Preface

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The Apparition on the Streckelberg
The Amber Witch
A ROMANCE BY
WILHELM MEINHOLD
TRANSLATED BY LADY DUFF GORDON EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH JACOBS
AND ILLUSTRATED BY
PHILIP BURNE-JONES
e
London
PusiisHepD By DAVID NUTT IN THE STRAND myceczch
TO
BURNE-JONES
Pntroduction
F you ask even the most widely read among your German acquaintances if he knows Meinhold or any of his works, the odds are great that he will proclaim a boast-
ful ignorance on the subject. Yet when some years ago an ingenious editor extracted more than usually interesting, and at the same time gratuitous, copy from our chief English men of letters, several of them included translations of one or other of Meinhold’s chief works among the Hundred Best Books. Such a contrast may well compel our wonder, and at least would rouse curiosity as to what manner of man was he who has succeeded so well in becoming known abroad and forgotten at home.
The circumstances of the early life of Johann Wilhelm Meinhold might have prepared one to expect a remark- able career. It was indeed remarkable that he outlived the rigorous discipline of his early years. His father was a Protestant clergyman who had the cure of a few souls at Netzelkow, a lonely hamlet on one of the projecting peninsulas of the Island Usedom at the mouth of the Oder, which give the isle its tortuous shape. vii
The Amber Witch
Pastor Meinhold was a great believer in water, yet he had a habit which does not often go with that belief; he invariably went to bed at six a.m. and got up at eleven in the forenoon. When Wilhelm his eldest son was born, 27th February 1797, he was immediately plunged into ice-cold water to harden him, and through- out his early days his regimen mainly consisted of cold water tempered by birch. Another of Pastor Meinhold’s pedagogic principles was that lessons should always be taken in the open air, even when the ice and snow were on the ground. It is scarcely to be wondered at that Frau Pfarrerin Meinhold only survived to witness his treatment of her son till he was nine years old, but it continued till the lad was sixteen, when he exchanged the parental tyranny for the less rigorous authorities of Greifswald University. No wonder that there was a strain of eccentricity in the younger Meinhold’s character; the brutal behaviour of his father seems to argue more than eccentricity.
Meinhold only stopped at Greifswald two years, earn- ing little but ill-will from either his professors or his Commilitonen. Only Kosegarten, one of the former, had the discernment to declare that he was sure there was a sweet kernel under the rough rind of Meinhold’s appearance and behaviour. After trying the life of a private tutor at Uekermunde he adopted his father’s profession and passed the usual theological examinations. He became curate at Giitzkow, not far from Greifswald,
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Introduction
under a certain Pastor Gering. Here for the first time he found somebody that could appreciate his sweet kernel. The second daughter of Pastor Gering gave him her heart, and shortly afterwards her hand, and the young couple settled in 1820 at Usedom, the capital town of Meinhold’s native island, where he had obtained an appointment as master of the Town School. Whether he attempted to carry out the family traditions on child culture at the Town School is not known, but he only held the post for a year, after which time he was appointed pastor of the village of Coserow, which he was destined to make famous by his pen as the seat of the romance which the reader has before him.
At an early stage of his career he showed a distinct turn for a life of letters. He sent to Jean Paul a poetical drama, Herzog Bogislaf, and received words of encouragement from the great man. A greater than Jean Paul also took note of Meinhold. In 1824 he published a volume of verse and sent a copy to Goethe, who reviewed it rather favourably, and showed his critical insight by recommending Meinhold to confine himself to local description and individual and personal experi- ence. Meinhold treated the great critic’s advice in the same manner as authors are accustomed to deal with the admonitions of their critics. In 1826 he produced a long and dull religious epic on the Crusade of St. Otto: it was the failure it deserved to be. He seems, however, to have learnt some wisdom by his failure, for his next
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The Amber Witch
work was precisely on the lines that his great critic had pointed out. Heine had just been revealing to the German world a new source of poetic feeling in his Nordseebilder, and Meinhold was concerned to show that the sun set with as much glory in the Baltic Sea near his native island as on the other side of the Danish Peninsula. His Miniaturgemilde von Rigen und Usedom, published in 1830, did much to attract the stream of tourists to the mouth of the Oder rather than to that of the Elbe.
Meinhold was now come to the years when a man’s life work is settled for him by that combination of choice and circumstance which constitutes life. He devoted himself with all the energy of his rugged nature to the study of Theology, at that time—the epoch of Strauss and Baur—the chief occupation of German intellect. In 1835 he competed unsuccessfully for a theological Essay, but he obtained an honourable mention, and an extract from his Essay, dealing with the vexed question of miracles, obtained him his D.D. five years later. Mean- while he had been preparing a counterblast to the critics of Holy Writ on very original lines. Strauss and Baur were showing their critical insight by declaring that most of the works contained in the New Testament were written by others than those to whom they were at- tributed. Meinhold made up his mind that he would confound the critics by showing that they could be easily taken in with regard to the authenticity of a work dealing
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with their own country. As early as 1826 he had written a romance entitled Die Pfarrer’s Tochter zu Coserow. But at that time the German censorship was peculiarly active, as Heine knew to his cost, and the Viennese censors refused Meinhold an imprimatur for his romance. Luckily for him and for us. For fifteen years later he made use of this corner-stone rejected by the builders to serve as a stumbling-block in the way of the higher criticism, and incidentally produced the most vital reconstruction of German medieval life in existence.
Leaving for more detailed discussion the effectiveness of Meinhold’s method of controversy till we deal with the