A MISTAKEN IMPERIAL CELEBRATION

Ox the saga-haunted Kyffhäuser mountain, famed by the Barbarossa folk-tale, the German Emperor recently unveiled a colossal equestrian statue of the late Kaiser Wilhelm the First. Combined with it was a sculptured representation of the heroic and immortal ruler and his knights who, in popular belief, were held to sleep in the underground cave or castle until the day came when the ravens would no longer circle round the hill, and he would sally forth with his armed men to restore the country's power and glory. All German children have been taught to learn by heart Rückert's impressive poem, the first three verses of which run thus :

Der alte Barbarossa,
Der Kaiser Friederich,

Im unterird'schen Schlosse
Hält er verzaubert sich.

Er ist niemals gestorben,
Er lebt darin noch jetzt;
Er hat im Schloss verborgen
Zum Schlaf sich hingesetzt.

Er hat hinab genommen
Des Reiches Herrlichkeit,

Und wird einst wiederkommen

Mit ihr zu seiner Zeit.

In accordance with this poem, the artist has figured Frederick the Redbeard sitting, under a richly ornamented arch, on his throne, in the act of awaking, clad in the coronation mantle, holding the imperial sword in his hand, with the crown on his long-haired and bearded head. About him, his retinue and his castle-wardens, as well as the dwarfs of the tale, and the horses and hounds, are still sunk in sleep. The whole is said to be a most stately piece of art. As to the dimensions of the equestrian statue, near which two figures stand typifying ancient Germany in the shape of a stalwart warrior, and History as a female, offering a laurel wreath to William the Firstthey are truly gigantic. The weight of the monument (396 cwt.) is correspondingly enormous. So are the costs, which reach the pretty sum of 1,300,000 mark.

It would, no doubt, be an unduly strict criticism were it pointed out that, historically speaking, Barbarossa wore his hair, as we happen to know from very minute descriptions of his person, rather short. Certainly it might be supposed to have grown, during fully seven centuries, in his subterranean abode, where, in Rückert's words, 'his beard that is not flaxen, but aye of fiery glow, has grown through the marble table on which his chin doth rest.' But a far more serious question is this: Did the folk-tale about the hill-hidden hero who was to bring back golden days of Germany's power and glory, originally refer at all to Frederick the First, called the Redbeard?

This question must be decidedly answered with a No!' In so far, the recent celebration may be said to be founded on a mistake. Close researches in our older literature and popular legends, begun about twenty-five years ago, after the war with France, have proved this in the clearest manner possible. It was not to Barbarossa-as the Italians called the terrible Kaiser, who first fought against the Lombard League of Free Cities-but to his not less celebrated grandson, Frederick the Second, who in his third marriage had an English princess as his wife, that the popular legend originally applied.

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This is important because Frederick the Second of Germany, in the early part of the thirteenth century, held in religious matters very advanced views-as much, if not even more so, than his Prussian namesake of the eighteenth century, Frederick the Second, called the Great. The early Hohenstaufen King of the Germans and Emperor of the Romans' anticipated, in fact, the views of modern science. And it was upon him-and not upon Barbarossa who had handed over Arnold of Brescia to the Pope, to be burnt as a 'heretic and rebel'—that the dreamy popular fancy set its expectant eyes as the future mythic hope of the German nation.

Frederick the Second had died somewhat suddenly. In the year before he had been thrown on a sick-bed in consequence of the shock given him by an attempt at poisoning. This murderous attempt was made by the medical adviser of his hitherto trusty Chancellor, Petrus de Vinea, who was suspected of being in collusion with Pope Innocent the Fourth. So, at least, it is stated by Matthew Paris. When the report of the Kaiser's death, in 1250, came over the Alps, few would believe it. The world had been so full of his fame that his disappearance was generally discredited among the people. Even the mendicant friars of the Franciscan Order, one of whose members had wrathfully preached against the corruption of the Church and predicted an awful fate for it, helped in spreading the belief in Frederick's continued existence. They looked upon him as the Antichrist, but as the inevitable avenger of clerical wickedness. An old Sibylline saw, 'He lives and yet he lives not,' was therefore applied to him. The common folk declared that nobody knew where he abideth,' says a contemporary German chronicle.

The long absence of the Emperor in Italy was favourable to the upholding of this superstitious belief. In our own days we have seen a strange counterpart of such a belief in the case of Napoleon the First and his Austrian consort. In the first years of the Second Empire, Louis Bonaparte and Eugénie as he himself laughingly told Queen Victoria-were greeted in the South of France by the masses with cries of Enfin voilà le vieux revenu!' and Vive MarieLouise!' These personages had never died in popular fancy.

So general was the opinion among the German popular classes in the second part of the thirteenth century, as to the continued existence of Kaiser Frederick the Second, that a number of pseudoFredericks arose and were believed in, by many, as genuine. One of them, a certain Tile Kolup, had been able to surround himself with a kind of court for about two years, until he was captured and burnt at Wetzlar as an impostor. Only a little bone' having been found in his ashes, a fresh tale was spread that the Emperor was still not dead, but that he remained alive by divine strength, and would make an end of the priesthood.

The long national struggle against the Papal claim of universal dominion had in those times- many centuries before Luther-gone deep into the minds of the German people. The bloodthirsty cruelties of the Roman Church were loathed by high and low. During the absence of the Emperor Frederick the Second in Italy, a fanatic Grand Inquisitor had consigned, year after year, numberless victims to the flames; among them, even not a few monks suspected of heresy. But at last some noble knights went for him and his associate, and killed them like mad dogs; whereupon the Courts of Inquisition were done away with by the alarmed priestly authorities.

