return, and his own slender means had for some time
been exhausted. Some gifts of honor were bestowed
upon the invalid by authors’ societies and princely
patrons, but they came too late to prevent the inevitable.
As late as 1859 Ludwig still had hope for the future.
“I see before me,” he wrote in his diary,
“a veritable world of conceptions and forms which
I might conquer if, freed from the weight that keeps
me down, I could take wings again. I believe
it would not be too late yet.” It was not
to be. Successful production of a high order
would probably have been impossible under such circumstances
in any case. With Ludwig it was further prevented
by an obstacle of a psychological nature. As
the feeling of health and strength and ease of mind
departed from him, there came in its place an ever
growing, almost morbid, spirit of self-questioning
criticism and doubt. As the springs of creative
energy ceased flowing, Ludwig thought he could replenish
them by turning to theory and analysis. In the
free intervals between the attacks of his illness,
when his mind worked as vigorously as ever, the luckless
poet filled volume upon volume with esthetic and ethical
reflections upon poetry and literature. From
Shakespeare especially he thought he might be able
to wrest those last secrets of an art which tantalizingly
hovered before his vision. In these studies,
fragmentary, ill-organized, not prepared for publication
as they are, we nevertheless possess a veritable treasure-house
of soundest reflection and subtlest intuition on many
of the fundamental questions of poetry, especially
of the drama. They have often been compared with
Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy, of which,
in many respects, they are the worthiest continuation.
But in this unequal struggle Ludwig became less and
less able to give life and color to his own conceptions
or to be satisfied with his results when he had done
so. How many could safely try to measure up to
a standard taken directly from Shakespeare! Plan
upon plan was started and laid aside. A field
of ruins, disquieting, threatening, piled up around
the lonesome fighter who slowly succumbed beneath
the crushing greatness of his vision. Noble,
but also tragic beyond words it is when, shortly before
his death, Ludwig declared to one of his friends that
even in his suffering no poet had ever been to him
such a source of strength as Shakespeare, to whom
he owed far more than the clarification of his ideals
of art. Thus the mariner sang the praises of
the ocean as it was about to engulf his shipwrecked
craft. Ludwig died in Dresden in February, 1865,
fifty-two years of age. Of his three surviving
children, two sons came to this western hemisphere
and attained, in successful business and professional
life, to positions of honor and influence among the
German element of Southern Brazil.