Immermann's' Merlin.'

3

that is, the quantity of learning which it requires the reader to possess respecting the early heresies in the first and second centuries. M. Kinkel is kind enough to point out that gnosticism lies at its foundation, and then proceeds to show what gnosticism is, with all the air of one who is opening a way to a treasure hitherto inaccessible! apparently forgetting that there is an article on 'Gnosis' in even that not very scarce work, the ConversationsLexicon,' which gives much fuller information on the subject. The worst of the matter is, that a smattering in the doctrines of the old heretics, though very edifying in its way, will, after all, contribute but little to the enjoyment of the reader of 'Merlin,' who may think he has perused a very indifferent poem, even though the gnosticism be unquestionable enough to please the manes of Simon Magus himself. The story of the mythus is a tremendous one: too tremendous to suit the ordinary class of readers. Satan is the Demiurgos or creator of the universe (herein consists the gnosticism), and is indignant that the Deity should invade his territory by sending the Messiah upon the earth. He therefore violates a Christian virgin, and the birth of Merlin, whom he designs as a sort of Antichrist, is the result. Merlin is piously brought up: disappointing the expectations of his father, he becomes a zealous champion of the God of the Christians, and causing the heavens to open before the eyes of the astonished Satan, shows to him, that though he made the world, he was but the instrument of a higher power. He leads King Arthur and all the knights of his round table in quest of the Sangreal' or real blood of Christ, which was caught in a cup by Joseph of Arimathea, and which is so prominent in the old British romance. But seduced by his love for Niniana, a petulant fair one, and the best drawn character in the mythus, he allows himself to while away the time with her, while his noble friends perish in the desert for want of his assistance. He tells Niniana a powerful word by which she will be enabled to fetter him, and as she imprudently utters it, he loses his senses, and fancies that he is a close prisoner. Satan restores to him the use of his reason, and besets him with strong temptations, but Merlin remains faithful to God, and dies with the words on his lips: "Hallowed be thy name."

เ

That the outline of this mythus is vast, that even in its structure there is something grand and Titanic, is not to be denied; but we cannot commend a work where the merest hints are given by the poet, and all the substance is left to be filled up by the readers. MM. Kinkel and Schucking are indefatigable in pointing to every little character who speaks some half dozen lines, and in explaining what a complete representative of some class, or impersonation

of some thought, is there. These well meaning gentlemen do not see that they are only setting forth more plainly how the poet has failed in expressing his own idea, since there is just the same relation between Immermann's Merlin' and their explanation, as between Lord Burleigh's nod, and the interpretation of Mr. Puff. In our opinion poetry should be something more than a series of hints, and as for any great effect which this work is to produce on German philosophy, we think that MM. Göschel, Marheineke, Michelet, and Hotho, may contemplate the death of KlingsorMerlin's rival, who we are told represents Hegel-without being fearful of any very serious consequences to the fame of their great preceptor. The plain truth of the matter seems to be, that Immermann, who was rather an imitative than a creative poet, thought that' Faust' having proved a most successful work, he might write a 'Faust' too: in which attempt he failed, however his commentators may labour to expound his crudities. Theodor Mundt says, speaking of the Merlin,' that Immermann's coy nature showed itself too hard for the speculative mythus, and fully subscribing to this opinion, we pass on to the work, the name of which forms the second head to this article.

