarkable constellation of men who had rescued their country, were incapable of giving to it a government such as its heroic sacrifices had deserved. There cannot be a more instructive proof that courage and honesty, united to the highest intellectual power and culture,

PREFACE.

xi do not suffice to qualify men for political action. The Germans had been too long confined to the domain of speculation, which is beset by no obstacles, and circumscribed by no limits, to be fit for the combined action in which a man finds himself hedged in on every side by limitations, and compelled to innumerable concessions; and in which that object so mortifying to human pride, some qualified and possible good, is all that can be attained.

Even now the Genial is too much the national idol ; and a more dangerous presiding deity of statesmen can hardly be imagined. To its worshipers, perseverance in a definite course is "Starrheit" (rigidity), and a concentration of the views on certain fixed and practicable objects, narrowness. The mixture of violence and feebleness, of boundless pretensions and pitiable short-comings, to which 1848 gave birth, showed but too clearly that the propensity to blind imitation, and the utter disdain of the Possible, which characterized Germany formerly, were not yet extinct. Change of habits, especially habits of thought, is a slow operation; but the manly spirits and high intelligences of Germany will assuredly in time devote themselves to the practical service

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of their Country, and secure to her a government worthy of men who freed themselves from a foreign yoke.

I have expressed in the text, but I am anxious to repeat, my earnest hope that the pictures of a conquering army and a foreign domination which make up a considerable part of my fourth chapter, may not be thought to be given in any spirit of hostility to the French people. Fortunately I cannot now be suspected of pandering to national antipathy, since that has given place to more rational and generous sentiments ; and if I had written under the guidance of personal feelings, I could have expressed no other than the admiration, attachment, and gratitude, inspired by my own knowledge and experience of France. It happens that, in the great Drama before us, the corrupting part of conqueror and irresponsible master is the one in which we view the French. That part no people has ever acted without exhibiting the worst qualities of our nature. The display of these qualities was never made on a wider scale, nor on a more lofty stage, than in the subjugation of Germany ; but we have only to look to the conduct of the English (till within the last thirty

PREFACE.

Xlll years) in Ireland, or the conduct of the Austrians in Italy, to see that no people can occupy such a position without incurring the hatred of the subjugated, and the severest disapprobation of all good men.

In disclaiming all antipathy to the French, however, I have not the least intention of disclaiming the utmost aversion to the man who made that highspirited and amiable people

" His instruments of death and tools of war

who flattered all the worst, and stifled all the best parts of their nature, and turned their marvellous talents and aptitudes into channels immediately destructive to others, and permanently injurious to themselves. A country so ruled and so occupied as France was during the reign of Napoleon, is drained of the political ability and vigour which render a nation the firm and temperate mistress of her own fate, the maker and maintainer of her own institutions.

I cannot help quoting the remarkable words which cheered the constant and prophetic spirit of a German patriot in the darkest period of his country's ruin : — " Hapta, sed trepida manu obtinentur sceptra ; omnis in ferro salus est. Quod civibus tenetur xiv

PREFACE.

S. A.

Weybridge, May 30, 1854.

# Seneca. Written by Count Minister in the margin of his Memoirs, in 1806.

GERMANY,

AT THE

CLOSE OE THE LAST CENTURY.

The authors of the works which gave occasion to the following pages * were, in their day, among the most popular female novel-writers of Germany, and some of their productions are still held in estimation. Madame Schopenhauer also published travels in France, Belgium, and England, and a little work of some merit on old German art, entitled 'Van Eyck and his Contemporaries/

* Jugendleben und Wanderhilder. Yon Johanna Schopenhauer. (Recollections of my Youth and Wanderings. By Johanna Schopenhauer.) 2 vols. Brunswick, 1839.

Zeitbilder — Wien in der letzten Halfte des AcMzehnten Jdhr- Jiunderts. Yon Caroline Pichler. (Sketches of Bygone Times — Yienna in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century. By Caroline Pichler.) Yienna, 1839.

B

MADAME SCHOPENHAUER.

This lady's life was a varied and eventful one. It was her lot to live through, and partly to witness, some of the greatest events and the most portentous changes of modern times. Her infancy was troubled by the dismay spread through her native city by the dismemberment of Poland. Then came the American war, which excited such intense sympathy throughout Europe, and stirred up that spirit by which it is still agitated. Her first visit to Paris was during the mutterings of the storm which soon burst over France. She was present at Versailles the last time Louis XVI. and his unfortunate Queen were permitted to celebrate the Fete de St. Louis. She saw the last gleam of their setting sun. She lived for some years in Hamburg, whence, after the death of her husband, she removed to Weimar. She had not been there a fortnight when the battle of Jena fell like a thunderbolt upon Germany. She has left a circumstantial and lively account of the scenes of which she was an eyewitness at that terrible moment. At Weimar she lived in the closest intimacy with Goethe; and her house was the resort of the eminent persons who were attracted to that remarkable court.

