VARNHAGEN VON ENSE (KARL AUGUST LUDWIG PHILIP)

VARNHAGEN VON ENSE (KARL AUGUST LUDWIG PHILIP), was born at Dusseldorf, 21st February, 1785. To his own countrymen, a writer of great mark, and a publicist of tried and varied service, he is chiefly notable abroad for his close connection throughout a long life with men of European fame; for the contributions he has made towards the just appreciation of some of those men; and for the many remarkable incidents of a career that, in an unusual degree, mirrors the age in which it has been run. To Englishmen, what Varnhagen saw and has described is, perhaps, more considerable than what he thought or did.

In 1803, while attending the medical college at Berlin, he formed the acquaintance of Chamisso (the author of Peter Schlemihl), and with him made his first literary venture in the Musen Almanach of 1804. There, too, he obtained an introduction to Fichte, "to whom," he says, "I listened as to a divine man," and there he met, for the first time, Rahel Levin. In 1806 he went to the University of Halle, but soon returned to Berlin, for the purpose, as he thought, of merely spending his vacation there.

He found the Prussian capital the scene of a proud excitement. Troops were marching out in quick succession, to check, as it was hoped, the progress of Napoleon. But a very brief interval brought the news of Auerstadt and Jena. Not a Prussian soldier was to be seen or heard of. It seemed to Varnhagen, he tells us, as if the earth had opened and swallowed them up. In October he witnessed the entry of the French. Halle University was now closed, and many both of the professors and the students flocked to Berlin. Varnhagen attended the lectures of Fichte and of Schleiermacher, and eagerly improved his acquaintance with Rahel, who had long occupied a conspicuous place in the best society of the town. Without possessing either rank, or wealth, or beauty, or, indeed (as Carlyle puts it), any artificial nimbus whatsoever, this lady was the queen of a distinguished circle, in which the youth, just entering on life, enjoyed the fellowship of Friedrich von Gentz, of Tieck, of Prince Lewis Ferdinand of Prussia, of Friedrich Schlegel, and of the two Humboldts. But Rahel herself was ever the central object, and friendship ripened into love.

This eminent woman exercised her singular influence over all who were privileged to approach her, partly by the force and freshness of an intellect which gushed forth in conver-

sation all the more vigorously for its freedom from the tasks of authorship, and partly from the habit of speaking her thoughts with little regard to the conventionalisms of the fashionable world. One who knew her well has said of her, "She had the head of a sage and the heart of an apostle, and yet she was as much a child and a woman as anyone can be."¹ In these days, it is only by such mere reports—unsatisfactory as they are—that she can be estimated. Her correspondence, indeed, is abundant, but it does not reflect her mind. Only in speaking face to face with those to whom she addressed herself does she seem to have had the command of her own powers. When the intercourse between Varnhagen and Rahel first became intimate, he was but twenty-four years of age; she was thirty-six. Seven years more of adventure and of struggle lay before him, ere he could join his lot with hers. Yet, when twenty-four years had passed, we find him writing:—"Rahel is still to me the freshest and brightest feature in my life (das neueste und frischeste meines ganzen Lebens)." These words were written just before her loss (1833). Shortly after it, he added, "In her, nature and intellect were ever in free reciprocity; great in innocence as well as in wisdom, her utterances, both of mind and heart, were original and vivid; her words and deeds were quick, appropriate, decisive. To force of character she added womanly gentleness and grace." Such a woman may well have done her life-task, and have done it faithfully and fully, without writing any books.

In 1809, Varnhagen entered the Austrian army as an ensign in the Count von Bentheim's regiment, and was severely wounded at Wagram. Count von Bentheim was one of several Austrian officers who, on the conclusion of the short-lived peace, accompanied Prince Charles von Schwarzenberg on an embassy to Paris, and shared in the festivities which attended the marriage of Napoleon with Maria Louisa. Varnhagen went with his commander. Beneath the smiling surface he found mutual distrust and hostility. Frenchmen were dwelling with more pleasure on their past victories than on their new alliance. Germans were already rejoicing in the hope of another appeal to the arbitrement of the sword. For a moment, however, both gaieties and heartburnings were stilled, under the impressions of grief and terror caused by the calamity at the ambassador's house on the night of the 1st July 1810. Varnhagen saw the splendid beginnings of the festival; noticed the significant smile with which Napoleon looked at a certain German transparency announcing the return of the golden age; witnessed the bursting forth of the flames, the strange alarm created by a cry that there was a conspiracy to kill the emperor, and the terrible rush which followed the emperor's quiet departure. He saw Napoleon's unexpected return, to direct in person the extinction of the fire, and stood beside the spot on which were discovered the blackened remains of the poor princess who, a few hours before, radiant with beauty and hospitality, had opened the ball. Such a shock must needs have thrown gloom over all the pomps of Paris, and may have deepened the prepossessions which already made it hard for Varnhagen to give an impartial picture of the court and of the man on whose words and deeds all Europe was then intent. His chapter, Am Hofe Napoleons is the least satisfactory one in the Denkwürdigkeiten. He re-presents Napoleon's speeches as "those of a schoolboy; insignificant in substance and in expression; without spirit, wit, or force (gering so wohl dem Inhalt als dem Wortausdrücke nach; ohne Geist, ohne Witz, ohne Kraft), and speaks of "his ridiculous attempts to shine." We possess too many of Napoleon's utterances—from Paris streets in 1793; from the rock of St Helena in 1816-21; and from almost every intermediate stage of the marvellous

Varnha-gen. itinerary comprised within those bounds; to be misled on a fact to which the witnesses are legion, and substantially of one accord. Rarely has a writer of great ability and of unimpeachable honesty fallen into a stranger mistake than has Varnhagen when he goes on to assert that "even the French themselves" perceived in Napoleon only ordinary faculties and common gifts, in an uncommon measure. Such a statement affords a gauge of the credulity even of able observers, when they are seeking what they wish to find. The just moral estimate of such a man is not advanced a title by unjust attempts to dwarf his intellectual stature.

