12192 to all instincts of aggression and conquest, not caring to have its thought take the lead in the world outside, it has known only how to retreat into the least essential space; and then, driven into this last corner, meet its enemies with invincible resistance. Even its fidelity has been merely a wasted devotion. Hard to conquer, and always behind time, it is faithful to its conquerors when the latter have ceased being faithful to themselves. It was the last to surrender its religious independence to Rome, and it has become the greatest stronghold of Catholicism; it was the last in France to surrender its political independence to the king, and it has given the world the last royalists. Thus the Celtic race has spent itself resisting the age and defending desperate causes. It would seem that at no time has it had any gift for political life: the sense of family has stifled all attempts at a larger organization. It would seem also that the peoples of which it is composed are not in themselves open to progress. Life is to them a fixed condition which it is not in the power of man to change. Gifted with but little initiative power, too apt to look upon themselves as minors under tutelage, they are inclined to believe in fatality and to resign themselves to it. To see it so submissive to God, one would hardly believe this race to be the daughter of Japhet. Hence the reason of its sadness. Take the songs of its bard of the sixteenth century: the defeats they bewail are more than the victories they glorify. Its history is but one long complaint; it still remembers its exile, its flights over the waters. If at times it seems to awaken into glad life, a tear soon sparkles behind its smile; it does not know that strange forgetfulness of human life and its vicissitudes which we call gayety. Its songs of joy end in elegies: nothing approaches the delightful sadness of its national melodies; one is tempted to call them dews from heaven, which, falling on the soul drop by drop, sink into it like memories of another world. One never feels more completely the secret delights of consciousness,- those poetic memories. where all the sensations of life meet at once, so vague, so deep, so penetrating, that were they to last but a moment longer one would die thereof, without being able to say whether it were of bitter sorrow or of tenderness. The infinite delicacy of sentiment which characterizes the Celtic race is intimately connected with its necessity of concentration. Undemonstrative natures are nearly always those that feel most intensely; the deeper the sentiment, the less can it express itself. Hence this charming modesty, this something, as it were, veiled, serious, exquisite,- equally far from the rhetoric of sentiment, too familiar in the Latin races, and from the conscious. naïveté of Germany,- which expresses itself in so admirable a way in the songs published by M. de la Villemarqué. The apparent reserve of the Celtic peoples, so often taken for coldness, comes from this timidity of soul which makes them think that a feeling loses half its worth when it is expressed, and that the heart must have no audience beside itself. If it were permissible to give nations a sex as we do individuals, we should unhesitatingly say that the Celtic race, especially taken in its Cymric and Breton branches, is an essentially feminine race. No human family has, I believe, brought so much mystery into love. No other has had a more delicate conception of the ideal of woman, and has been more dominated thereby. It is a sort of intoxication, a madness, a dizziness. Read the strange Mabinogion of Pérédur, or its French imitation Parceval the Gaul: these pages are, so to speak, soft with feminine sentiment. Woman appears therein like a sort of vague vision, something between man and the supernatural world. I know of no literature which offers anything analogous. Compare Genevra and Isolde with the Scandinavian furies Gudrun and Krimhilde, and you will admit that woman, as chivalry has conceived her,this ideal of tenderness and beauty set up as the supreme end of life, is neither a classic, nor a Christian, nor a Germanic creation, but truly Celtic. The power of imagination is almost always in proportion to the concentration of feeling and to the lack of events in outward life. The very limitation of the imagination of Greece and Italy comes from the easy self-expression of the peoples of the South, with whom the soul, spent upon the outside world, has very little self-reflection. Compared with classic imagination, Celtic imagination is really the infinite compared to the finite. In the beautiful Mabinogion of The Dream' of Maxen Wledig, the emperor Maxime sees in his dream a young girl so beautiful that on awakening he declares that he cannot live without her. For several years his ambassadors travel through the world to find her for him. She is finally discovered in Bretagne. This is what the Celtic race did: it grew tired of taking its dreams for realities, and running after beautiful visions. The essential element XXI-763 12194 of Celtic poetic life is adventure,- that is to say, the pursuit of the unknown, a never-ending hunt after the always fleeing object af desire. This is what St. Brandan dreamed on the other side of the waters; this is what Pérédur sought in his mystic chivalry; this is what the knight Owenn expected of his subterranean peregrinations. This race wants the infinite; it is thirsting for it, it seeks it at all hazards, beyond the grave, beyond hell. The essential fault of the Breton people-the leaning toward drink, a fault which according to the traditions of the sixteenth century was the cause of its disasters - comes from this invincible need of illusion. Do not say that it is an appetite for gross pleasures, for, aside from this, there never was a people more sober and free from sensuality; no, the Bretons sought in the hydromel what Owenn, St. Brandan, and Pérédur, sought in their way,the vision of the invisible world. Even to-day, in Ireland, drunkenness is part of all patronal feasts,—that is to say, of the feasts which have best preserved their national and popular character. Hence this profound sentiment of the