Heinrich Heine
Heine seems, viewed superficially, the most baffling, elusive, and inconsistent of all writers, the veritable Proteus of poetry. He has so many shapes, that at the first blush it seems almost impossible to grasp finally and definitely the one genuine Heine. What is really this man who is now a gamin and now an angel, whose face seems almost simultaneously to wear the sardonic grin of a Mephistopheles and the wistful smile of a Christ, this flaunting Bohemian who has written some of the tenderest love songs in literature, this cosmopolitan who cherished the deepest feelings for his fatherland, this incarnate paradox who almost at one and the same moment is swashbuckler and martyr, French and German, Hebrew and Greek, revolutionary and aristocrat, optimist and pessimist, idealist and mocker, believer and infidel?
Yet it is even because of this surface inconsistency, this psychological many-sidedness that Heine is a great poet and the one who, mirroring in his own mind the complexity that he saw without, is typically representative of the varied phases of the early nineteenth century. Heine looks at life from every conceivable aspect: he sees the gladness of life and rejoices therein; he sees the tears of life and weeps; he sees the tragedy of life and cannot control his sobs; he sees the farce of life and finds equal difficulty in controlling his laughter. “Ah, dear reader,” says Heine, “if you want to complain that the poet is torn both ways, complain rather that the world is torn in two. The poet’s heart is the core of the world, and in this present time it must of necessity be grievously rent. The great world-rift clove right through my heart, and even thereby do I know that the great gods have given me of their grace and preference and deemed me worthy of the poet’s martyrdom.”
The first half of the nineteenth century, in fact, in which Heine lived, is, like any transition period, disturbed, unsettled, paradoxical. The most diverse tendencies boil and bubble together in the crucible; the Revolution and the Reaction, Romanticism and Hellenism, materialism and mysticism, democracy and aristocracy, poetry and science, all ferment apace in the psychological Witches’ Cauldron of the age.
Heine simply represented the illusions and disillusions of this age, or to put it with greater precision, he represented the clash and contrast between these illusions and disillusions. To arrive then at a correct appreciation of Heine it will be necessary to glance first at the main currents of the contemporary events, the political movements of the Revolution and the Reaction, and the literary movements of Romanticism and Æstheticism.
All these currents flow either directly or indirectly from the French Revolution. To the more sanguine and poetical minds of the time the Revolution had manifested itself as a species of Armageddon, a gigantic cataclysm, which, sweeping away all existing institutions with one great shock, was to leave to mankind an untrammelled existence of natural and idyllic perfection. These dreamers were destined to be rudely disappointed. The Holy Alliance temporarily suppressed the Revolution at Waterloo, and an efficient Reaction reigned both in France and in Germany. A great religious revival set in in Prussia, culminating in the Concordat with the Pope in 1821. The Press was gagged by a rigid censorship, while the students at the universities were subjected to the most rigorous police espionage. From the point of view of the German idealists who hoped for liberty and progress, the Revolution had ended in the most dismal of fiascos.
Parallel with the Revolution ran Romanticism, which eventually merged in orthodoxy, or, to put it more accurately, in a mystical Catholicism. The cardinal characteristic of Romanticism was the revolt of the individual against the stereotyped prosaic life of the classical eighteenth century. This revolt manifested itself in the most untrammelled freedom of the ego, which either took to rioting in an elaborate self-analysis, as did Hofmann and Jean Paul Richter, or else simply abandoning ordinary life gave itself up to the cult of the bizarre, the mystic, the mediæval, and the exotic, and fell in love with the Infinite, or, to use the terminology of the school, the Blue Flower. Though, however, Heine was in his poetic youth largely influenced by the Romanticists (he was, in fact, dubbed by a Frenchman with tolerable reason an “unfrocked Romantic”), the essence of his maturer outlook on life is far from being romantic. The life-outlook of the Romanticists consisted in a vague yearning for the ideal without any reference to this earthly life; the life-outlook of Heine on the other hand was made up largely of the almost brutal contrast between the ideal and the real, between life as it was dreamed and life as it actually was.
