disunited, too often struggling in wild disorder: his poetry, like his life, is still not so much an edifice as a quarry. Werner had cast a look into perhaps the very deepest region of the Wonderful; but he had not learned to live there: he was yet no denizen of that mysterious land; and, in his visions, its splendor is strangely mingled and overclouded with the flame or smoke of mere earthly fire. Of his dramas we have already spoken; and with much to praise, found always more to censure. In his rhymed pieces, his shorter, more didactic poems, we are better satisfied: here, in the rude, jolting vehicle of a certain Sternhold-and-Hopkins metre, we often find a strain of true pathos, and a deep though quaint significance. His prose, again, is among the worst known to us: degraded with silliness; diffuse, nay tautological, yet obscure and vague; contorted into endless involutions; a misshapen, lumbering, complected coil, well-nigh inexplicable in its entanglements, and seldom worth the trouble of unravelling. He does not move through his subject, and arrange it, and rule over it: for the most part, he but welters in it, and laboriously tumbles it, and at last sinks under it. As a man, the ill-fated Werner can still less content us. His feverish, inconstant and wasted life we have already looked at. Hitzig, his determined well-wisher, admits that in practice he was selfish, wearying out his best friends by the most barefaced importunities; a man of no dignity; avaricious, greedy, sensual, at times obscene; in discourse, with all his humor and heartiness, apt to be intolerably long-winded; and of a maladroitness, a blank ineptitude, which exposed him to incessant ridicule and manifold mystifications from people of the world. Nevertheless, under all this rubbish, contends the friendly Biographer, there dwelt, for those who could look more narrowly, a spirit, marred indeed in its beauty, and languishing in painful conscious oppression, yet never wholly forgetful of its original nobleness. Werner's soul was made for affection; and often as, under his too rude collisions with external things, it was struck into harshness and dissonance, there was a tone which spoke of melody, even in its jarrings. A kind, a sad and heartfelt remembrance of his friends seems never to have quitted him: to the last he ceased not from warm love to men at large; nay to awaken in them, with such knowledge as he had, a sense for what was best and highest, may be said to have formed the earnest, though weak and unstable aim of his whole existence. The truth is, his defects as a writer were also his defects as a man: he was feeble, and without volition; in life, as in poetry, his endowments fell into confusion; his character relaxed itself on all sides into incoherent expansion; his activity became gigantic endeavor, followed by most dwarfish performance. The grand incident of his life, his adoption of the Roman Catholic religion, is one on which we need not heap farther censure; for already, as appears to us, it is rather liable to be too harshly than too leniently dealt with. There is a feeling in the popular mind, which, in well-meant hatred of inconsistency, perhaps in general too sweepingly condemns such changes. Werner, it should be recollected, had at all periods of his life a religion; nay he hungered and thirsted after truth in this matter, as after the highest good of man; a fact which of itself must, in this respect, set him far above the most consistent of mere unbelievers, in whose barren and callous soul consistency perhaps is no such brilliant virtue. We pardon genial weather for its changes; but the steadiest of all climates is that of Greenland. Farther, we must say that, strange as it may seem, in Werner's whole conduct, both before and after his conversion, there is not visible the slightest trace of insincerity. On the whole, there are fewer genuine renegades than men are apt to imagine. Surely, indeed, that must be a nature of extreme baseness, who feels that, in worldly good, he can gain by such a step. Is the contempt, the execration of all that have known and loved us, and of millions that have never known us, to be weighed against a mess of pottage, or a piece of money ? We hope there are not many, even in the rank of sharpers, that would think so. But for Werner there was no gain in any way; nay rather certainty of loss. He enjoyed or sought no patronage; with his own resources he was already independent though poor, and on a footing of good esteem with all that was most estimable in his country. His little pension, conferred on him, at a prior date, by a Catholic Prince, was not continued after his conversion, except by the Duke of Weimar, a Protestant. He became a mark for calumny; the defenceless butt at which every callow witling made his proof-shot; his character was more deformed and mangled than that of any other man. What had he to gain? Insult and persecution; and with these, as candor bids us believe, the approving voice of his own conscience. To judge from his writings, he was far from repenting of the change he had made; his