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crated by the insulting conqueror. I experienced a certain vexation and impatience, but nothing yet like wrath. At Frankfort and Höchst I found myself in the midst of battle; yet all this was but a spectacle for me, though I should have rejoiced had an angel of God, as in the days of Sennacherib, left the Frenchmen's camp filled with dead men in a night. But my patriotic wrath had still to waken, and it did not tarry long. It came at last; that wrath which, however little joy-foreboding, was destined to support me through many a weary day, and give me gladness in the hardest of them all. "Napoleon's return from Egypt took place within a few days of my departure from Paris. I had watched that great ambitious figure of the time in his rise and progress; I had followed all his intrigues, his victories, his proclamations, his conquests; I know not whether I had rightly understood him, but after the battle of Marengo not call them rights-of conquest over I learned to shudder before that figure then so

time till his deathbed, the same feeling was predominant in the patriot's mind. He held to it through many disappointments, through many trials, but with an intensity of faith which was almost, if not altogether, of his life, the assurance of his old age, the an inspiration. It was the ruling notion prophecy of his departure; the thing he was permitted to live beyond ninety years to foster, and which another decade has so nearly and so marvellously brought to pass. Thus it was that Arndt became the apostle of German nationality; but, if his mission was glorious for its patriotism, it was not the less an apostolate of hatred. No doubt the provocation he had endured was excessive and intolerable. The French exercised the powers

idolized by so many and so mighty men; and that shuddering was but an unconscious premonition of the ten years' woe which was to come. But my utter wrath-a wrath that at the thought of the degradation of Germany and Europe often became a very frenzy this was awakened by the peace of Luneville, and the disgraceful stipulations, the underhand bargainings by means of which Talleyrand and Maret stripped and portioned out the divisions and the destinies of the Fatherland. The events of 1805 and 1806 tore away the last supports on which anything truly German could any longer lean; the worst was come; the least and the greatest, the unknown and the famous, all that made Germany, lay in one common mass of desolation, and the Gallic cock crowed his victorious note over the ruins of her desecrated glory. The day was come for all individual feelings, all opinions, all prejudices, all passions, all preferences, to sink together in one common crash. It was when Prussia and Austria, both after unavailing struggles, lay prostrate in the dust, it was then that my heart began to love them, and to love Germany, with a real love, and to hate the French with a true and holy hate. It was not Napoleon only-not the crafty, calculating, taunting Corsican, born in the land where the very honey is a poison, not the man whom liars afterwards were ready to make the great scapegoat for all the just wrath of Europe, it was not him I hated most; it was the French themselves - the deceitful, proud, ambitious French, the crafty, treacherous enemies of Germany through centuries gone by; it was these I hated in the very fulness of wrath, as in that very fulness of wrath I recognized my Fatherland, and loved it in a passion of love. All that was merely Swedish died out from me; the very hero-names of Sweden became for me but the echoes of the bygone time; and just when, through its divisions, Germany had no longer an existence, my heart embraced the notion of its oneness and its unity."

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Germany with an unsparing hand; and bitter than the savage and selfish tyranny no curse was ever laid on Europe more of the armies and the men born of the French Revolution of 1793. Europe and Prussia had their revenge in 1814 and 1815, and it was a just one. But we were not prepared, after half a century of peace and firesidely intercourse, for a fresh outbreak of those vindictive passions, stamped with all their original intensity; and we can regard with no friendly or indulgent eye those who have kept alive these sentiments in the hearts of a people, and have dug up the war-hatchet, after an interval of fifty or sixty years, with the ferocity of a savage tribe. France entered with most culpable levity into the war which has just devastated so many of her fairest provinces, under the impression that she was seeking a passage of arms, of no very dreadful import or long duration. She instantly encountered a nation armed at every point, animated by the deadliest hostility, and bent on her total destruction. Whatever may be the political view taken of the war, it is impossible to deny that the existence of intense national hatreds is a dreadful calamity, and the cause of all other calamities, for it acts and reacts incessantly. The greatest indication of progress that we can trace in our own country is that we appear to have outgrown these feelings. The English entertain at this time no national hostilities at all, and hardly condescend to notice the hostilities occasionally expressed against themselves. Our national songs are songs of loyalty and of independence, but not of hatred. But it is not so in Germany or in France. There all the sentimental and imaginative powers of the nation have Be it said, in passing, that from that been wrought upon by their poets, by

