expect a solid support from this mounted foreigner." Her practical nature triumphs, and like a hunted chamois she springs from stone to stone into her tailor's arms. An expression of divine scorn glides over the countenance of the Centaur; he is seen to move away, and shortly afterward he has vanished from the eager gaze of those who are staring after him.
Here Genelli's voice is hushed, the little circle breaks up, and the poet awakens in the ante-room of the inn.
All the qualities which make a poetic work an enjoyment to the reader are combined in this "Märchen"; an exalted humor, which casts a gentle glow over all the details, the tenderest semi-tone and the finest clair-obscure, that permits the action of the piece to glide gently from the light of day into a dream of a circle of the dead, and then again allows the twilight of the shadow-world to be illumined by a sunbeam from old Hellas. Add to this a profound thought, which is entirely original to its poet. For this sportive tale is in reality a hymn to freedom in art as well as in life, and to freedom as Heyse has conceived it. In his eyes freedom does not consist in a struggle for freedom (as, for instance, in the case of the Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen), but it is the protest of nature against dogmas in the religious sphere, of nature against conventionality in the social and moral sphere. Through nature to freedom! that is his path and that his watchword. Thus the Centaur as half human being, half divinity, is to his fancy a beloved symbol. How beautiful is the Centaur in his proud strength gained from the remnant of old Grecian blood he has preserved in his veins! What must he not have suffered, the poor Centaur, for the remnant of heathenism, that has arisen in him, and that, after having been frozen in a few thousand years, has ventured out into the light of day in our age when all the glaciers are beginning to melt away! How much more instructive, how much more sedate and moral, does the whole civilized world about him find his interesting rival, the stuffed calf, with two tongues and five legs, which are by no means intended for progress, but are conservative legs that with all due propriety keep the place ascribed to them. Such curiosities never exceed the limits of any civil custom, never exhibit themselves without permission from the public authorities and the clergy, and are therefore none the less unusual. They will always remain rivals of the Centaur, considered by some as his equal and by others as far outshining him.
And is not the poet himself, on his Pegasus in this petty modern social world of ours, the living representative of "the last Centaur"?
X.
I have noted down some expressions of opinion concerning Heyse, favorable and unfavorable all mixed together.
"Heyse," says one, "is the woman's doctor, the German woman's doctor, who has thoroughly understood Goethe's saying—
'Es ist ihr ewig Weh und Ach
So tausendfach u.s.w.'
That he is no poet for men, Prince Bismarck has rightly felt."
"On the contrary," says another, "Paul Heyse is very masculine. He is pronounced weak by some because he is pleasing, because a finished grace has lent its impress to his creations. People do not realize how much strength is requisite in order to have this exquisite charm!"
"What is Heyse?" says a third. "The denizen of a small town, who has so long played hide and seek with Berlin, with the social life of the world, with politics, that he has estranged himself from our present, and only feels at home among the troubadours in Provence. I always scent out something of the Provençale and of the provincialist in his writings."
"This Heyse," remarks a fourth, "in spite of his fifty years and the maturity of his authorship, has the weakness to wish to persuade us throughout that he is an immoral, lascivious poet. But no man believes him. That is his punishment."
"I have never in my life been so greatly envied," once said a lady, an old friend of Heyse's youth, in my presence, "as I was to-day, in one of our higher schools for young ladies, which I was visiting, when the rumor was circulated that I was about to pass the evening in a circle where I would meet him. The little damsels (Backfische) unanimously commissioned me to carry to him their enthusiastic greetings. How gladly would they one and all have thrown themselves into his arms! He is and always will be the idolized author of young maidens."
"One can define Paul Heyse," said a critic, "as the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy of German poetry. He appears like Mendelssohn when compared to the great masters. His nature, like that of Mendelssohn, is a German lyric, sensitive temperament, permeated with the most refined Southern culture. Both men lack the grand pathos, the energetic power, the storm of the dramatic element; but both have natural dignity in earnestness, charming amiability and pleasing grace in jest, they are thoroughly cultured in regard to form, they are virtuosos in execution."
[1] One's movements, step by step to measure, Mars all one's chances. Who dares not follow one's own pleasure (sich gehen zu lassen) Not far advances.—P. H.
[2] Gesammelte Werke, iv. 135.
[3] Ibid., v. 199.
[4] Kinder der Welt, ii. 162.
[5] Kinder der Welt, iii. 210, 242, 256.
[6] Kinder der Welt, iii. 109.
[7] Kinder der Welt, i. III; Gesammelte Werke, vi. 206.
[8] Gesammelte Werke, iii. 300.
[9] Kinder der Welt, ii. 47.
[10] Gesammelte Werke, v. 201. On page 175 the word "vornehm" is used by her.
[11] Gesammelte Werke, viii. 44, 246, 321.
[12] Kinder der Welt, ii. 355. "That you are the best, deepest, purest, noblest of women"—"Poor, brave, free-born breast—bow well it has preserved its patent of nobility." Kinder der Welt, iii. 309.
[13] Im Paradiese, iii. 6.
[14] Gesammelte Werke, v. 197.
[15] Gesammelte Werke, ix. 73.
[16] Gesammelte Werke, viii. 168.
[17] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 71: "I have been sold once in my life. How mankind will now blame me if I give myself as a free-will offering in order to suppress the anguish of that disgrace!"
[18] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 40.
