Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 by Various

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The former may be taken on by indigent souls: the latter imply a noble
and opulent nature. And wait you not for death, according to the counsel
of Solon, to be named happy, if you are permitted fellowship with a man
of rich mind, whose individual savor you always finely perceive,
and never more than finely,--who yields you the perpetual sense of
community, and never of confusion, with your own spirit. The happiness
is all the greater, if the fellowship be accorded by a mind eminently
superior to one's own; for he, while yet more removed, comes yet nearer,
seeming to be that which our own soul may become in some future life,
and so yielding us the sense of our own being more deeply and powerfully
than it is given by the consciousness in our own bosom. And going
forward to the supreme point of this felicity, we may note that the
worshipper, in the ecstasy of his adoration, feels the Highest to be
also Nearest,--more remote than the borders of space and fringes of
heaven,--more intimate with his own being than the air he breathes or
the thought be thinks; and of this double sense is the rapture of his
adoration, and the joy indeed of every angel, born.

Divineness appertains to the absolute nature of man; piquancy and charm
to that which serves and modifies this. Infinitude and immortality are
of the one; the strictest finiteness belongs to the other. In the first
you can never be too deep and rich; in the second never too delicate and
measured. Yet you will easily find a man in whom the latter so abounds
as not only to shut him out from others, but to absorb all the vital
resource generated in his own bosom, leaving to the pure personality
nothing. The finite nature fares sumptuously every day; the other is a
heavenly Lazarus sitting at the gate.

Of such individuals there are many classes; and the majority of
eccentric men constitute one class. If a man have very peculiar ways, we
readily attribute to him a certain depth and force, and think that the
polished citizen wants character in comparison. Probably it is not so.
Singularity may be as shallow as the shallowest conformity. There are
numbers of such from whom if you deduct the eccentricity, it is like
subtracting red from vermilion or six from half a dozen. They are
grimaces of humanity,--no more. In particular, I make occasion to say,
that those oddities, whose chief characteristic it is to slink away from
the habitations of men, and claim companionship with musk-rats, are,
despite Mr. Thoreau's pleasant patronage of them, no whit more manly or
profound than the average citizen, who loves streets and parlors, and
does not endure estrangement from the Post-Office. Mice lurk in holes
and corners; could the cat speak, she would say that they have a genius
_only_ for lurking in holes. Bees and ants are, to say the least, quite
as witty as beetles, proverbially blind; yet they build insect cities,
and are as invincibly social and city-loving as Socrates himself.

Aside, however, from special eccentricity, there are men, like the Earl
of Essex, Bacon's _soi-disant_ friend, who possess a certain emphatic
and imposing individuality, which, while commonly assumed to indicate
character and force, is really but the _succedaneum_ for these. They
are like oysters, with extreme stress of shell, and only a blind, soft,
acephalous body within. These are commonly great men so long as little
men will serve; and are something less than little ever after. As an
instance of this, I should select the late chief magistrate of this
nation. His whole ability lay in putting a most imposing countenance
upon commonplaces. He made a mere _air_ seem solid as rock. Owing to
this possibility of presenting all force on the outside, and so creating
a false impression of resource, all great social emergencies are
followed by a speedy breaking down of men to whom was generally
attributed an able spirit; while others of less outward mark, and for
this reason hitherto unnoticed, come forward, and prove to be indeed the
large vessels of manhood accorded to that generation.

Our tendency to assume individual mark as the measure of personality
is flattered by many of the books we read. It is, of course, easier to
depict character, when it is accompanied by some striking individual
hue; and therefore in romances and novels this is conferred upon all the
forcible characters, merely to favor the author's hand: as microscopists
feed minute creatures with colored food to make their circulations
visible. It is only the great master who can represent a powerful
personality in the purest state, that is, with the maximum of character
and the minimum of individual distinction; while small artists, with a
feeble hold upon character, habitually resort to extreme quaintnesses
and singularities of circumstance, in order to confer upon their weak
portraitures some vigor of outline. It takes a Giotto to draw readily
a nearly perfect O; but a nearly perfect triangle any one can draw.
Shakspeare is able to delineate a Gentleman,--one, that is, who, while
nobly and profoundly a man, is so delicately individualized, that the
impression of him, however vigorous and commanding, cannot be harsh:
Shakspeare is equal to this task, but even so very able a painter as
Fielding is not. His Squire Western and Parson Adams are exquisite, his
Allworthy is vapid: deny him strong pigments of individualism, and he is
unable to portray strong character. Scott, among British novelists, is,
perhaps, in this respect most Shakspearian, though the Colonel Esmond of
Thackeray is not to be forgotten; but even Scott's Dandie Dinmonts, or
gentlemen in the rough, sparkle better than his polished diamonds.
Yet in this respect the Waverley Novels are singularly and admirably
healthful, comparing to infinite advantage with the rank and file of
novels, wherein the "characters" are but bundles of quaintnesses, and
the action is impossible.

