E RN ST MO RITZ ARNDT.* THE earliest years of
the present century were marked by the accomplishment of a silent revolution, which was indeed hidden amid the roar and smoke of battle, but which is now, and has been for more than fifty years, bearing fruit. The seeds of that revolution had been sown hundreds of years before, had been east into the ground seemingly to die,—seemingly only The first old feudal laws had contained within themselves the unripe kernel of a truth, and established, in rough fashion, the responsibilities existing between the owners and the occupiers of the soil. Nevertheless, for many a long year, with brief intervals of struggle, the owners had it pretty much their own way ; but at the very moment when the fierce struggle for spiritual and physical freedom seemed to have died of exhaustion, and the spectre of Imperialism to have risen out of its ashes, and the foot of the conqueror was on the neck of the Princes, —at that very moment a silent resurrection was being accom- plished, new life-blood was flowing in the veins of the peoples, a life which should concern itself with questions larger and deeper than any which had gone before, which should recognise law and order as essential factors in progress, unity as essential to nationality, and Icings and priests as the exponents of the national will. Liberty, equality, fraternity, under the iron heel of Napoleon, seemed crushed, but the essential spirit of the three was but crushed out of the body to be diffused in subtler and more intelligent form over a wider area. Blind levelling-down gave place to the desire to help up, to the determination that serfdom should cease, however slow the process ; that the enlighten- ment, in whatsoever form it presented itself, which was good
* We and Adventure:of Ernst Aforitt Arndt. Compiled from the German,
witha prelim by J. R. Seeley, M.A. London Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday.
Tor the prince was good also for the peasant; and for the moment with which we are about to concern ourselves, the moment when thought throughout Germany, Germany in its widest sense, was undergoing a fresh baptism of blood, the root and source of all enlightenment was God. This idea, con- sciously or unconsciously, underlaid, as it necessarily must, the idea of national life. There might be philosophers who clis- -claimed it, writers who scoffed at it, but the "sweet singers" of the Fatherland knew how alone to touch the deepest heart of the people. Of their number was the man whose name stands at the head of our paper,—Ernst Moritz Arndt. With no particular claim to greatness of any kind, he flung abroad his simple words, and the heart of the people echoed to his,—
" Who underground the iron stored, Cared not to see a slave," &c.
Or shouted as one man :-
"Das gauze Deutschland soll es soul! 0 Gott ! vom IliMmel ieh' darein ; Und glob tins lichten deutschen Muth ; Hass wir es lieben treu und gut ! Das soli es sein I das soli es Rein Das gauze Deutschland Boll es sein."
And many who, as Professor Seeley in his preface to the volume before us says, "have little leisure for reading, and no motive for it but amusement," and "who will not read any more about States and Governments than can be presented to them in the biographies of famous men," will certainly under- stand the Napoleonic age the better for tracing the narrative of such lives as Arndt and men like-minded, and watching the stirring scenes of that stirring time, not through English .or French spectacles, but to quote Mr. Seeley again, " iu the main, from Germany, through the eyes of one who felt intensely the pressure of his time, who himself joined and suffered in the struggle of his country against Napoleon." In the little volume before us (a book not too large for the 'hand), we have a memoir which consists mainly in a transla- tion of Arndt's own autobiography. He takes us with him into the heart of his early home in the island of Rligen ; and we get a glimpse of a truly idyllic life, in the early years when Ernst and his brothers, Karl and Fritz, with many other brothers and sisters, were left in blissful ignorance of school routine, to ramble, play, and fish in the midst of rich orchards and meadows, full of bushes and ponds. There came a moment. indeed, even then when a dark shadow crossed this happy life, and the father of the merry tribe lay dangerously ill, It was characteristic of the Arndt of after-years, that in this hour of trouble he bethought himself of the possibility of saving his father's life by the sacrifice of something on which his heart was set,--a blind, heathen faith, the rough husk of an undis- covered truth. He had nothing but his pet doves, so these he determined to surrender ; but we need not trace that little inci- dent to its conchision. But the child, in this case, was em- phatically the father of the man. Through life Arndt held his
few posseasions with a light heart, and more than once "on life's journey parted with all the portmanteaus." Of him more -than of most men it might be said : he is rich who can do without. Very few thalers sufficed him, at any time. The man who, at -past eighty, still heard a voice urging him "to he up and doing 'his duty," laborious as that duty was, had scant tolerance for -the self-indulgence which he believed, not without reason, to be about to become the danger of an age, towards which be, never- theless, looked forward with brave and manly hope. Alluding to the hardships to which he had been subjected as a boy, he -writes :— "I probably owe it to this that I cnn still got about pretty vigorously without stick or spectacles. I was conscious then of noble, pure intentions, and wont bravely and hopefully to meet the future. I thought most young men then too soft and effeminate; 'but, with the many changes of this last generation, with the cushioned railway carriages, &o., this vice of effeminate laziness and self. indulgence, the too great 'comfort of life' for which everybody is 'struggling, has grown much worse and more dangerous."