Catholic faith evidently stands in his own mind as the first blessing of his life, and he clings to it as the anchor of his soul. Scarcely more than once (in the Preface to his Mutter der Makkabäer) does he allude to the legions of falsehoods that were in circulation against him; and it is in a spirit which, without entirely concealing the querulousness of nature, nowise fails in the meekness and endurance which became him as a Christian. Here is a fragment of another Paper, published since his death, as it was meant to be; which exhibits him in a still clearer light. The reader may contemn, or, what will be better, pity and sympathize with him; but the structure of this strange piece surely bespeaks anything but insincerity. We translate it with all its breaks and fantastic crotchets, as it stands before us: "TESTAMENTARY INSCRIPTION, from Friedrich Ludwig Zacharias Werner, a son," &c. - (here follows a statement of his parentage and birth, with vacant spaces for the date of his death)," of the following lines, submitted to all such as have more or less felt any friendly interest in his unworthy person, with the request to take warning by his example, and charitably to remember the poor soul of the writer before God, in prayer and good deeds. "Begun at Florence, on the 24th of September, about eight in the evening, amid the still distant sound of approaching thunder. Concluded, when and where God will! "Motto, Device and Watchword in Death: Remittuntur ei peccata multa, quoniam dilexit multum!!! Lucas, caput vii. v. 47. "N.B. Most humbly and earnestly, and in the name of God, does the Author of this Writing beg, of such honest persons as may find it, to submit the same in any suitable way to public examination. "Fecisti nos, Domine, ad Te; et irrequietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in Te. S. Augustinus. "Per multa dispergitur, et hic illucque quærit (cor) ubi requiescere possit, et nihil invenit quod ei sufficiat, donec ad ipsum (sc. Deum) redeat. S. Bernardus. "In the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen! "The thunder came hither, and is still rolling, though now at a distance. The name of the Lord be praised! Hallelujah! I BEGIN: "This Paper must needs be brief; because the appointed term for my life itself may already be near at hand. There are not wanting examples of important and unimportant men, who have left behind them in writing the defence, or even sometimes the accusation, of their earthly life. Without estimating such procedure, I am not minded to imitate it. With trembling I reflect that I myself shall first learn in its whole terrific compass what properly I was, when these lines shall be read by men; that is to say, in a point of Time which for me will be no Time; in a condition wherein all experience will for me be too late! Rex tremendæ majestatis, But if I do, till that day when All shall be laid open, draw a veil over my past life, it is not merely out of false shame that I so order it; for though not free from this vice also, I would willingly make known my guilt to all and every one whom my voice might reach, could I hope, by such confession, to atone for what I have done; or thereby to save a single soul from perdition. There are two motives, however, which forbid me to make such an open personal revelation after death: the one, because the unclosing of a pestilential grave may be dangerous to the health of the uninfected looker-on; the other, because in my Writings (which may God forgive me!), amid a wilderness of poisonous weeds and garbage, there may also be here and there a medicinal herb lying scattered, from which poor patients, to whom it might be useful, would start back with shuddering, did they know the pestiferous soil on which it grew. "So much, however, in regard to those good creatures as they call themselves, namely to those feeble weaklings who brag of what they designate their good hearts, so much must I say before God, that such a heart alone, when it is not checked and regulated by forethought and steadfastness, is not only incapable of saving its possessor from destruction, but is rather certain to hurry him, full speed, into that abyss, where I have been, whence I-perhaps?!!!-by God's grace am snatched, and from which may God mercifully preserve every reader of these lines." 1 All this is melancholy enough; but it is not like the writing of a hypocrite or repentant apostate. To Protestantism, above all things, Werner shows no thought of returning. In allusion to a rumor, which had spread, of his having given up Catholicism, he says (in the Preface already quoted): "A stupid falsehood I must reckon it; since, according to my deepest conviction, it is as impossible that a soul in Bliss should return back into the Grave, as that a man who, like me, after a life of error and search has found the priceless jewel of Truth, should, I will not say, give up the same, but hesitate to sacrifice for it blood and life, nay many things perhaps far dearer, with joyful heart, when the one good cause is concerned." 1 Werner's Letzte Lebenstagen (quoted by Hitzig, p. 80). |