Written history has somewhat of the same infirmity with fictitious
literature, though not always by the fault of the historian. Far too
little can it tell us respecting those of whom we desire to know much;
while, on the other hand, it is often extremely liberal of information
concerning those of whom we desire to know nothing. The greatest of men
approach a pure personality, a pure representation of man's imperishable
nature; individual peculiarity they far less abound in; and what they do
possess is held in transparent solution by their manhood, as a certain
amount of vapor is always held by the air. The higher its temperature,
the more moisture can the atmosphere thus absorb, exhibiting it not as
cloud, but only as immortal azure of sky: and so the greater intensity
there is of the pure quality of man, the more of individual peculiarity
can it master and transform into a simple heavenliness of beauty, of
which the world finds few words to say. Men, in general, have, perhaps,
no more genius than novelists in general,--though it seems a hard speech
to make,--and while profoundly _impressed_ by any manifestation of the
pure genius of man, can _observe_ and _relate_ only peculiarities and
exceptional traits. Incongruities are noted; congruities are only felt.
If a two-headed calf be born, the newspapers hasten to tell of it; but
brave boys and beautiful girls by thousands grow to fulness of stature
without mention. We know so little of Homer and Shakspeare partly
because they were Homer and Shakspeare. Smaller men might afford more
plentiful materials for biography, because their action and character
would be more clouded with individualism. The biography of a supreme
poet is the history of his kind. He transmits himself by pure vital
impression. His remembrance is committed, not to any separable faculty,
but to a memory identical with the total being of men. If you would
learn his story, listen to the sprites that ride on crimson steeds along
the arterial highways, singing of man's destiny as they go.

THE GERMAN BURNS.

The extreme southwestern corner of Germany is an irregular right-angle,
formed by the course of the Rhine. Within this angle and an
hypothenuse drawn from the Lake of Constance to Carlsruhe lies a wild
mountain-region--a lateral offshoot from the central chain which
extends through Europe from west to east--known to all readers of
robber-romances as the Black Forest. It is a cold, undulating upland,
intersected with deep valleys which descend to the plains of the Rhine
and the Danube, and covered with great tracts of fir-forest. Here and
there a peak rises high above the general level, the Feldberg attaining
a height of five thousand feet. The aspect of this region is stern and
gloomy: the fir-woods appear darker than elsewhere; the frequent little
lakes are as inky in hue as the pools of the High Alps; and the meadows
of living emerald give but a partial brightness to the scenery. Here,
however, the solitary traveller may adventure without fear. Robbers and
robber-castles have long since passed away, and the people, rough and
uncouth as they may at first seem, are as kindly-hearted as they are
honest. Among them was born--and in their incomprehensible dialect
wrote--Hebel, the German Burns.

We dislike the practice of using the name of one author as the
characteristic designation of another. It is, at best, the sign of an
imperfect fame, implying rather the imitation of a scholar than the
independent position of a master. We can, nevertheless, in no other way
indicate in advance the place which the subject of our sketch occupies
in the literature of Germany. A contemporary of Burns, and ignorant of
the English language, there is no evidence that he had ever even heard
of the former; but Burns, being the first truly great poet who succeeded
in making classic a local dialect, thereby constituted himself an
illustrious standard, by which his successors in the same path must be
measured. Thus, Bellman and Beranger have been inappropriately invested
with his mantle, from the one fact of their being song-writers of a
democratic stamp. The Gascon, Jasmin, better deserves the title; and
Longfellow, in translating his "Blind Girl of Castel-Cuille," says,--

"Only the lowland tongue of Scotland might
Rehearse this little tragedy aright":--

a conviction which we have frequently shared, in translating our German
author.