their statesmen, by their leaders, until a contest between these nations appears to each of them to be a contest against the Powers of Evil, and no sacrifices are too great to procure the defeat and humiliation of their foe. To the propagation of this irrational and sanguinary passion Arndt and his imitators have not a little contributed. They have responded but too faithfully to the sanguinary chorus of the "Marseillaise."

The year 1804 he spent for the most part in Sweden, still zealously continuing his studies of nationality, and publishing his experiences there as he had done those gathered in his other travels. Some smaller works, mainly political in their purpose, date from the same period. But it was the news of the disasters of Ulm and Austerlitz which evoked the first part of the passionate work, "The Spirit of the Age," by which he at once asserted the But we must return from this digres-power of his vigorous patriotism over the sion, which has been wrung from us by German mind. It was not as a savant, as the present lamentable dissensions of Eu- an original thinker, as a profound statesrope, to the career of Arndt himself, which man, that he came before his fellow-men. now assumed a more serious character. To have appealed in such a character His first political work appeared some- would have been to address a limited where about 1803, after his name had be- audience indeed, and what he had to come extensively known by the several say was meant for all. It was as an volumes in which he had just published honest, simple, unpretending citizen, as a the notes of his journeyings in various believing Christian man, as one who delands. The special point of politics on plored the corruptions and felt the miswhich he entered concerned what was then to him in some sort a home-question. His work was entitled "History of Serfdom in Pomerania and Rügen," and, exposing, as it did, the cruel tyranny exercised in too many cases, up to the very time of his writing, by the nobles against their dependents, drew down upon him the enmity of the ruling class, the displeasure of the King (of Sweden), and a threat of criminal prosecution. His account is entertaining:—

"The book was shown to the King, his informant having marked with a red pencil many passages in which I was supposed to have been too free in censuring acts of some of his distant ancestors upon the throne. The King, in the first storm of his displeasure, sent the book, so marked, to General von Essen, the chancellor of my university (to whom I had dedicated my work), requiring him to call the audacious author to account and, if needful, to proceed judicially against him. General von Essen summoned me to Stralsund, gave me a hint of who

my accusers were, and asked me how I meant to extricate myself from the difficulty I was placed in, as the King seemed seriously displeased. I took the book and underlined with my pencil a number of passages showing beyond all question the great cruelty and injustice still prevailing, and begged the general to point out these passages to the King. He did so, and the King replied: "In that case the man is right enough" and so I returned to Griefswald none

the worse.

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eries and scorned the despairing fatalism
of the time, that he spoke to the nation,
and struck the chord of faith and hope
and patriotism which has never ceased
since then to tremble in the German soul,
and which now, after a lapse of threescore
years, seems at last to be swelling mightily
to its grandest and fullest vibration. Like
all the mightiest things he wrote, whether
in prose or verse, his book, as he says him-
self, was "forged upon the glowing anvil
of the hour;" out of the abundance of a
generous heart, stirred by the terrible
necessity of the time, his mouth was
forced to speak. Indeed almost literally
to speak, for his book is far more an ora-
tion than a composition; and none who
ever knew the man, in reading such a
work, could fail to fancy, as sentence fol-
lows sentence and page follows
page, that
they could hear the utterance flowing
from his lips. But the book was no mere
rhapsody, though even that might have
been permitted, might even have been
profitable, at the time. Starting from a
common-sense view of the intellectual
condition of the period, he portrays the
spirit of the age as it then was, and proves
the truth of his portraiture by the writ-
ings as well as by the actions of his con-
temporaries.