Unfortunately, from the year 1789, the whole of this eventful history exists only in brief notes and frag-

MADAME PICHLER.

ments. At the age of seventy-two she sat down to put her c Recollections' into regular form and order ; but she had got little beyond the period of her early marriage, when her hand was stopped by a sudden but placid death. The last incident recorded in them is the arrival, at Danzig, of the news of the destruction of the Bastille. Her daughter"*, upon whom devolved the duty of publishing these Memoirs, chose rather to give them in their fragmentary form, than to fill up the chasms from her own knowledge of her mother's history ; and though such a work could never fall into more competent hands, we admire the good taste which influenced her decision. She has added nothing but the few words absolutely necessary to explain the circumstances under which the book was given to the world.

Madame Pichler's work also consists of Reminiscences. True, however, to her vocation as a novelwriter, she has strung her amusing c Sketches' of the society of Vienna at the end of the last century, on a thread of story. This detracts from the air of truth which they would otherwise have; w T hile, as the story itself is of the feeblest texture, it adds nothing to the

* Since the above was written Adele Schopenhauer has followed her mother to the grave. What she has left in writing gives no idea of the acuteness and originality of her conversation, nor of the extent of her acquirements.

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SOCIAL CHANGES AND interest. The scenes she describes lose the character of a report of an eyewitness, which is the greatest merit such a work can possess. Madame Pichler is inferior to her northern contemporary in many respects, but especially in the candour which ought to preside over all comparisons of different ages or countries. She is more prejudiced in favour of the r good old times/ and more apt to lament over the degeneracy of modern manners.

It is, doubtless, extremely difficult to compare the amount of the changes wrought in the aspect of society in any given periods or lapses of time; since the mutations which lie nearest to us are far more obvious and distinct than those which blend in the vapoury distance behind us. Perhaps, therefore, every generation of men that has walked the earth has thought, as we do, that never were the traces of former things so quickly effaced ; never were the thoughts and habits, the works and ways of men subjected to so complete and rapid a change as during the period embraced by their own memory, or transmitted to them with almost the distinctness and vivacity of actual observation, by the lips of their parents or other immediate predecessors on the high road of life. Few inquiries can, we think, be more attractive than that here suggested ; in the first place, as to the

THEIR CHRONICLERS.

facts ; in the second, as to the causes which retard or accelerate such changes, or affect their nature for good or for evil. To those who believe in the gradual progress of the human race, and in the possibility of eradicating some of the errors and prejudices most pregnant with evil, it is one of the most profoundly interesting : to those of a different way of thinking, or to the still greater number who do not think at all, it is one of the most amusing. We are therefore extremely grateful to the aged who, before they quit the world, will take the trouble to tell us how it looked when they opened their eyes upon it ; especially if they write in a cheerful, ungrudging, and unprejudiced spirit, which does not discolour the present, because the eyes that behold it are dim with age.

It appears to us that this is a service which women are especially fitted and called upon to perform. They are gifted with the delicacy of tact which enables them to seize the shades of character, and to recognize the outward indications of what is passing within; and this peculiarity of their organization is kept in perpetual exercise by the necessities of their subordinate and dependent position.

Society is so much the province of women, that it seems as if they were the natural and proper historians

WHAT IS PROGRESS?

of its changes, — changes on which, so much of their own happiness depends. Like other historians, too, (deserving of the name,) their business would be not only to record, but to analyse, to compare, to philosophize ; to trace results to their causes ; to try with an impartial judgement the great cause of the Present and the Past, and to endeavour from the decision to arrive at some guiding principles for the Future.

Perhaps few of the labours of the historian would be more valuable to the cause of human progress. Indeed such researches lead us to the very heart of the great question, what is progress? and till that is satisfactorily settled, all other questions are uninteresting, blank, and objectless. For what does it signify, that in such an age, this or that country was the most powerful, this or that family enthroned, or in obscurity ? What avail territorial divisions, military successes, or even political institutions and physical discoveries, if the heart of man is not at peace in his home; if he is enslaved by the tyranny of custom ; if his childhood is embittered by needless harshness, or prematurely worn out by more pernicious excitement ? if woman have no hold on any but the lower appetites or the despotic tempers of men, and is the spoiled and exacting plaything,

SOCIAL EPOCHS.

the useless and fretful clog, or tlie timid,, servile drudge of her master ? if the high and the low live as enemies? if, in short, life is saddened, or poisoned at its core, and dissatisfaction with what is, gnaws at the heart of almost all classes of human beings ?