Another current of thought which it is necessary to mention, though of course it exercised rather less influence on Heine than did Romanticism, was the æsthetic neo-Hellenic movement represented by Winckelmann, Lessing, and to a certain extent by Goethe.
Heine, however, though a lover of the beautiful, lacked almost entirely the plastic genius and marble serenity of Hellas, and is, as will be shown later, only a Greek in the exuberance of his joie de vivre. To summarise then the main tendencies of the age in which Heine was born, we can see these four distinct currents—the glorious ideals of the French Revolution, the official reaction against these ideals, the cult of the bizarre and the infinite yearning of Romanticism, and the Hellenism of the æsthetic movement. Let us now turn to the poet’s life, and examine the part played by environment, race, and parentage in moulding his character.
Heine was born in Düsseldorf on December 1797, and not as is currently supposed in 1799.
The Catholic Rhineland, in which Düsseldorf is situated, rebelled more than almost any other district in Germany against the despotism of the Prussian bureaucracy; it possessed an almost southern joie de vivre, and only naturally exhibited a distinct inclination to the Catholicism of the Romanticists, all of which characteristics in a greater or less degree are to be found in Heine.
Further, Heine was a Jew, possessing, in consequence, an hereditary tendency to gravitate to the extreme left wing both of thought and of politics, while the inborn Judenschmerz in his heart was aggravated by the anti-Semitic reaction which followed the benevolent tolerance of Napoleon.
The poet’s father, Samson Heine, was an easy-going, æsthetic nonentity in moderate circumstances, who does not appear to have exercised any serious influence on the child’s development. This was accomplished by the mother, née von Geldern, a cultured and strong-minded woman, and a Voltairean by belief, who did her best to foster and stimulate her son’s youthful intelligence. The favourite authors of the young Heine were Cervantes, Sterne, and Swift. Of contemporaries, the two men who exercised any real influence were the Emperor Napoleon, and Byron, “the kingly man” and the aristocratic revolutionary. Napoleon in particular was the god of his boyish adoration. This Napoleonic enthusiasm was largely fostered by Heine’s friendship with a grenadier drummer of the French army named Le Grand, while it reached its climax when he beheld with his own eyes the beatific vision of the Emperor himself riding on his beautiful white palfrey through the Hofgarten Allee at Düsseldorf, in splendid defiance of the police regulations, which forbade such riding under a penalty of five thalers.
This worship of the Emperor, moreover, resulted in the wonderful poem called “The Grenadiers,” written at the age of eighteen. The swing and power of the poem have made it classic, especially the great final stanza beginning:
“Denn reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab.”
Heine received his early education at a Jesuit monastery. The first event of any moment in his life, however, is his calf-love for Josepha, or Sefchen, the executioner’s daughter, a weird fantastic beauty of fifteen, with large dark eyes and blood-red hair. Josepha was the inspiration of the juvenile Dream Pictures incorporated subsequently in the Book of Songs, and exhibiting a genuine power and an even more genuine promise.
In 1816 Heine was sent into the office of Solomon Heine, his millionaire uncle of Hamburg.
He seems to have been singularly destitute of the financial genius of his race, and the business career proved from the outset a fiasco. The real key, however, to the three years spent in Hamburg is supplied not by Money, but by Love. Having served his apprenticeship in Düsseldorf with his calf-attachment to the executioner’s daughter, Heine proceeded straightway to a grande passion for his uncle’s pretty daughter Amalie. His love was not reciprocated, and in 1821 the beauteous Amalie married a wealthy landowner of Königsberg. This Amalie incident was one of the most important in Heine’s life, and is largely responsible for his early cynicism. He was disillusioned with a vengeance, and could now with his own eyes inspect the flimsy material of which “Love’s Young Dream” is wove. Though, however, a great personal blow, this abortive passion is also to be regarded as an invaluable æsthetic asset. The poet of necessity is bound to write of his own personal impressions and experiences; and it is obvious that the intenser are these experiences, the more vital will be his poetry. If Heine’s love for Amalie was the accursed flame that seared his soul, it was also the sacred fire that kindled his inspiration, and it is to Amalie that we owe not only a great part of the Book of Songs, but also much which is characteristic of Heine’s subsequent life-outlook.
