The Wine-ghosts of Bremen. Вильгельм Гауф

ine-ghosts of Bremen

      PREFACE

      When Mr. Carlyle endeavoured to introduce Jean Paul Richter to the English public, it seems to us that he was more than usually unsuccessful. The literary publics of the England and the Germany of those days were very different, and perhaps the errors of taste, which each professed to find in the other, were not in truth wholly upon the side of John Bull. We feel, (with much deprecation of our own impudence in challenging such a comparison,) in a somewhat similar position, and dread in our more diffident moments a far colder reception and far greater depth of oblivion for our present attempt to render into English a good German story about STRONG DRINK. German humour is often more rollicking than that of our own countrymen; it is also occasionally more subtle. But it has always been a matter of some wonder to us that Hauff's acknowledged masterpiece should be unknown to English readers, and we have therefore made the following attempt; praying the courteous reader only that he will not throw the story down in disgust till he gets to the best part: of the location of which we allow him to be the best judge.

      Wilhelm Hauff was born on the 29th November, 1802, at Stuttgart, where his father held various high posts, with various high-sounding double and treble official names, under the paternal government of the Elector Frederick, the first of his name and house who attained 'serenity.' It was this same ruler who three years later, after refusing a passage to Napoleon's troops for some time with great show of patriotism, allowed himself to be 'convinced,' as soon as the Emperor himself appeared and offered him a considerable extension of territory and a Royal Crown; and who confessed with some naïveté 'that since Frederick the Great he had never met any one so good at talking a man over as Napoleon; that the latter had in fact the same "tournure de l'esprit" as Frederick.' But His Serene Highness was, in common with many of his contemporaries, in the habit of allowing himself to be talked over by any one with a good strong army at his back. 'C'était leur nature de complaire aux plus forts.' Therefore he now openly joined, in 1805, as he had practically done in '95 and '99, the row of princely traitors to the cause of Germany, and began to dance with his fellows on the fast-closing grave of the Holy Roman Empire. It must however be remembered that his country was one of the few German principalities that still possessed an active 'Landstände' or system of Estates: this was indeed of the most rudimentary order, and consisted chiefly of representatives of the nobles, craft gilds, and ecclesiastical corporations; but it is worthy of note that, as in the Tyrol, there was a Peasants' Estate in Württemberg, and that these Estates did possess, though they rarely made good, the right of voting or withholding supplies from His Serenity. On the occasion referred to, when he expressed some doubts as to whether his Estates would agree to the proposed treaty, Napoleon, who had methods of his own for dealing with refractory representatives, answered that 'he would settle all that.' The Elector then got his crown from Napoleon; but in November, 1813, a very similar scene was enacted at Stuttgart, (with Alexander in place of Napoleon,) when the confederation of the Rhine was dissolved, and Bavaria had already made her peace with the allies by the treaty of Ried. Then the magnanimous King Frederick threw in his lot with the winning side again, in return for that fatal guarantee of absolute sovereignty and territorial indemnification for his losses, (for he was obliged to disgorge some of the spoils of his neighbours,) which proved such an obstacle in the way of the long-deferred restoration of Germany.

      Growing up under influences like these, it is wonderful that young Hauff and his brother Hermann (his senior by two years) should ever have discovered that they were Germans at all; but they lost their father in 1809 and do not afterwards appear to have had any political connection with the government: and by 1815, when Wilhelm was only thirteen, the worst was over and the people of Stuttgart were left face to face with their amiable monarch; who surprised them and all the world by granting them of his own grace and favour an absolutely free constitution. This, however, on the principle of 'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,' was too much for the Württembergers, who profoundly mistrusted him: but before the matter could be settled King Frederick died, and King Wilhelm I, the husband of a Russian princess, and a brave soldier and able diplomatist, who had stood up for the rights of Germany in the deferred Elsass question, gave to his people, after much preparation, a very respectably constitutional form of government with two chambers, which included a representation both of clergy and old-imperial nobility, backed up by a strong Executive. This was in 1822, and the remaining five years of W. Hauff's life were passed in a happy country that had no history. It is usual of course to account for the excessively fertile development of literary culture in Germany at this time by the fact that the system of repression was so strong and effective as to drive all the moderate minds away from politics; but this will hardly hold good in Württemberg. Yet the educated classes there seem to have been completely indifferent to such politics as there were. But there were very few.

      Those who want to discover the conditions under which Hauff's earlier life passed should read (1) Goethe's Autobiography in Wahrheit and Dichtung, and (2) Histoire d'un Conscrit; and, by mixing the two well together, may arrive at some sort of idea what life was like in a small German state, on which were grafted the new horrors of a military despotism. It is not a pleasant picture, but if it bred a good many souls as dead to patriotism as Goethe's and Heine's, it also bred not a few Müllers and Uhlands and Arndts; and it bred Wilhelm Hauff. That Hauff, in his later years at least (if a man can be said to have later years who died at twenty-five), had caught much of the spirit of the heroes of the War of Liberation, is best seen from the few soul-stirring lyrics which he has left, especially the two odes which he wrote in 1823-4 on the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo; even more perhaps it is seen in his admiration for W. Müller, and in the affecting story that when on his deathbed he heard the news of the battle of Navarino, he cried, 'What news! I must go hence and tell it to Müller,' who preceded him to the grave by a few weeks.

      Hauff and his brother were voracious readers. Their maternal grandfather, 'a learned jurist,' (one trembles to think what a learned German jurist must have been like in the first decade of this century,) had a good library, consisting chiefly of old Law and History books, but including also a considerable number of romances; 'Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith were there,' says his biographer, Gustav Schwab, in the life which he prefixed to the 1837 (first collected) edition of Hauff's works. Schwab relates, not without humour, how the boys would play at fortress building and sieges with some of the more ponderous of the volumes, and the delight which they took in battering down a breastwork composed of the 'Acta Pacis Westphalicæ,' perhaps at the very time at which the Congress of Vienna was engaged upon the same job. But in the way of reading, they battened chiefly upon the old German historical romances, Hardleder's 'Ursache des Deutschen Krieges' especially, and it was from works like these that Wilhelm caught that old-imperial swing and flow of ideas which carries us so powerfully through Lichtenstein and the 'Phantasien.' The plan of turning a boy loose in a library is sometimes justified by results, although not always in the way expected. But although Wilhelm got a certain amount of classics drilled into him at the cloister school of Blaubeuern, and afterwards studied 'Philology, Philosophy, and Theology,' from 1820-1824, at the University of Tübingen, 'more,' says Schwab, 'to please his mother than from any leaning of his own to those subjects,' he never could write Greek or Latin verses like his brother, or pass for anything but an essentially poor scholar. But several other people who have afforded some pleasure to the world at large have been essentially poor scholars.

      This deficiency did not affect him much; his mother, though apparently not wealthy, had good interest, and procured for him, when he left the University, the position of private tutor in the family of 'the at that time War's-council's-President, later War's-minister von Hügel' at Stuttgart, where he remained two years, with apparently abundant leisure for exercising his talent for writing poetical romances and fairy tales, of which during the last two years of his life he poured forth an incessant stream. It is worth while noting that in one of these–the first part of the 'Memoirs of Satan' (not the completed edition of these memoirs as they now stand)–is a passage in which the author falls foul of the great Autocrat of German Literature apropos of some lines in Faust; which was a more daring thing for a young fellow of four-and-twenty to do than it is possible for a man living in a free country to imagine. The rash youth afterwards repented, and expunged the obnoxious passage when he finished the memoirs of his black Majesty.

      Perhaps it would have been as well if there had been no expunging, at least we may dare to say so on this side of the water, where