It is a matter of surprise to us, that, while Jasmin's poems have gone
far beyond the bounds of France, the name of John Peter Hebel--who
possesses more legitimate claims to the peculiar distinction which
Burns achieved--is not only unknown outside of Germany, but not
even familiarly known to the Germans themselves. The most probable
explanation is, that the Alemannic dialect, in which he wrote, is spoken
only by the inhabitants of the Black Forest and a portion of Suabia,
and cannot be understood, without a glossary, by the great body of the
North-Germans. The same cause would operate, with greater force, in
preventing a translation into foreign languages. It is, in fact, only
within the last twenty years that the Germans have become acquainted
with Burns,--chiefly through the admirable translations of the poet
Freiligrath.

To Hebel belongs the merit of having bent one of the harshest of German
dialects to the uses of poetry. We doubt whether the lyre of Apollo was
ever fashioned from a wood of rougher grain. Broad, crabbed, guttural,
and unpleasant to the ear which is not thoroughly accustomed to its
sound, the Alemannic _patois_ was, in truth, a most unpromising
material. The stranger, even though he were a good German scholar, would
never suspect the racy humor, the _naive_, childlike fancy, and the pure
human tenderness of expression which a little culture has brought to
bloom on such a soil. The contractions, elisions, and corruptions which
German words undergo, with the multitude of terms in common use derived
from the Gothic, Greek, Latin, and Italian, give it almost the character
of a different language. It was Hebel's mother-tongue, and his poetic
faculty always returned to its use with a fresh delight which insured
success. His _German_ poems are inferior in all respects.

Let us first glance at the poet's life,--a life uneventful, perhaps, yet
interesting from the course of its development. He was born in Basle,
in May, 1760, in the house of Major Iselin, where both his father and
mother were at service. The former, a weaver by trade, afterwards became
a soldier, and accompanied the Major to Flanders, France, and Corsica.
He had picked up a good deal of stray knowledge on his campaigns, and
had a strong natural taste for poetry. The qualities of the son were
inherited from him rather than from the mother, of whom we know nothing
more than that she was a steady, industrious person. The parents lived
during the winter in the little village of Hausen, in the Black Forest,
but with the approach of spring returned to Basle for their summer
service in Major Iselin's house.

The boy was but a year old when his father died, and the discipline of
such a restless spirit as he exhibited in early childhood seems to have
been a task almost beyond the poor widow's powers. An incorrigible
spirit of mischief possessed him. He was an arrant scape-grace,
plundering cupboards, gardens, and orchards, lifting the gates of
mill-races by night, and playing a thousand other practical and not
always innocent jokes. Neither counsel nor punishment availed, and
the entire weight of his good qualities, as a counterbalance, barely
sufficed to prevent him from losing the patrons whom his bright,
eager, inquisitive mind attracted. Something of this was undoubtedly
congenital, and there are indications that the strong natural impulse,
held in check only by a powerful will and a watchful conscience, was the
torment of his life. In his later years, when he filled the posts of
Ecclesiastical Counsellor and Professor in the Gymnasium at Carlsruhe,
the phrenologist Gall, in a scientific _seance_, made an examination of
his head. "A most remarkable development of"----, said Gall, abruptly
breaking off, nor could he be induced to complete the sentence.
Hebel, however, frankly exclaimed,--"You certainly mean the thievish
propensity. I know I have it by nature, for I continually feel its
suggestions." What a picture is presented by this confession! A pure,
honest, and honorable life, won by a battle with evil desires, which,
commencing with birth, ceased their assaults only at the brink of the
grave! A daily struggle, and a daily victory!