He contrasts the past state of nations as history displays them with their state as he had learned to judge them by his personal experience, and, gradually passing in review the moral weakness and the political profligacy of Germany, breaks out at length into a cry of bitter lamentation over the terrors and the miseries of the time; accusing and ad

Though left unmolested, Arndt felt the very soil burn under his feet; and, as may be imagined, the struggles of the year 1809 on the Danube, in the Tyrol, aye, even the gallant Schill's fatal enterprise, and his death at Stralsund, made it impossible for Arndt to remain where he was.

his way homewards in disguise, through many difficulties and obstructions, travelling chiefly by night from place to place, here and there when necessary disarming suspicion by simple audacity, and coming at last, under a feigned name and character, to his brother's house, from whence the ferment of the time brought him to Berlin.

monishing those on whom he shows the catastrophe of Jena in the year 1806 gave blame to rest. From page to page, as the France the upper hand in Germany. work proceeds, the accusations become Obliged to fly across the seas, he found an more definite and pungent, the admoni- asylum at Stockholm, where, while occutions more impressive and striking. At pied in one of the Government offices, he one time he scourges, with incisive plain- still laboured constantly for the cause he ness of speech, the princes who, coquet- had made his own. At intervals during ting and intriguing with the foreigner, the next two years he published the varicould in such unprincely fashion betray ous portions of the second part of his their dignity, their duty, and their people; "Geist der Zeit." But the thundercloud at another it is the nobles in whose teeth of the year 1809 spread over Sweden too, he flings the shame of such unchivalrous and in its fury swept away the very throne forgetfulness as could let them wear the itself. cross of the Legion of Honour, accepted at the Gallic despot's hands, as a reward for their shedding of their fellow-Germans' blood. Again, with a sort of awe which can scarce help shuddering before the mighty force of the man's nature, he depicts "the Corsican upstart" himself. In him he recognizes, so to speak, the very In spite of the peril he incurred, he made incarnation of the "spirit of the time;" and then, turning again to consider the age itself which produced such a man as Napoleon, his utterances, like his feelings, oscillate violently between the anguish of despair and the awakening of hope. "Now," he exclaims, "we are suffering for our sins of ten years ago, and of five years ago; the chariot-wheels of desolation are rolling further and further, and how and where shall they be stayed?" of the public entry of the King and Queen. I “I arrived just before Christmas, on the day "Never," he replies, "till some equally saw the procession and the rejoicings (such as tremendous power be found to oppose it.' they were); all hearts then were united in one Never, in fact, till all the German race common German spirit through those misforcould feel as he himself could. For tunes, in the blame of which each man felt conArndt's last utterance is like his first in scious of having a part to bear. Berlin, once so this. He proclaims the faith of believing proud and glorious, lay in dust and ashes.. hope as opposed to the promptings of a went out from my place of concealment and fatalistic resignation. He calls upon each mingled in the crowd, who with shouting and living individual man to rouse from the weeping filled the Linden and the Schloss-platz. mechanical condition to which "the spirit I speak of those who wept among others who reof the age" had degraded him, to his joiced, for more eyes were wet with sorrow proper sense of freedom, virtue, and pa- Queen presented herself before the people in the than were bright with joy. When the lovely triotism. "If," he says, "each of you can feel your own heart honest, your country reddened eyes how deep an anguish mingled balcony of the palace, we could see in her tearworthy, your laws holy, your Fatherland with the gladness of her welcome. I looked for imperishable, and your princes nobleScharnhorst, and saw him ride slowly past then have no fear, for so the world is saved. with the other generals, pale and preoccupied, For every hundred such as you are worth and bending sadly forward in his saddle." a host of other men."

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Though he gives few details of his life in Berlin, beyond mentioning that, despite the multitude of spies, both French and German, busily occupied there, he contrived to associate with a circle of men like-minded with himself, and to practise assiduously, as they did, in rifle and pistol galleries, in the hope of one day turning

See in the Poems the two pieces "Der Waffenschmidt der Deutschen Freiheit," p. 249, and "Scharnhorst der Ehrenbote," p. 252.

in some sort remake his character, when already he had reached middle life, and resume his professorial duties to remove suspicions which no doubt were readily heaped upon him by those enemies of his country against whom he had been so outspoken, and from whom, day by day, he went in danger of his life.

the skill they thus acquired to the profit useful and important duties, that he should of their country, he unquestionably did much towards awakening and spreading the spirit of resistance to that power of Napoleon which only too many Germans were disposed to regard as irresistible. In the Easter of the following year, 1810 (its former Pomeranian territory having been restored to Sweden), Arndt returned to his professorial chair at the University of Greifswald, General von Essen, the Governor, receiving him as if he had spent in England the whole time from his leaving Stockholm.