In 1819, probably because Heine had given convincing proofs of his business inefficiency, it was decided that he should go to Bonn to study law. He neglected his studies, and it was not long before he fell foul of the authorities, owing to his anticipation in the proceedings of the Burschenschaften or student political unions.
In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen. At Göttingen his career was brief but thrilling, and he was rusticated after a few months on account of a proposed duel with an impertinent junker.
Transferring his quarters to Berlin, he now spent by far the most enjoyable period of his university career. The intellectual atmosphere of Berlin was quicker and less pedantic than that of Göttingen, and he plunged into his studies with considerable energy.
In 1821 Heine published the first volume of his poems, containing the Dream Pictures, some miscellaneous juvenile poems, and the Lyrisches Intermezzo, which was inspired by the banker’s, in the same way that the Dream Pictures had been inspired by the executioner’s, daughter.
The book was an immediate success, how great may be gauged by the numerous parodies and imitations which it almost instantaneously evoked. It was at this period that he wrote the two romantic tragedies of Ratcliff and Almansor. Both failures and devoid of much merit, they served none the less useful purpose of advertising his fame.
In 1823 we see an echo of his passion for Amalie in his love for his younger cousin Therese, who seems in many respects to have been a replica of her elder sister. Therese, however, refused to be anything more than a cousin to him, and his heart was still further embittered as is shown by the poem:
“Wer zum erstenmale liebt
Sei’s auch glücklos ist ein Gott
Aber wer zum zweitenmale
Glücklos liebt, er ist ein Narr
Ich, ein solcher Narr, ich liebe
Wieder ohne Gegenliebe;
Sonne, Mond und Sterne lachen
Und ich lache mit und sterbe.”
In 1824 he decided to prosecute his studies for his doctorial degree with greater seriousness, and leaving behind him the distractions of the capital, went back once more to the more staid and prosaic Göttingen.
Heine intended not merely to take a degree for the sake of ornament, but also to practise seriously as a lawyer. How serious were these intentions may be seen from the fact that he went to the length of paying in advance the heavy entrance fee which the legal profession then exacted from Jews, and became baptized “as a Protestant and a Lutheran to boot” on June 28, 1825.
Heine’s conversion has frequently been criticised with superfluous harshness. Let him, however, explain his position for himself:
“At that time I myself was still a god, and none of the positive religions had more value for me than another; I could only wear their uniforms as a matter of courtesy, on the same principle that the Emperor of Russia dresses himself up as an officer of the Prussian Guard when he honours his imperial cousin with a visit to Potsdam.”
After all, his apostasy brought with it its own punishment, not only in its deep-felt shame, but in the fact that he eventually threw up law for literature, and thus rendered so great a sacrifice of racial loyalty and his own self-respect consummately futile. After selling his birthright he found that he had absolutely no use for the mess of pottage which he had purchased.
In the summer of 1825, Heine, having just succeeded in passing his degree, proceeded to the little island of Norderney, off the coast of Holland, to recuperate. Living ardently the simple life and indulging to the full his passion for the sea, he now wrote not only the second part of the Reisebilder, entitled Norderney, but the far greater Nordsee Cyklus, which in its irregular swinging metre expresses with such marvellous efficiency the whole roar and grandeur of the ocean. Speaking generally, of course, Heine was too subjective to be a real nature poet. No writer, it is true, fills up so freely and with so fantastic an elegance the blank cheques of nightingales and violets, lilies and roses, stars and moonshine, yet none the less these rather served to grace his measure than as his real flame. His one genuine love was the sea. With the sea he felt a deep psychological affinity. The sea was the symbol of his own infinite restlessness, of his own divine discontent, and mirrored in the sea’s ever-changing waters he beheld the incessant smiles and storms of his own soul.