Hebel lost his mother in his thirteenth year, but was fortunate in
possessing generous patrons, who contributed enough to the slender means
he inherited to enable him to enter the Gymnasium at Carlsruhe. Leaving
this institution with the reputation of a good classical scholar, he
entered the University of Erlangen as a student of theology. Here his
jovial, reckless temperament, finding a congenial atmosphere, so got the
upperhand that he barely succeeded in passing the necessary examination,
in 1780. At the end of two years, during which time he supported himself
as a private tutor, he was ordained, and received a meagre situation
as teacher in the Academy at Loerrach, with a salary of one hundred and
forty dollars a year! Laboring patiently in this humble position for
eight years, he was at last rewarded by being transferred to the
Gymnasium at Carlsruhe, with the rank of Sub-Deacon. Hither, the
Markgraf Frederick of Baden, attracted by the warmth, simplicity, and
genial humor of the man, came habitually to listen to his sermons. He
found himself, without seeking it, in the path of promotion, and his
life thenceforth was a series of sure and moderate successes. His
expectations, indeed, were so humble that they were always exceeded by
his rewards. When Baden became a Grand Duchy, with a constitutional form
of government, it required much persuasion to induce him to accept
the rank of Prelate, with a seat in the Upper House. His friends were
disappointed, that, with his readiness and fluent power of speech,
he took so little part in the legislative proceedings. To one who
reproached him for this timidity he naively wrote,--"Oh, you have a
right to talk: you are the son of Pastor N. in X. Before you were twelve
years old, you heard yourself called _Mr._ Gottlieb; and when you went
with your father down the street, and the judge or a notary met you,
they took off their hats, you waiting for your father to return the
greeting, before you even lifted your cap. But I, as you well know,
grew up as the son of a poor widow in Hausen; and when I accompanied my
mother to Schopfheim or Basle, and we happened to meet a notary, she
commanded, 'Peter, jerk your cap off, there's a gentleman!'--but when
the judge or the counsellor appeared, she called out to me, when they
were twenty paces off, 'Peter, stand still where you are, and off with
your cap quick, the Lord Judge is comin'!' Now you can easily
imagine how I feel, when I recall those times,--and I recall them
often,--sitting in the Chamber among Barons, Counsellors of State,
Ministers, and Generals, with Counts and Princes of the reigning House
before me." Hebel may have felt that rank is but the guinea-stamp, but
he never would have dared to speak it out with the defiant independence
of Burns. Socially, however, he was thoroughly democratic in his tastes;
and his chief objection to accepting the dignity of Prelate was the fear
that it might restrict his intercourse with humbler friends.

His ambition appears to have been mainly confined to his theological
labors, and he never could have dreamed that his after-fame was to rest
upon a few poems in a rough mountain-dialect, written to beguile his
intense longing for the wild scenery of his early home. After his
transfer to Carlsruhe, he remained several years absent from the Black
Forest; and the pictures of its dark hills, its secluded valleys, and
their rude, warm-hearted, and unsophisticated inhabitants, became more
and more fresh and lively in his memory. Distance and absence turned the
quaint dialect to music, and out of this mild home-sickness grew the
Alemannic poems. A healthy oyster never produces a pearl.

These poems, written in the years 1801 and 1802, were at first
circulated in manuscript among the author's friends. He resisted the
proposal to collect and publish them, until the prospect of pecuniary
advantage decided him to issue an anonymous edition. The success of
the experiment was so positive that in the course of five years four
editions appeared,--a great deal for those days. Not only among his
native Alemanni, and in Baden and Wuertemberg, where the dialect was
more easily understood, but from all parts of Germany, from poets and
scholars, came messages of praise and appreciation. Jean Paul (Richter)
was one of Hebel's first and warmest admirers. "Our Alemannic poet," he
wrote, "has life and feeling for everything,--the open heart, the open
arms of love; and every star and every flower are human in his sight....
In other, better words,--the evening-glow of a lovely, peaceful soul
slumbers upon all the hills he bids arise; for the flowers of poetry he
substitutes the flower-goddess Poetry herself; he sets to his lips the
Swiss Alp-horn of youthful longing and joy, while pointing with the
other hand to the sunset-gleam of the lofty glaciers, and dissolved
in prayer, as the sound of the chapel-bells is flung down from the
mountains."

Contrast this somewhat confused rhapsody with the clear, precise, yet
genial words wherewith Goethe welcomed the new poet. He instantly
seized, weighed in the fine balance of his ordered mind, and valued with
nice discrimination, those qualities of Hebel's genius which had but
stirred the splendid chaos of Richter with an emotion of vague delight.
"The author of these poems," says he, in the Jena "Literaturzeitung,"
(1804,) "is about to achieve a place of his own on the German Parnassus.
His talent manifests itself in two opposite directions. On the one hand,
he observes with a fresh, cheerful glance those objects of Nature which
express their life in positive existence, in growth and in motion,
(objects which we are accustomed to call _lifeless_,) and thereby
approaches the field of descriptive poetry; yet he succeeds, by his
happy personifications, in lifting his pictures to a loftier plane of
Art. On the other hand, he inclines to the didactic and the allegorical;
but here, also, the same power of personification comes to his aid, and
as, in the one case, he finds a soul for his bodies, so, in the other,
he finds a body for his souls. As the ancient poets, and others who have
been developed through a plastic sentiment for Art, introduce
loftier spirits, related to the gods,--such as nymphs, dryads, and
hamadryads,--in the place of rocks, fountains, and trees: so the author
transforms these objects into peasants, and countrifies [_verbauert_]
the universe in the most _naive_, quaint, and genial manner, until the
landscape, in which we nevertheless always recognize the human figure,
seems to become one with man in the cheerful enchantment exercised upon
our fancy."

