The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries/Volume 18/Ricarda Huch
ICARDA HUCH is not a poet of the people, nor for the people, but her writings have gained an evergrowing, readily applauding audience among readers who have feeling for artistic prose and a natural ear for style.
She won her reputation in three different lines: first, as the author of several valuable novels and novel-like prose works; second, as a lyric poetess of great refinement; and third, as the writer of a keen survey of older German Romanticism. Her novels are daring studies of life, and in them symbolistic romanticism and modern realism are blended uniquely. Her lyric poems are remarkable both for grace of form and for wide sweep of thought. Her work on the German Romantic School, through its deep psychologic insight, competes successfully with the best scholarly presentations of this subject. Thus Ricarda Huch combines in a high degree versatility of talent with the original quality of mind which gives to all her works a note of distinction.
The external facts of her life are quickly told. She was born in the city of Brunswick in 1864, and having lost her parents when she was still very young, was mainly educated by her grandmother, a charming woman of high spiritual gifts, to whom the granddaughter lovingly dedicated her first remarkable work, the drama Evoë! (1892). She lived at home until her twenty-third year, when she resolved to get a scholarly training. She went to the university of Zurich, Switzerland, one of the very first European universities admitting women to the study of the arts and sciences. There, she studied history and literature, and received the degree of doctor of philosophy.
In Zurich she stayed for nearly ten years. After having taken her degree, she accepted, first, the position of a secretary at the public library, and then that of a high school teacher in Zurich. In 1896 she left that "town of hope and youth," as she has called it, and went to Bremen where, for a while, she taught in a Latin school for girls. In Vienna, where she afterward lived for a time, she married a dentist, Dr. Ceconi, whom she followed to Trieste and later to Munich. In 1906 she obtained a divorce from him. Soon afterward she married again, and with her second husband, a cousin of hers, who is a lawyer in Brunswick, she is living in her native town.
We have but scant information about the details of her outer life. The chief interest, therefore, will rest in her spiritual biography. And her inner history has, indeed, a special interest due to the rather abrupt change which at the beginning of her career came into her relations with the world around her. It must have been like a revolution to her when she left her North German home and went to the Swiss university town. She came of old patrician stock, one for whom life was made easy and never became "a mere drought and famine." Although imbibing readily the refinement and culture of her family traditions, from the beginning her mind was working against the limitations which she found in the life about her. Her instinct for self-development at last made her break traditional bounds, and free herself to become a woman after her own mind.
Ricarda Huch, who never takes her readers into her confidence, has not told us sufficiently what the new phase of her life in Zurich meant to her. Where even the landscape was new to her, everything must have attracted the young woman. She took part in the real student life, and met people who were congenial to her. And when she tried to grasp all her manifold impressions, and to give them adequate expression, she found herself a poet.
In 1890 she published her first volume of Poems, which was overlooked until she attained fame as a novelist. In 1907 appeared New Poems. In these two volumes of verse her poetic genius showed pronounced individuality. She is not, indeed, essentially a lyric poet, she is too problematic for that; besides, she does not like to open her heart, but rather comments on life. Only some smaller love songs and poems of nature are "pure feeling breathed in pure music." Yet even when she pours out her love, her hopes, and her sorrows, and charms us by the simple pathos of genuine lyric poetry, there still remains a certain sad touch of restraint and shyness, a marked feature which she shares with many a North German poet and, strangely enough, also with the Swiss Gottfried Keller, whom she congenially understands, and on whom she wrote an appreciative essay. But in addition to these short lyrics of rhythmic grace—and more important than they—there are dreamy fancies, sombre legends, and, above all, plastic renderings of historic episodes in her poems. These poems are like finely-cut cameos, all of a perfect art which reminds us of Konrad Ferdinand Meyer's masterpieces. Ricarda Huch surely was influenced by this master, and has quite remarkably assimilated his art.
Her inspiration, however, was purely personal. Some strong expressions of her poetic nature are to be seen in her tempestuous love of beauty and freedom, her mystic glorification of death, and her pronounced interest in history, all of which find their expression also in sundry prose works.
Her intense love of beauty, united with her acquaintance of Italy and thirst for historic knowledge, inspired her to write excellent essays on the heroes of Italy's political renaissance (The Risorgimento, 1908). And on those psycho-biographical sketches, poetical studies based on historical sources, so to speak, is based The Life of Count Federigo Confalonieri (1910), another prose work, half history, half fiction. It is the time of the Austrian sway over Northern Italy which is pictured in this novel-like work, a period which Elizabeth Barrett Browning, too, described in Casa Guidi Windows. And like the English woman, Ricarda Huch is intensely interested in the struggle of the Italians to free themselves from the Austrian yoke, and to become a unified nation. Perhaps her best tribute to the Italy of her thoughts and dreams was paid in the History of Garibaldi, comprising two parts, The Defense of Rome (1906) and The Fight for Rome (1907).