“I love the sea, even as my own soul,” he writes. “Often do I fancy that the sea is in truth my very soul; and as in the sea there are hidden water-plants that only swim up to the surface at the moment of their bloom and sink down again at the moment of their decay, even so do wondrous flower-pictures swim up out of the depths of my soul, spread their light and fragrance, and again vanish.”
In 1826 Heine published the Heimkehr, the Nordsee Cyklus, the airy and sparkling Harzreise, and the first part of the Reisebilder.
From Norderney Heine moved to Hamburg, avowedly to practise, though it does not appear that he took his profession with much seriousness. At any rate, until 1831, when he migrated to Paris, his career is excessively erratic. At one moment he is paying a flying visit to England, “the land of roast beef and Yorkshire plum-pudding, where the machines behave like men and the men like machines”; at another he is on the staff of the Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen and the Morgenblatt of Munich; he is now in Hamburg, now in Frankfurt, and now in Italy, where his sojourn inspired the racy and brilliant Italy and Baths of Lucca, both of which works obtained the gratuitous and well-merited state advertisement of prohibition, and achieved a most undeniable succès de scandale.
The departure to Paris marks an entirely new epoch in Heine’s life, and offers a convenient stopping-place at which to give some account of his early poetry and prose, as exemplified in the Book of Songs, which was published in 1827, and the Reisebilder, the last part of which, the Baths of Lucca, was published in 1831.
Though neither the Book of Songs nor the Reisebilder is as great or as characteristic as the Romanzero and Poetische Nachlese on the one hand, or the Salon on the other, they are yet by far the most popular of his works and contain some of his most delightful writing. One of the first traits that strikes us in the Book of Songs is the Romantic tendency to bizarre and exotic themes. In the Junge Leiden and Lyrisches Intermezzo in particular we move in a ghostly atmosphere of apparitions, sea-maidens, skeletons, and midnight churchyards. Another interesting characteristic of these poems is his deep love of the East, a love which is to be probably ascribed more to the general eastward gravitation of the Romantic school than to the poet’s Oriental blood. This tendency is responsible for two of the most charming poems in the book, the exquisite lyric starting:
“Auf Flügeln des Gesanges
Herzliebchen trag ich dich fort
Fort nach den Fluren des Ganges
Dort weiss ich den schönsten Ort.”
“Dort liegt ein rotblühender Garten
Im stillen Mondenschein;
Die Lotosblumen erwarten
Ihr trautes Schwesterlein.”
And—
“Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kabler Höh’,
Ihn schläfert; mit weisser Decke
Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er traumt von einer Palme,
Die fern im Morgenland
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.”
This latter poem in particular illustrates admirably the vague melting, infinite yearning which Heine at first experienced as deeply as did any of the Romanticists. There are not wanting, however, and especially towards the end of the book, examples of his later manner, of that note of rebellion which he was afterwards to strike with such inimitable precision. Occasionally his wistful pessimism suddenly changes into cynicism, and in reaction from his morbid sensitiveness he derives a sardonic satisfaction from probing his own wounds as in the already quoted “Wer zum erstenmale liebt,” while in the mock-heroic Donna Clara and in the Frieden we see that artistic use of the anti-climax of which he was afterwards to acquire an even greater mastery. Even in the comparatively early Lyrisches Intermezzo we see him constantly playing on that contrast between the Real and the Ideal, between Dream Life and Waking Life, which formed so integral a part of his subsequent life-outlook. Speaking generally, however, the Book of Songs exhibits the sentimental rather than the cynical side of Heine’s mind. It possesses moreover those qualities which remained in Heine throughout his life, the light, airy touch, the intimate personal note, the delicate lyric sweetness, and that concision which is found in poetry with such extreme rarity.