The views which Germany held in those years of terrible abasement were by no means as high and as unanimous as those it holds now. Had they been so, Arndt would not have been what he was, or have

But it was not with the purpose of re-done what he did. His was an utterance, maining there permanently that he resumed his professorship. The man's heart was too deeply engaged in the salvation of his country to allow selfish ease or secure position to tempt him from what he had undertaken as an irresistible duty. Of course, though he does not say so, he was a conspirator. He held too firmly the hopes which he so ardently instilled into others not to be ready to stake his all on any reasonable effort to deliver Germany from its slavery. He recognized too fully what he preached so clearly, that the only prospect of general salvation lay in individual self-sacrifice, to place himself in any situation which might silence his voice or hamper his hand when the great time should come. He went back to his post, as he tells us in touching words, —

not a mere reverberation. German unity is the one cry heard to-day; but it was one among very many when the modest simpleminded Arndt threw his whole soul into the task of sounding it in the ears of his compatriots, and even among many who had been his friends at Greifswald, his views met little sympathy. Several of the thrones of Germany were filled by French nominees; hundreds of Germans, and amongst them men as distinguished as John Müller the historian, had willingly accepted office under their conquerors; the Confederation of the Rhine recognized Napoleon as its Protector; and multitudes of German troops were serving in or with the French armies. No wonder, then, that Arndt took an early opportunity of setting himself free from all official trammels, as we have seen.

"With neither the desire nor the hope of retaining it long. Who could at that time calcu- Warned by some loyal friends of the late on anything remaining a year or two secure watchfulness of the French spies, and the or unchanged? But two objects were essential partial discovery of the German secret soto me; first, make myself a position in an hon-cieties, he hastened to Berlin, where he ourable and irreproachable civil capacity, and secondly, to settle my family affairs. Both of these objects I had secured by the summer of the following year (1811), and then sent in my resignation, packed up my books, papers, and possessions, and betook myself to my old home at Trantow to await events; ready to fly, if I must fly, or to journey, if my country wanted (Erinnerungen, p. 114.)

me."

procured a passport for Russia (in which country, as he says "there was still a Europe "), providing himself with another passport for the Bohemian baths, to be used in case of need. He was scarcely back a day in Trantow when the alarm came; but we will give in his own words the narrative of his escape from Swedish into Prussian territory:

We have called these touching words, for the sentence we have underlined im- "A number of us were assembled in a joyous plies more than it says; it implies that party at the house of the Provost of Loitz, when this true self-sacrificing patriot felt him- a mounted messenger brought me a line from self more or less at a disadvantage from the very conditions of life which had prepared him to be most useful to his country; that, in fact, at times he felt for himself, and possibly at times was made by others to feel, that his wandering and apparently unsteady course in life was a wrong and a discredit. It became then a part of his purpose, an essential to qualify him, even in the eyes of his own party, for

my friend Billroth in Greifswald stating that have the whole country occupied within a day the French had crossed the frontier, and would or two. We all separated at once. I drove that very night to Stralsund, which as yet the French had not reached, obtained some money, slept the next night at a friend's house, starting early the following morning by sledge, and, passing on my way several detachments of French cavalry, got by sunset to Greifswald, which I found full of French troops. I bid a

few farewells there, and, avoiding the high roads, made my way across country to a spot where a sledge of my brother's met me, and brought me back to Trantow that night.