future, and the eternal destiny of its race, which has always upheld the Cymry, and makes it appear young still beside its aged conquerors. Hence this dogma of the resurrection of heroes, which seems to have been one of those most difficult for Christianity to uproot. Hence this Celtic belief in the coming of a Messiah (messianisme'), this belief in a future which will restore the Cymry and deliver it from its oppressors, like the mysterious Leminok which Merlin has promised them, the Lez-Breiz of the Armoricans, the Arthur of the Gauls. The hand which raises itself out of the lake when Arthur's sword falls in, which seizes it and brandishes it three times, is the hope of the Celtic races. Little peoples gifted with imagination do usually thus take their revenge over those who conquer them. Feeling strong within and feeble without, they protest, they grow inspired: and such a struggle, strengthening their forces tenfold, makes them capable of miracles. Almost all great appeals to the supernatural are due to people hoping against all hope. Who can say what has in our days been fermenting in the heart of that most obstinate and most helpless of nations, Poland? Israel humiliated dreamt of the spiritual conquest of the world, and succeeded. Translated for A Library of the World's Best Literature by Olga Flinch. FRITZ REUTER (1810-1874) MONG the novelists of the German realistic school, Fritz Reuter occupies the first place. No one of them has come nearer than he to the heart of life, nor understood with greater sympathy the lives of the people, in whose apparently monotonous and commonplace conditions he found endless dramatic possibilities of humor and pathos. He is the novelist of the proletariat; his works are steeped in the clear sunshine of the working-day world. With the romantic moonshine of an artificial nobility he had nothing to do. His life was favorable for the fostering of his peculiar genius. He was born on the 7th of November, 1810, at Stavenhagen in Mecklenburg-Schwerin: his boyhood was passed in this sleepy, out-of-the-way German town, among such types of people as he has immortalized in his novels. His father was burgomaster and sheriff of the place, and was also a farmer; he purposed however that his son should study law. Until his fourteenth year the boy was educated at home with private tutors; then he entered the gymnasium at Friedland in Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and afterwards passed through the higher classes of the gymnasium at Parchim. In 1831 he attended lectures on jurisprudence at the University of Rostock, going the following year to the University of Jena, where he became a member of the Burschenschaft Germania. The government, alarmed by the revolutionary agitation of 1830, was on the lookout for undue exhibitions of patriotism among the student body. The riot at Frankfort in 1833 served as a pretext for making arrests. Reuter was seized, on no other evidence of guilt than that of wearing the German colors, was tried and condemned to death for high treason. This sentence was commuted by King Frederick William III. to thirty years' imprisonment. Reuter was taken from one Prussian fortress to another; in 1838, through the intervention of the Grand-Duke of Mecklenburg, he was delivered over to the authorities of his native State. A two-years' imprisonment in FRITZ REUTER the fortress of Dömitz followed. In 1840, Frederick William IV. having proclaimed an amnesty after his accession, Reuter was set free. Severe as his experiences had been, they had ripened him and prepared him for his life's work, though at that time he was scarcely aware of his gifts. He went to Heidelberg to resume his legal studies; but the death of his father compelled his return to Stavenhagen, where he undertook the charge of the farm. During this period he gained that practical. knowledge of agriculture and of the farmer's life which he has interwoven in his masterpiece, 'My Apprenticeship on the Farm.' In 1850 he was obliged, however, to abandon farming: removing to Sreptow in Pomerania, he became a private tutor, and soon afterwards married Luise Kunze, the daughter of a clergyman. His life at this time was full of drudgery; but he found occasion to write a number of tales and anecdotes in prose and verse, which were published in 1853 in a volume with the title Läuschen un Rimels' (Funny Tales and Nonsense Rhymes). These were written in Platt Deutsch, the Low German which is so well adapted for the expression of simple and natural feeling, and for the portrayal of the concrete life of the people. Reuter was possessed with the spirit of homeliness, and he used the hearty dialect with consummate tact to embody this spirit. The great success of his first book led him to write and publish another, 'Polterabendgedichte' (Nuptial-Eve Stories). In 1855 appeared 'De Reis nah Belligen' (An Account of a Journey to Belgium), a humorous poem relating the adventures of a number of Mecklenburg peasants, who travel to Belgium for the sake of learning the secrets of an advanced civilization. In 1856 Reuter removed to Neubrandenburg, devoting himself entirely to literary work. In 1858 he published 'Kein Hüsung,' a poem of village life; in 1859 Hanne Nüte un de Lüdde Pudel,' considered his masterpiece in verse; and in 1861 Schurr-Murr,' a collection of tales. Soon afterwards he began the publication of 'Olle Kamellen,' literally Old Camomile-Flowers,' meaning "old tales, old recollections," a series which was to include his best work. The first, 'Zwei Lustige Geschichte' (Two Pleasant Stories), included 'Wo aus ik tau 'ne Fru kamm,' a little skit of how he wooed his wife; and 'Ut de Franzosentid' (In the Year '13), a novel of the time of the uprising of the German people against Napoleon. The scenes are laid in Stavenhagen, Reuter's native town; and its characters are drawn from real life. This work has had enormous popularity in Europe and America. No. 2 of the series, 'Ut Mine Festungstid' (My Imprisonment), was founded on Reuter's own experience as a prisoner. Nos. 3, 4, and 5 were embodied in 'Ut Mine Stromtid' (My Apprenticeship on the Farm); No. 6, the last of the series, was entitled 'Dörchläuchting.' |