The romance of Münchhausen' being, as it professes to be, a history in Arabesque, it is somewhat difficult to seize its contents with a single grasp. It is a crammed book. The author designed it to hold every thing; to pack into it his humour, his sentiment, his religion, his morals, and likewise to make it the vehicle of the sharpest satire. It was to be a treasury of Immermannism; to represent his loves and his hatreds; to go into the world as a confession of faith, half-laughing and half-crying; the laugh being bitter, and the tears seeming ironical; so that it is somewhat difficult to divide the jest from the earnest. It is no trivial work to read this Münchhausen. We have humoristic extravagances, which, at the first glance, seem to be bubbling up freshly from the author's fancy; but which we soon discover to be pumped up out of his brain, with a labour which excites our compassion, while the draught grows flatter and flatter as the toil proceeds. We have a love story written in glowing characters, with an intensity of passion which startles us in this age of cool propriety; but the glow continues so steadily, that after first exciting us, it lulls us to a state of indolence, like the sun in a sultry climate. We have pictures of country life drawn with a vigorous hand; the author boldly tears us from the world of civilization, with its polish, its effeminacy, and its enlightenment, and he places us in a bracing atmosphere, in the face of a sturdy generation of men who rejoice in their strength and their prejudices. We are invigorated at the sight; it comes upon us like the snuff of country air, to one who is chained

Character of the Book.

5

down to his desk in the city for the half-year together; but Immermann will hold us to it so long, that we begin to "hate green fields and all who babble of them," and to cry, with the lady in Pope's Essay, 'Oh odious, odious trees? The medley contains ingredients of every degree of merit: there are figures highly finished, bold, original, concrete; in a word, stamped with the hand of a master; and there is the merest balderdash that ever witling contrived, in the fond hope that he might raise a laugh. There are touches of fantastic humour that shake the sides of the reader; and there is a species of drollery through which he will slowly and sorrowfully work his way, wondering when it will close. It is a strange jumble this Münchhausen' of Immermann !

6

But there is one great defect in the book, which peeps out throughout all its variations, and which in fact lies at the root of all its blemishes: a defect which, if it is for a while concealed, soon displays itself with redoubled vigour. This defect is that want of originality with which the author has been charged by the critics of his own country, and to which we may almost say he pleads guilty, in the course of this very romance. In the person of Baron Münchhausen he has chosen a fantastical subject, with which an original genius might disport itself without effort, which would afford opportunities for a thousand little tricks and devices, all played off with ease, and which, imposing no restraint, has left full room for the vagaries of a petulant wit-and how has he treated it? He has availed himself of the licence, but he cannot enjoy it with ease: he makes his way laboriously from one irregularity to another. He affects to treat his reader with levity, but it is a hard-headed, circumspect levity; and his strange movements are rather like those of some heavy eccentric old gentleman, than those of a buoyant and hilarious youth. What was playfulness in Sterne, would be no playfulness in one who was steadily resolved to tread in his footsteps. A page of marbled paper in the middle of a modern novel would be but a dull device, and would argue no ingenuity on the part of the author; and when Herr Immermann begins his book with the eleventh chapter, and comes to the first some hundred pages on, we feel that he has only worked out a Shandyism. When the Baron Münchhausen astounds his hearers, by running one story into another, we seem to be still listening to the life and opinions of the great Tristram; and when he describes his life among the goats of Mount Helicon, thoughts of one Gulliver and his Houyhnhmns rise before us. Immermann is no dishonest plagiarist: we find, in the course of his Münchhausen,' that every author is named, to whom we could trace a resemblance in the particular parts, as if to show his readers of what stores he was possessed when he began to write. By the same evidence, he was not an unconscious plagiarist, and this is, perhaps, his fault.

The most original genius cannot help straying into the paths in which some favourite author has already trodden; but in Immermann we can see that he laboriously essayed to follow. Even where we cannot detect a predecessor, we can perceive that nothing was done without toil; and in those places where the author affects to sport with the lightest recklessness, we feel that he is most seriously plodding.