It is certain that there have been epochs in which men seemed little disposed to question Providence, or that human providence called Government, as to the measure of suffering allotted to them. They bore it as they might ; with the sort of acquiescence in the Inevitable, which results from absence of thought, or with the better resignation inspired by faith. There have been other epochs in which the hopes of men were high, and they thought they beheld the dawn of a new and brighter day. Such, pre-eminently, was the period just preceding the French Revolution. There have been epochs in which, on the contrary, doubt, dissatisfaction, scorn, and despondency were rife : such, indeed, have naturally followed on the former. Men had cheated themselves with sanguine dreams, were angry at their self-inflicted disappointment, or too impatient at their tardy and partial success, even to admit its existence. All these great moral and intellectual revolutions are reflected by the incidents of social life, as from the thousand faces of a prism ; the school, the road, the ball-room,

ENGLAND AND GERMANY.

the theatre, nay the very centre and penetralia of domestic life, are coloured by the prevailing tone.

The two works before us, with some others to which we shall occasionally refer, will enable us, we hope, to lay before our readers some curious and amusing details illustrative of the tone of thought and social phenomena of Germany towards the end of the last century.

The progress made by England in what the French call material civilization, — in all that conduces to the splendour, comfort, and convenience of physical life, — has been so much more rapid than that of the nations of the Continent, that fewer remains of the domestic life of the last century are to be found among us than among any other people. Less than half a century has totally changed the habits of our middle classes. In Germany, where the change is much more recent and partial, an Englishman is still continually reminded of the customs and the traditions of his childhood, especially if that childhood was passed in a provincial town. In the more remote parts, we find a state of civilization which we have been accustomed to regard as past for ever"*. The observant and reflecting traveller meets, with a kind

* The reader will bear in mind that this was written ten years ago. Though still to a great extent true, it is daily becoming less so.

FllEE CITIES OF THE EMPIRE.

of delighted recognition, some custom, some saying, some implement, dress, or viand — perhaps some sentiment or opinion, for these, too, have their day — of which he has heard his parents talk with the fond recollection of early years. He finds the garment for which his mother's hoards were ransacked; and which, once the dress of the higher classes, is now become the distinctive costume of a retired peasantry not yet infected with the rage for imitation. He will hear with surprise the traditions of his paternal house, and the sayings of his ancient nurse. In one district, he will find the undoubting simple faith of his forefathers ; in another, the feudal attachment to the immediate lord, or the blind and affectionate loyalty to the hereditary ruler, for which he must look through a long vista of centuries at home. In this or that free city, he will see the coarse substantial comfort, and the strict adherence to the manners and pleasures of his class, which once characterized our citizen. He will see in operation what to him is extinct, and will be able, in some degree, to estimate what society has gained or lost by the change.

It would not be easy to point out a field in which so rich a harvest of curious and amusing traditions of this sort might still be gleaned, as in the Free Imperial cities of Germany. Their political importance

B 3

10 KOLN AND NURNBERG.

is gone, or at least changed ; but there are vestiges enough remaining to show what they once were. \Te have often wondered that, in learned and industrious Germany, no one has undertaken a history of these remarkable communities. — exhibiting their quaint customs, as well as their political and municipal institutions, To particularize only two of these cities, — Koln, whose Koinan origin and ecclesiastical government form two curious substrata to its stronglymarked burgher character and its sturdy democratic spirit : and Xiimberg. the younger sister of Venice, whose institutions she copied, as far as national differences would permit, and whose Geschlechter (t/entes, or patrician families" 1 affected to tread in the footsteps of the merchant princes of the south.

In the former city are to be found the descendants of the sturdy bourgeoisie which once drove out the nobles, and good Catholics as they were' 1 would not allow their sovereign Archbishop to sleep within their walls, still carrying on a quiet but dogged contest with the Ehineland aristocracy. The democratical spirit, partly transmitted to them by their ancestors, partly, no doubt, the result of their contact with France, has probably led the more ignorant writers of that country into their confident mistakes, as to the love of the people for French domination.

NURNBERG.