The man whom a crust sufficed, and who could sleep on a plank, had little to fear in the roughest journey ; aid doubtless the youth which, through all his student life, in the midst of fun and frolic, he kept pure and unspotted, helped greatly toward the vigorous old age of which his companions and his children were so proud. Arndt was intended for the Ministry, but the love of adventure was strong within, and he appears to have had no special inclination for the clerical office ; anyhow, he save up the idea, and in 1798 set out, intending, mostly on foot, to see the world. He visited Vienna and Hungary, and passed over the Alps into Italy. Then the war breaking out, he was not able to visit Rome, Naples, or Sicily, but after pass- ing some months in Paris, made his way home through Brussels, Cologne, Frankfort, Leipzig, and Berlin. He fancied he was wandering about without any definite plans or object, but he was, in fact, gathering in, in his leisurely way, a rich harvest of observation upon men and things, which served him after- wards when, in the service of the great Prussian Minister, Von Stein, he devoted himself heart and soul to promote what he believed to be the true welfare of the Fatherland. To be at once the companion and servant of Stein required capacity of no mean order, and we might repeat, for the benefit of those who see no greatness in the simple-hearted singer, the criticism which Arndt applied to his great master :—" There are," writes Arndt (alluding to Stein's detractors), "some who never can under- stand the power and simplicity of a great character in which originality is subordinated, being lost in courage, humility, and faith, though it is there, and is a necessary ingredient in the qualities which go to make a man of virtue and action." A man has plumbed some depths in human nature before a fact like that strikes him. Any one who will take the trouble to follow Arndt's career through the ninety years of which a brief history lies in the pages before us, will be rewarded by at least a somewhat more familiar acquaintance with much that filled the eventful time in which his life was cast, with much that, during that period, was stirring the heart of Ger- many to its depths.
We cannot here follow Arndt's career from the moment when he became a political writer, on through his wander- ings and work in Russia and on the Rhine, with all his many anecdotes of many men ; he was necessarily in personal con- tact with many of the greatest spirits of the age. Himself the brother-in-law of Schleiermacher and the friend of Stein, Scharn host and Bliicher, Schlegel and Madame de Steel, Schubert the astronomer and Klenjer the dramatist were all to be num- bered among his friends, and the very simplicity of the man makes us see many an old form under a new aspect, as when he notes of Madame de Sta,e1, no description of the brilliant talents to which she owed her European reputation, but that "she could tell every bird by his beak, and knew at once how she must sing to him,"—" a royal talent, though many kings lack it,"—Arndt adds, with his usual touch of humour and shrewdness. But we will confine ourselves to noticing one subject which lay very nearthe poet's heart. Him- self the grandson of a serf, the condition of the peasantry in Pomerania, and the islands of the Baltic was a subject which touched him deeply, and regardless of the Warnings of his friends, be determined to write the history of serfdom in Pomerania and Rfigen. The publication of this little book brought down upon him, as be probably knew it would, a storm of abuse; but he says, "I wrote it in the firm conviction that history must not yield an inch of her sacred rights, and that whoever feels himself a coward, is unworthy to approach the illustrious Judge of past and present." Better than all the abuse, which, seeing the quarter from whence it came, Arndt judged an honour, was the formal accusation made against him as a stirrer-up of the people and a dangerous ina,n, with tendencies to high-treason. All this commotion only brought out into clearer light the abuses against which he fought, and caused the petty and corrupt tribunals which so long had been a means of oppression and cruelty, to be replaced by public district tribunals. If Arndt had accomplished no other work, he would not have lived in vain. Perhaps we may even describe it as work which will bear fruit when his very name as one of the sweet singers of the Fatherland is forgotten. He himself regarded many of his songs as ephemeral, belonging only to the moment which called them forth ; though amongst -their number can hardly be
reckoned one with which we are familiar only through the translation given in the pages before us. It is one which will find an echo deep in the hearts of all who know how a terrible grief can change the aspect of death, and kill the petty fears of life. Arndt is writing on the death of his. wife. We give the last verse only
Bitter then was my grief ; through months and through years I lamented.
Yet in the shadowy vale now there was light on my path ; Had I not seen the gods P Heaven's blessedness, had I not felt it ? Had I not lifted my life whither no lightning can reach P"
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