Münchhausen,' though from the variety of its contents it might be separated into fifty divisions, may readily be considered as containing two. One of these is a humoristic novel, of which Münchhausen, grandson of the great liar, is the hero, and which abounds in strange narratives, fantastical incidents, and literary satire while the other exhibits the life of the peasants in Westphalia. These two parts of the tale are not formally separated, but, nevertheless, they are so distinct, not only in subject, but also in tone and treatment, that the work may almost be considered as two novels, united under one common title, and, as was said of a certain English history of German literature, rather connected by the thread of the bookbinder, than by a link springing from their nature. It is in the Münchhausen portion of the book that all the Shandyisms appear; and this portion, though it is enlivened with pictures and adventures of great humour, is certainly the weakest of the two, and often runs into mere dull absurdity. The Westphalian part, on the other hand, is only objectionable from its tediousness, since, on the whole, it is intrinsically good; and the author, if here, as in the other part, he is seen fagging hard, has at any rate solid material to work upon. Obvious labour does not appear so strange, when we find it employed in a sturdy portraiture of real life, as when we find it aping the tricks of spontaneous fancy.

The scene of the Münchhausen part is the old tumble-down castle of Schnick-Schnack-Schnurr, the property of an old baron, who hopes for the return of the times that existed before the French invasion, and his consequent elevation to the honourable post of privy councillor to a Prince, whose dominion, alas! has been destroyed by the latest partition of Germany. This wish is with him a sort of lunacy; and he has with him a daughter, an old young lady, who believes herself born for the same Prince, and who, likewise mad upon this point, expects from year's end to year's end the appearance of her noble lover. It is a melancholy place, the old castle:-the flag-stones that lead to it have been pulled up; the rails have been taken down to relieve the necessities of the family; a stone shepherd in the garden stands with hands and mouth formed for playing on the flute, but the flute is lost; a stone dolphin turns up its nose mournfully in a dry basin-altogether it is a symbol of the dilapidated state, of the

The Mad Schoolmaster.

ས

7

proud poverty of an old German baron, still adhering to the French fashion of the last century. The old baron cannot for ever amuse himself with hopes-what is he to do with himself? -as a last resource he takes to reading. A few dull books are in his library, but these will not satisfy him; so he belongs to a reading society, and becomes a student of journals.

"This amusement was quite to the old baron's taste. 'At last,' cried he, joyously, when he had made himself acquainted with the extent of the newly-discovered treasures, at last there is something in print, which instructs without fatiguing.' And indeed his mind was wonderfully enriched by the reading of journals. If one sheet gave him a short notice of the great poison-tree in India, which infects the atmosphere for a thousand paces round; the next told him how to keep potatoes from the frost during the winter. In one minute he read of Frederic the Great; in the next of the water-cure of Gräfenberg, at which, however, he did not stop long, as he went on at once to an account of the new discoveries in the moon. One quarter of an hour he was in Europe; then again, as if transported by the mantle of Faustus, under the palm-trees; sometimes he had a historical Redeemer, sometimes a mythical one, sometimes none at all. In the forenoon he attacked the ministers with the extreme gauche; in the afternoon he leaned towards absolutism; in the evening he did not know which way to turn; and at night he went to bed, as a juste-milieu, to dream of the juggler Janchen, of Amsterdam."

But even these varied enjoyments wear out after a while, and it is a real delight to the old baron, when a neighbouring schoolmaster, who has become insane, and who has in consequence lost his school, comes to the castle, and boldly asks the owner to receive him as an inhabitant. The origin of the pedagogue's madness will be particularly diverting to those who are familiar with the aspect of a German philosophical grammar.

"The schoolmaster, Agesilaus, who had formerly been called Agesel, had filled the office of instructing the youth of a neighbouring village in reading and writing. He dwelt in a mud cottage, the only apartments in which were his schoolroom and his bedroom; and he had thirty gulden a year pension, besides the schooling-money, which was twelve kreuzer for a boy, and six for a girl; a grassplot for a cow, and the right of driving two geese into a common. He performed his duties without blame; taught the children to spell according to the old fashion, that had been in usé in the village for upwards of a hundred years: G-e, Ge, s-u-n-d, sund, h-e-i-t, heit, Gesundheit (health), &c.; and advanced the cleverest so far, that they were frequently able to read print without any extraordinary effort. As for writing, there were some that left his hands capable of forming their own name, that is, if they were not hurried, but had proper time given them.

"Under this system, our schoolmaster had attained the age of fifty