Many curious proofs of the force and tenacity of the municipal character might be found in Koln. And in social life,, while the wealthier citizens enjoy their well- stored tables and joyous amusements, without the smallest desire to intrude themselves into the ranks of the nobles"^; while they retain much of the coarse joviality and sturdy independence of their forefathers, the people have not lost their southern taste for out-of-door shows and amusements, their singular talent for decoration, their hearty familiar manners, or their jocular temper. Koln was one example, among m any, of the old saying, " U liter dem Krummstab ist gut wohnen" — (It is good living under the Crozier.)

And indeed the government of the Ecclesiastical Electors was liberty itself compared to that of the civic oligarchy of Niirnberg. This was so oppressive and arrogant, that the tempest which swept it away, together with crowns and diadems, was hailed as a

# In England, classes are so blended, and the shades which divide them are so imperceptible, that we have lost all notion of the pride of the citizen as distinguished from, and opposed to, that of the noble. But in Koln I found it still living. I knew a case in which a brilliant and unexceptionable offer of marriage was refused by a girl of high mercantile race, solely on the ground that the suitor was noble. Her parents did not coerce her; but she thought, as they did, that it was lowering the dignity of the class to which she belonged, to match out of it.

PATRICIANS OF NURNBERG.

deliverer. The traveller, who stands amazed before the matchless treasures of art with which the patrician families encircled their city ; who looks at the gorgeous windows placed by the piety of the Hallers, the Beheims, the Tuchers, the LofFelholzers, and the Holzsclmhers, in her beautiful churches • who sees himself surrounded on every side by traces of their antiquity, their munificence, and their taste, feels the melancholy with which fallen glory inspires every generous mind. There is an exquisite portrait of one of the Holzschuher family, painted by Albrecht Diirer in 1526, which, by the courtesy of the present head of that most ancient house, is shown to strangers. When we stood before it, and thought that then — more than three centuries ago — the Holzschuhers were already a time-honoured race ; that, in the year 1291, Herdegen Holzschuher was elected to the seat in the Senate or Supreme Council, which his descendants, in unbroken line, filled down to the dissolution of the Germanic Empire ; when we turned over the vellum pages containing the effigies and armorial illustrations of these potent and reverend Councillors, we fell unwittingly into a fit of veneration for purity and antiquity of descent, unworthy of Englishmen, justly proud of the mixed blood and confused heraldry of their own aristocracy. We were ready to do homage to the modest

CIVIC OLIGARCHY.

and blooming daughter of the ancient race, who with simple courtesy placed this authentic record of a long line of ancestors before us, as to a princess of high and august lineage.

But the smallest inquiry into the condition of the people under this oligarchy soon dissipates all sentimental regrets. No sympathy with the fallen fortunes of individuals can prevent our rejoicing in the overthrow of a tyranny the more intolerable from its proximity. We have heard an aged Niirnberger contrast the haughtiness and morgue of his former masters, who never suffered their servants to address them without the magnificent title of e Hochfreiherrlicher Herr/ with the plain habits and easy manners of their present Sovereign. It reminded us of the naif wonder expressed by Madame Schopenhauer, then fresh from her free city, and full of republican pride, at seeing the young reigning Duke of Mecklenburg- Schwerin take out a flower-girl to dance in the public walks at Pyrin out. "What," exclaims she, " would the Danzigers say if their reigning Burgermeister were to demean himself so in public ?"

In later times, arbitrary and rapacious exactions were added to the insolent domination of the hereditary senate of Niirnberg. It had no hold on the popular sympathies, and its fall is spoken of without

CIVIC CUSTOMS.

regret. In Niirnberg, therefore, we must seek not so much the peculiar stamp impressed on the popular character, as the recollections connected with its picturesque streets, and with the domestic habits of its inhabitants. How strongly does every house bear the stamp of an opulent merchant city, as distinguished from the feudal aspect of Prague or Ratisbon ! How distinctly do we trace the impression which Italy, then the queen of commerce, the nurse of municipal independence, had left on the minds of these travelled burghers ! We have seen a curious letter addressed by the patrician citizens of Niirnberg to the senators of Venice, requesting a copy of the regulations of an orphan institution, which they were ambitious to imitate. Time and change have swept away both these bodies, — the loftier with a ruder and a more desolating storm, the humbler by a gradual decay. Retired from the trade which gave them all their importance, unacknowledged by the old territorial aristocracy, and disliked by the present new race of traders for their pretensions to birth and rank, the few remains of the ancient Geschlechter are become, as a Niirnberger said to us, " neither fish nor flesh," and share the nullity which attends all pretensions, the basis of which is wanting or decayed.

But customs long survive those who institute them.