There are some naive, appealing bits in the description of the 
Jewish second-hand dealer, e.g.: 
The week flies by, five days only 

The week allows you for your work. 
Bestir yourself, don’t pause for breath, 

Earn, earn your daily bread. 
Saturdays the Father does forbid you, 
Sundays are forbidden by the Son [p. 55]. 

But later Beck succumbs completely to.that kind of blathering 
about the Jews which is typical of the liberal Young Germans. The 
poetry dries. up so entirely that one might think one was listening to a 
scrofulous speech in the scrofulous Saxon Assembly of Estates: You 
cannot become a craftsman, nor an ‘alderman of the mercers’ 
guild”, nor tiller of the soil, nor professor, but a career in medicine is 
open to you. This finds poetical expression as follows: 

A working trade they would deny you, 
Deny you too a field to till. 

You may not from the teacher’s chair 
Offer discourse to the young; 

You may heal the country’s sick [p. 57]. 
Could one not in the same way versify the Collected Statutes of 

Prussia and set Herr Ludwig of Bavaria’s verse to music? 
Having declaimed to his son: 

You must labour and be grasping, 

Always covetous of property and gold [p. 57], 
the Jew consoles him with: 

Your honesty endures for ever [pp. 57-58]. 

LORELEI 

This Lorelei is none other than Gold. 
Then did turpitude flood in 
Upon all purity of spirit, 
Drowning all things sound [p. 64]. 

This Deluge of the spirit and drowning of all things sound is a 
most depressing mixture of the banal and the bombastic. There 
follow petty tirades against the evil and immorality of money. 

Its (love’s) quest is money and precious stones 

And never hearts nor parity of souls, 
No simple hut for dwelling [p. 67]. 

If money had done no more than discredit this German quest for 
hearts and parity of souls and Schiller’s meanest hut with its space for a 
happy loving pair,* its revolutionary effects would deserve recogni- 
tion. 

DRUM-SONG 

In this poem our socialist poet once more shows how through 
being trapped in the German petty-bourgeois misery, he is 
constantly obliged to spoil what little effect he achieves. 

A regiment marches off with its band playing. The people call 
upon the soldiers to make common cause with them. The reader is 
glad that the poet is at last summoning up courage. But oh dear! We 
finally discover that the occasion is merely the Emperor’s name-day 
and the people’s words are only the improvised and unspoken 
reverie of a youth watching the parade. Probably a gymnasium boy: 

Thus dreams a youth with burning heart [p. 76]. 

Whilst in the hands of Heine the same material, with the same 
point, would contain the most bitter satire on the German people, in 
Beck’s case all that emerges is a satire on the poet himself, who 
identifies himself with the powerlessly rapturous youth. In Heine’s 
case, the raptures of the bourgeoisie are deliberately high-pitched, so 
that they may equally deliberately then be brought down to earth 
with a bump; in Beck’s case it is the poet himself who is associated 
with these fantasies and who naturally also suffers the consequences 
when he comes crashing down to earth. In the case of the one the 
bourgeoisie feels indignation at the poet’s impertinence, in the case 
of the other reassurance at the attitudes of mind they have in 
common. The Prague uprising!” in any case presented him with an 
opportunity to work up material of a quite different character from 
this farce. 

THE EMIGRANT 

I broke a bough from off a tree, 

The keeper made complaint, 

The master bound me to a post 

And dealt me this grave injury [p. 86]. 

The only thing missing here is the complaint delivered in similarly 
versified form. 

THE WOODEN LEG 

Here the poet tries his hand at narrative and fails in a really 
pathetic fashion. This complete inability to tell a story and create a 
situation, which is evident throughout the book, is characteristic of 
the poetry of true socialism. True socialism, in its vagueness, 
provides no opportunity to relate the individual facts of the narrative 

to general conditions and thus bring out what is striking or 
significant about them. That is why the true socialists shy away from 
history in their prose as well. Where they cannot avoid it, they 
content themselves either with philosophical constructions or with 
producing an arid and boring catalogue of isolated instances of 
misfortune and social cases. Furthermore, they all lack the necessary 
talent for narrative, both in prose and poetry, and this is connected 
with the vagueness of their whole outlook. 