During the remainder of the enforced submission of Austria to Napoleonic policy, Varnhagen lived in retirement; sometimes in Bohemia, where he formed a friendship with the Prussian minister Von Stein, and sometimes in Saxony. Just before the news came of the burning of Moscow, he entered the Russian army under Tettenborn, who was so soon to become one of the most conspicuous leaders in the War of Liberation. His first service lay in the expedition for the seizure and defence of Hamburg. The war of liberation. When that city again fell to the French, he followed Tettenborn in his campaigns in Mecklenburg, Hanover, and Holstein; and, finally, in the advance on Paris. These campaigns form the subject of two of his works,—(1.) Geschichte der hampburger Ereignisse, 1813; (2.) Geschichte der Kriegszüge Tettenborns, 1814. In Paris he made the acquaintance of Madame de Stael, and at her house listened to a remarkable conversation on Negro slavery and Russian serfdom, in which the Emperor Alexander took a leading part, and in the course of which he promised (in 1814) that serfdom should be abolished; thus affording another illustration of the fitness of his famous self-definition. Madame de Stael's social position naturally excited in Varnhagen's mind some mental comparisons, which did not turn altogether to her advantage. He praises her talents, but finds her wanting in simplicity. "She was," he says, "both a princess and a 'bourgeoise' and it became a matter of grave doubt with me which of these characters was assumed. Perhaps both were."

Diplomsey. It is characteristic of those times of upheaving, that as it was at Berlin he had entered the Russian army, so now, being at Paris, he entered the diplomatic service of Prussia. His chief duty in prospect was to aid the chancellor Von Hardenberg at the Congress of Vienna. But he had first to discharge a political mission at Hamburg, and then to secure the long-promised felicity of his life by his marriage with Rahel at Berlin. Together they proceeded to Vienna. His account of the congress, or rather of its outward life, is graphic, and is charmingly written; but it neither makes, nor pretends to make, any essential contribution to political history. Always fortunate in the opportunities of ob-

serving famous men at critical times, he saw the last flashes of that relic of a bygone age, the old Prince de Ligne, and he was present at the expiatory service which Talleyrand had to celebrate for the execution of Louis XVI. His career in diplomacy was for a while prolonged by a mission of three years at the court of Baden, where he was much too honest and too liberal to satisfy the court of Prussia. It was then interrupted for nearly ten years. In 1829 he went on a mission to Hesse-Cassel, to endeavour to heal the dissensions in the electoral family, a service in which he acquitted himself with great ability, although with small success. At a later period, he declined an offer of the embassy to Washington, as he also declined other offers of official employment and honour. That his experience of diplomatic life never weakened his lofty ideas of public duty and responsibility, we have the best evidence. There lies, too, ancillary testimony, instructive in itself, to the same effect, in the words of withering scorn with which, in his Diary,¹ he has branded Lord Normanby's Year of Revolution, and the pitiful intrigues therein recorded.

From 1819 onwards, Varnhagen's main work in the world was literary. But with him literature was ever the handmaid to life. The reader of his books need not be a German to trace in them the good results of the discipline of 1813, and of the gloomy antecedent years, as well as the fruits of original faculty and of a wide and patient culture. Their literary merit is great, but they have merits more important. Varnhagen can depict with force and beauty men and epochs that are past, but he so depicts them as to show that in his eyes the chief value of the dead heroes and the dead ages consists in their capacity of exciting the living to wise, earnest, and fruitful action, instead of lulling them in a fool's paradise. He, for one, will not be content with that division of power which assigns to the Germans the empire of the air. He felt, in all its bitterness, the contrast between the intellectual greatness and the political degradation of Germany, and he laboured to make German books the seedplot of German independence and self-truthfulness. Neither in literature nor in public life was he the dupe of such fine-spun schemes as those by which Frederick William IV., and his knot of pseudo-pietists, sought to build up a system of policy which should be half modern and half mediæval; which should mask the principles of a feudal tyranny in the garb of a delusive constitutionalism. Few surviving men had seen more of the horrors of war; still fewer could appreciate more lovingly the domestic blessings which take wings at the first approach of that calamity; but he knew that there are calamities less tolerable than those even of civil war. Perhaps in the whole extent of his writings (of the most important of which we give a list below),² nothing more significant is

Varnish. to be found than those few sentences of his Diary¹ which indicate the conclusions and the omens that, ten years ago, came upon his mind as to the future of Prussia, from all he had seen and heard during the years 1840 to 1849. If a happier issue may now be hoped for, than at that time he could foresee, his own writings and influence—and those of men likeminded—have had no inconsiderable share in bringing about the improved prospect which, as we trust, is opening before his country. (E. E.)