Long before that decisive event, the anti-Papal and anti-priestly spirit had found vent, not only in the Minnesinger poetry, but also in the satires contained in fables about Reynard the Fox, Isegrim, and the whole animal kingdom. And a characteristic sign it was, that members of the clergy itself, men of somewhat more enlightened minds, imbued with sympathy for popular rights, helped in working out these allusive satires against princely, aristocratic, and theocratic arrogance.

We shall, therefore, not be astonished when we find that one of the popular poets of that epoch, Barthel Regenbogen, describes the hoped-for return of Kaiser Frederick, and the beginning of a golden age of peace, in language foreshadowing a great Church Reformation -language which could not possibly apply to the first Hohenstaufen emperor of that name. Regenbogen is usually reckoned among the Minnesinger; and these are often, though erroneously, held to be

'See The Life of his Royal Highness the Prince Consort, by Sir Theodore Martin.

almost exclusively of noble origin. There were, however, a number of handicraftsmen and other commoners among them. Regenbogen himself was a smith. In one of his songs about his love of the poetic art he says that he won his bread most wretchedly on the hard anvil, Poverty having besieged him.' In a lay in which he pleads. for a friendly feeling between the three classes-the priests, the knights, and the peasants--he maintains that 'the plough does fully its duty.'

Now, in his Prophecy of the Future, Regenbogen foretells a great struggle about the two heads of Christendom, which will bring tears to many a mother's child. Robbery and arson will be rampant in the land. But then Kaiser Frederick, the sublime and yet mild,' will come and hang his shield on the famed withered tree, when it will bloom and bear fruit again, and peace will be restored, and all heathen kingdoms become subject to him. As to the Jews, Regenbogen shows himself steeped in the prejudices of his time. We can scarcely wonder at it, considering the disgraceful occurrences at this end of the nineteenth century.

But then he predicts that Kaiser Frederick will lay low the masterful rule of all the priests. Scarcely the seventh part of them will remain. The cloisters he will destroy, this highborn Prince. The nuns he will give into marriage; that I tell you true. They must grow wine and corn for us. When that happens, there will be good years.'

Such a prophecy could not have been made about Barbarossa. It fully fits in with the character of his grandson Frederick the Second, the friend of heathen thinkers, who corresponded with the Sultan of Egypt about philosophical and mathematical questions, and who was accused by the Pope of having written a book, De Tribus Impostoribus. Nobody, it is true, has seen that book. Nor can it be proved that Frederick the Second, or anybody else, wrote a work of such a kind. But it is pretty certain that Frederick rejected all supernatural beliefs. In his dealings with the Papacy he did not mince words. A dirty priest,' 'a dragon,' 'a roaring lion,' 'a hellish beast' these were some of his little refined expressions. Truth to say, they were but the echoes of similar insulting deliverances from the Chair of St. Peter against him.

This Hohenstaufen Emperor, rather unlike his forebear, was a man of great intellectual cultivation, a lover of art, and a poet too. Witness his Italian lay, 'Di dolor mi conviene cantare,' an excellent English translation of which, under the title of My Lady in Bondage,' is contained in the Early Italian Poets, from Ciullo d'Alcamo to Dante Alighieri,' published years ago in London by Rossetti. Frederick the Second was a wit, moreover, of whom ingenious sayings are recorded. His priestly enemies sometimes accused him of having declared that the Jews had been deceived by Moses, the Christians

by Christ, the Mahommedans by Mahommed.' At other times they changed the venue by asserting that he was a secret adherent of the doctrines of Mohammed. How can I be that?' was his answer, 'seeing that you accuse me of valuing that Prophet as little as the others?'

His clerical antagonists charged him with all kinds of heresy. To a Saracen grandee who asked him about the meaning of the holy wafer, he is said to have replied: Our priests would fraudulently make us believe that this is God!' When seeing a priest going with the Holy Host to a dying man, he is alleged to have exclaimed : 'How long is this imposture to go on?' On passing a cornfield, he remarked: Here a great many Gods are grown anew!' At various times, it is true, Frederick took occasion to deny the correctness of these reports. Whether he did so from policy in his difficult contest with the Papacy, or because the reports had been over-coloured, it is impossible to make out.

Gregory the Ninth, who spoke about him as 'that King of Pestilence,' was at any rate not far wrong when asserting that Frederick the Second had declared 'men should not believe anything else than what can be proved by the force of reason, as drawn from the laws of Nature' ('homo debet nihil aliud credere nisi quod potest vi et ratione naturæ probari '). Natural history was, in fact, a special study of the gifted German ruler, who combined with a martial disposition and a love for all chivalrous exercises a marked inclination to scientific studies. He had mastered also the languages of all the populations that were under his sceptre: besides German, Italian, French, Arabic, as well as Latin and Greek.

This was the Prince of whom the folk-tale, current for centuries, fabled that some day he would come forth, from his mythic palace in the enchanted mountain, as a Saviour of the distressed Fatherland. The head of the Roman Church and his partisans had treated him as a King of Pestilence, as an Antichrist, and so forth. His own nation remembered him differently.

Certainly he, too, like Barbarossa, had indulged in high-flying Cæsarean aspirations, out of all harmony with his constitutional position. For was he not, after all, simply the elected and deposable head of a nation whose Constitution he was bound to observe, under penalty of being unseated, when proved guilty of a breach of the ground-law before a High Court of Justice? Like Barbarossa also, Frederick the Second was much engaged in useless war for the sake of aggrandisement in Italy, as well as in crusading against the Saracens. Again, even as in the case of his ancestor, his ambitious enterprises abroad were calculated to damage national unity at home. The dukes and princes of the Empire, who, constitutionally speaking, were merely its officials, always tried to use such troublous difficulties abroad for obtaining semi-sovereignty as domini terræ.