THE POTATO 
Tune: Morgenrot, Morgenrot! 

Sacred bread! 

You that came in our distress, 

You that came at heaven’s bidding 

Into the world, that men might eat— 
Farewell, for now you are dead! [p. 105]. 

In the second verse he calls the potato 

...that little relic 
Left to us from Eden, 

and describes potato-blight: 

Among angels the plague rampages. 

In the third verse Beck advises the poor to put mourning on: 

You, the poor! 
Go and put mourning on. 
You now have need of nought, 
Alas, all you own is gone, 
Weep, who still have tears to shed! 

Dead in the sand 
Lies your God, o melancholy land. 
Yet let these words speak comfort to you: 
Never did redeemer perish 
Who did not later rise again! [p. 106]. 

Weep, who still have tears to shed, with the poet! Were he not as 
bereft of energy as his poor man is of wholesome potatoes, he would 
have rejoiced at the substance acquired last autumn by that 
bourgeois god, the potato, one of the pivots of the existing bourgeois 
society. The landowners and burghers of Germany would have done 
themselves no harm by having this poem sung in the churches. 

For this effort Beck deserves a garland of potato-blossom. 

THE OLD MAID 

We shall not look more closely at this poem since it drags on 
interminably, extending over full ninety pages with unspeakable 
boredom. The old maid, who in civilised countries is mostly only a 
nominal occurrence, is in Germany admittedly a significant “social 
case”’. 

The most common kind of socialist self-complacent reflection is to 
say that all would be well if only it were not for the poor on the other 
side. This argument may be developed with any conceivable 
subject-matter. At the heart of this argument lies the philanthropic 
petty-bourgeois hypocrisy which is perfectly happy with the positive 
aspects of existing society and laments only that the negative aspect 
of poverty exists alongside them, inseparably bound up with present 
society, and only wishes that this society may continue to exist without 
the conditions of its existence. 

Beck develops this argument in this poem often in the most trivial 
possible way,-for example, in connection with Christmas: 

O day that gently edifies men’s hearts, 

You would be gentler still and doubly dear— 
Did there not lodge in poor children’s hearts 
Whose orphan gaze surveys the festive 

Rooms of their rich playmates, 

Envy and the seeds of sin, 

Along with rabid blasphemy! 

Yes. 

.. more aveely would he children Ss Merry cheer 
Sound to my ears in the Christmas candlelight, 
If only in damp caverns destitution 

Were not shivering on putrid straw [p. 149]. 

There are, by the way, occasional fine passages in this amorphous 
and interminable poem, for example the description of the humpen 
proletariat: 

Who day by day unwearyingly 

Hunt garbage in the fetid gutters; 

Who flit like sparrows after food, 
Mending pans and grinding knives, 
Starching linen with stiff fingers, 
Pushing breathless at the heavy cart, 
Laden with but scarcely ripened fruits, 
Crying piteously: Who'll buy, who'll buy? 
Who fight over a copper in the dirt; 
Who at the corner-stones each day 

Sing praise to the God in whom they believe, 
But scarcely dare hold out their hands, 
Begging being against the law; 

Who with deaf ears, beset by hunger, 

Pluck the harp and blow upon the flute, 

Year in, year out, the same old tune— 
Beneath each window, at each gate— 

Setting the nursemaid’s feet adance 

But hearing not the melody themselves; 

Who after dusk illuminate the city 

But have no light for their own home; 

Who shoulder burdens and split firewood, 
Who have no master, and who have too many; 
Who dash to pray, procure and steal 

And drown with drink the vestige of a soul {pp. 158-160]. 

Beck here rises for the first time above the usual morality of the 
German bourgeoisie by putting these lines in the mouth of an old 
beggar whose daughter is asking for his permission to go to a 
rendezvous with an officer. In the above lines he gives her an 
embittered picture of the classes to which her child would then 
belong, he derives his objections from her immediate social position 
and does not preach morality to her, and for this he deserves credit.