This is entirely correct, as a poetic characterization. Hebel, however,
possesses the additional merit--no slight one, either--of giving
faithful expression to the thoughts, emotions, and passions of the
simple people among whom his childhood was passed. The hearty native
kindness, the tenderness, hidden under a rough exterior, the lively,
droll, unformed fancy, the timidity and the boldness of love, the
tendency to yield to temptation, and the unfeigned piety of the
inhabitants of the Black Forest, are all reproduced in his poems. To say
that they teach, more or less directly, a wholesome morality, is but
indifferent praise; for morality is the cheap veneering wherewith
would-be poets attempt to conceal the lack of the true faculty. We
prefer to let our readers judge for themselves concerning this feature
of Hebel's poetry.

The Alemannic dialect, we have said, is at first harsh to the ear.
It requires, indeed, not a little practice, to perceive its especial
beauties; since these consist in certain quaint, playful inflections and
elisions, which, like the speech of children, have a fresh, natural,
simple charm of their own. The changes of pronunciation, in German
words, are curious. _K_ becomes a light guttural _ch_, and a great
number of monosyllabic words--especially those ending in _ut_ and
_ueh_--receive a peculiar twist from the introduction of _e_ or _ei_:
as _gut, frueh_, which become _guet, frueeih_. This seems to be a
characteristic feature of the South-German dialects, though in none is
it so pronounced as in the Alemannic. The change of _ist_ into _isch,
hast_ into _hesch, ich_ into _i, dich_ into _de_, etc., is much more
widely spread, among the peasantry, and is readily learned, even by the
foreign reader. But a good German scholar would be somewhat puzzled by
the consolidation of several abbreviated words into a single one, which
occurs in almost every Alemannic sentence: for instance, in _woni_ he
would have some difficulty in recognizing _wo ich; sagene_ does not
suggest _sage ihnen_, nor _uffeme, auf einem_.

These singularities of the dialect render the translation of Hebel's
poems into a foreign language a work of great difficulty. In the absence
of any English dialect which possesses corresponding features, the
peculiar quaintness and raciness which they confer must inevitably be
lost. Fresh, wild, and lovely as the Schwarzwald heather, they are
equally apt to die in transplanting. How much they lose by being
converted into classical German was so evident to us (fancy, "Scots who
have with Wallace bled"!) that we at first shrank from the experiment of
reproducing them in a language still farther removed from the original.
Certainly, classical English would not answer; the individual soul of
the poems could never be recognized in such a garb. The tongue of Burns
can be spoken only by a born Scot; and our Yankee, which is rather a
grotesque English than a dialect, is unfortunately so associated
with the coarse and the farcical--Lowell's little poem of "'Zekel's
Courtship" being the single exception--that it seems hardly adapted to
the simple and tender fancies of Hebel. Like the comedian whose one
serious attempt at tragic acting was greeted with roars of laughter, as
an admirable burlesque, the reader might, in such a case, persist in
seeing fun where sentiment was intended.

In this dilemma, it occurred to us that the common, rude form of the
English language, as it is spoken by the uneducated everywhere, without
reference to provincial idioms, might possibly be the best medium.
It offers, at least, the advantage of simplicity, of a directness
of expression which overlooks grammatical rules, of natural pathos,
even,--and therefore, so far as these traits go, may reproduce them
without detracting seriously from the original. Those other qualities of
the poems which spring from the character of the people of whom and
for whom they were written must depend, for their recognition, on the
sympathetic insight of the reader. We can only promise him the utmost
fidelity in the translation, having taken no other liberty than the
substitution of common idiomatic phrases, peculiar to our language,
for corresponding phrases in the other. The original metre, in every
instance, has been strictly adhered to.

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