"Arrived at the house I slipped in by a back door and reached a side room from whence, in case of alarm, I could easily escape into the thickly-planted shrubberies and so make my flight good to the woods. A number of French troops, both officers and privates, were billeted in the house; but my brother plied them well with liquor, they were weary and exhausted with long marching over ice and snow, and snored away in quiet repose while I spent the whole night in packing and arranging papers, writing letters, and giving my parting commissions, blessings, and good wishes to my friends. For as long as a man lives, though the deathcandle be burnt down low enough to scorch his fingers, he always feels he has something to set in order and arrange. The snow creaked under my footsteps, as with the first streak of dawn I withdrew by the back way from the house; my cousin, my sister, and my little ten years old boy clung closely around me, and held me fast. With a last caress and a sad violence I had to thrust them from me and hurry away. I heard my little son's footsteps as he ran after and tried to overtake me, I heard his voice crying loudly behind me; and my whole soul was filled with rage, almost with curses." (Erinnerungen, p. 117 seq.)

He made his way in safety to Berlin, to find himself in the midst of that great association of Germans whose one engrossing bond of union consisted of hatred of the French, determination to shake off their yoke, and longing for their destruction. But there, too, he found the place too hot for him, and, furnished with good and influential recommendations, he took his way with Colonel Count Chazot to Breslau, on his way to Russia. From Breslau he

passed to Prague, where, strangely enough,

found; and the unexpected call to cooperate with one so great as Von Stein found him every way prepared:

"If any ask from what sources I as a pilgrim and fugitive could be possessed of means and money, I reply: as a boy my heart was filled by God with a presentiment of my destiny; from horror of self-indulgence and luxury I early grew hardy and self-reliant, and learned how to be needy as well as how to abound. And this system I had persisted in even beyond my fortieth year, disciplining myself by voluntary deprivations of food, drink, and sleep. I had well tested my pedestrian powers, and often walked as much as thirty miles at a stretch, while my brothers rode about on handsome horses. From the time of Napoleon's elevation I had felt we should have hard trials to undergo, and I had ordered myself and my mode of life accordingly. From the profits of some of my books, my official salary in Stockholm, and some years' arrears of my Greifswald appointment, which were paid in full in the year 1810, I was provided with sufficient means for my purpose. Now and then indeed, in the company of my friends, I might spend a ducat or a Friedrich's d'or, but when alone or on my wanderings my wants were of the very slightest. I cannot tell how many a time my table was no better provided than that of a huntsman in the woods, or of a hussar on a march." (Erinnerungen, p. 125.)

In August 1812, he reached St. Petersburg, and was received into Von Stein's house, where he entered on his functions as a secretary, his salary and appointments being paid by the Russian Government, at whose call Von Stein also was working in "the good cause."

In the following passage Arndt gives his own account of his meeting with Von Stein, and of the work he had to do:

Towards the end of August 1812, I stood for Minister Baron von Stein. I saw before me a the first time in the presence of the famous he met with information which he had man of middle stature, already greyish-haired failed to receive weeks before by letter, and slightly stooping, but with the brightest of that the Minister Von Stein, summoned eyes and a most friendly bearing. Attracted to thence to St. Petersburg some time pre-me as he had been by the perusal of some of my viously, was specially desirous of his services in the great work of liberation he was organizing.

Thus the man at last had found his mission. By what many would call a chance, but he himself honestly believed to be a special Providence, he found himself on the way to his work, his passport ready, and his place appointed. It was for this sort of service he had been making his whole life a preparation. From the early days of his boyhood, in all the modesty and simplicity of his nature, he had still nursed the presentiment of being useful to his Fatherland, when that Fatherland was

writings, he had invited me to join him in the most cordial manner, and as I stood before him I seemed to feel as if the impression I produced upon bim satisfied his friendly expectations. He received me with as pleasant an ease as if we had been already years acquainted, and for my part, notwithstanding the deep respect I felt before a man so famous, I could not help feeling as if we were old friends. pointed out to me as nearly as possible the pohim, though he never gave me cause to feel mysition I was to occupy with and for and under self subordinate. He never spoke of his own position towards the Emperor of Russia, merely saying, "You know what my object here is just as well as what your own has been in coming so

. . Stein

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