But not Italy only was "a face full of remembrances" to our author. She also undertook to revive a tragic episode of the German past, in her remarkable book, The Great War, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1912-13. It gives the story of the Thirty Years' War in the form of a prose epic.
There are very interesting chapters and passages in these and kindred books, clever studies of human nature, wonderful accounts of epoch-making events, interspersed with lyric effusions and romantic ballads, but, on the whole, we must say that the author has wasted in these works her poetic strength on political themes too big for her grasp — reminding us again of Elizabeth Browning in her Italian period. Nevertheless, Ricarda Huch here as in all her work proves herself a prose writer of fine skill and of an austere beauty of language. To a certain degree, she is to German literature what Walter Pater is to the English art of writing.
Although it is not seldom that the critic in her runs away with the novelist, Ricarda Huch is no scholarly poet in the disagreeable sense of the word. In the main, the solid burden of her thought is steadied by her good taste and her mastery of words. Her poet's heart lives in history. To her, instinct for poetry must needs be instinct for history. And from the very first of her career as an author she showed a keen sense for historic retrospection.
It remains for us to consider Ricarda Huch's novels which, like her poems, show her art fully. Her first printed novel was Recollections of Ludolf Ursleu the Younger, published in 1892. Ludolf Ursleu, the last scion of a North German patrician family, in the cell of a Swiss monastery where he has fled from the world, writes down the fateful history of his house. But the book is more than a mere family chronicle; it is the story of his sister Galeide's and his cousin Ezard's unhappy love. And the author takes great pains in tracing the psychological influence of their unlawful and secret passion on the different members of the Ursleu family. To highten the situation, fate lurks behind the scene; a horrible epidemic of cholera gives the story a gloomy background. We hear the author's constant cry: Let us obey nature, not the world, for nature is good and beautiful and brings happiness. But her characters who obey the call of nature rush to predestined ruin.
A slight variation of the same theme, that is a man of patrician family wavering between his wife and the woman he really loves, is found in another novel Vita somnium breve (Life a Short Dream), which was published ten years later. Here also, the leading motive is, "Oh life, oh beauty!" And the end of the story, like that of Ursleu, is chaos instead of beauty. In both of these novels resignation is the last note.
These books may be contrasted with two other novels: From the Triumphgasse (1902), the best known of Ricarda Huch's works, and Of the Kings and the Crown (1902), which is the author's most symbolic novel. In the Triumphgasse we are led into a totally different atmosphere of life: the slums of a large Italian town. The owner of a crowded tenement in the poorest part of the city describes the fates and frailties of his tenants. The most interesting group of figures is formed around the old woman Farfalla and her sons and daughters—all of them children of physical and moral wretchedness. Only the crippled Ricardo knows of a better life, where his soul dreamingly wanders about in blossoming gardens of eternal beauty. But he, 
RICARDA HUCH
too, is no victor over circumstances, for the title of Triumphgasse (the street of triumph) is mere mockery. He dies "a fettered slave in the procession of life."
What the novelist portrays in these two books shows her changed attitude toward the humbler classes. In the two first mentioned novels, she is rather remote from the life of the toiling many; e. g., all the Ursleus "wear life like a beautiful garment or ornament." Then, when living in Trieste, as she told in a letter, Ricarda Huch saw what women and children had to suffer, and what it meant to be a social outlaw. Now, after this experience, she feels how a common man feels who has lost his happiness or, worse still, his self-respect and honor. And with subtle observation she pictures wildgrown human beings, men blinded with passion or even raging maniacs. She does not, however, raise her characters from the despair of drudgery and brutality to confidence in life. She is no Jane Addams, nor does she want to be more than an objectively observing bystander. She sketches life as it is, and her method is more analytic than intuitive. Yet she must not be classed with the naturalists, because she is too refined and tasteful. The plots and structures of most of her stories deserve unstinted praise, and delight lovers of artistically organized and well-proportioned novels. And over all her books there plays that symbolistic spirit of neo-romanticism which spreads a veil of beauty even over the ugliness of life.
It is impossible to sum up Ricarda Huch's life and message to our generation in a few sentences. All her books from first to last command our respect. She is not afraid of life as so many old and new romanticists are, nor is she ignorant of it. She has lived on terms of sympathetic contact with primitive people as well as with representatives of an overrefined civilization. She has thought honestly and does not shrink from declaring her criticism of life. But her characters are no winners in the fight of life, because her self-centred philosophy is a humane scepticism and even materialistic determinism. She does not lead us into the land of heart's desire where there has been given "beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness."
Ricarda Huch's prose has breadth and repose and calm development, and is, at the same time, full of variety and of admirable clearness. Her style possesses delicate precision, felicities of word and cadence, superb lines—in a word, an atmosphere of art which belongs only to the highest order of prose.