Let us turn now to the Reisebilder. Its most dominant characteristics are its inimitable swing and the absolute irresponsibility of its transitions. The grave, the gay; the lively, the severe; the sublime, the ridiculous; the reverent, the frivolous; the refined, the crude; the poetic, the obscene, all jostle pell-mell against each other in this most fascinating of literary kaleidoscopes. It is no mere guide-book, this record of his wanderings in the Harz, in Norderney, in England, and in Italy, but rather a description of those reflections on men and things which were suggested by his various adventures. In style the Reisebilder marks a new epoch in German prose, or, as has been said, showed for the first time since Lessing and Goethe that such a thing as German prose really did exist. Heine was the first to show convincingly that a Gallic grace and flexibility could be imparted into the cumbrous and heavy-footed Teutonic language.
Psychologically the most interesting part of the Reisebilder is the fervent Napoleonic worship which, combined with his love of liberty and revolt against reaction, largely contributed to mould his life. The general tone, moreover, of political, sexual, and religious freedom that characterises the latter part of the Reisebilder rendered Heine not a little obnoxious to official Germany, not only because of the intrinsic heresy of the sentiments themselves, but of the joyous rollicking insolence with which they were paraded.
It is small wonder, then, that the Paris July Revolution of 1830 made the poet feel “as if he could set the whole ocean up to the very North Pole on fire with the red-heat of enthusiasm and mad joy that worked in him,” and that in the spring of 1831 he migrated finally and definitely from Germany to Paris.
This migration to Paris marks the turning-point in Heine’s life. His career in Germany had throughout been erratic, unsatisfactory, and hampered by political restrictions. In Paris he settled down, felt that now at last he was in a congenial element, and—found himself. It was at Paris that he wrote his most brilliant prose and found inspiration for his highest poetry, that he experienced his wildest joys and his intensest sufferings. The first ten years of his sojourn were probably the happiest in his life. His increased literary and journalistic earnings helped to solve the financial problem, while socially he was, as always, a pronounced success. He soon found his way into the centre of the artistic set of the capital, and was on a footing of intimacy with such writers as Lafayette, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Georges Sand, Théophile Gautier, Michelet, Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, Hector Berlioz, Ludwig Borne, Schlegel, and Humboldt. In social life Heine’s most characteristic feature was wit—a wit so irrepressible as to burst forth impartially on practically all occasions, and to resemble that of the Romans of the early Empire, who preferred to lose their heads rather than their epigrams. Yet in private life he was a devoted son and brother, an ideal husband. The correspondence which he maintained up to his death with his sister Lotte and his mother show conclusively what stores of German Gemut he treasured in his heart. Particularly significant is the fact that during the whole eight years in which he languished in his mattress-grave he assiduously concealed from his mother the real state of his health. Yet none the less “he could hate deeply and grimly with an energy which I have never yet met in any other man, but only because he could love with equal intensity,” writes the poet’s friend, Meissner. Heine disapproved on principle of swallowing an injury; when he was hit, he hit back. Not infrequently, as in his rather scandalous attack on Börne, he would riposte with somewhat superfluous efficiency, though according to his own theories it must have been after all only a mistake on the safe side.
“Yes,” writes Heine, “one must forgive one’s enemies, but not until they have been hanged.”
Heine’s quarrel with Börne originally arose out of the abomination with which Börne, who was Radical to the point of fanaticism, regarded the somewhat poetic and elastic Liberalism of his fellow-Jew, and it is instructive to enter into an examination of the depth and strength of those views which supplied the real motive power which drove him from Germany to France. There can be no doubt that Heine himself took his Liberalism with perfect seriousness. “In truth I know not,” he writes, “if I merit that my coffin should be decorated with a laurel wreath. However much I loved Poesy, she was ever to me only a holy toy or a consecrated means for heavenly ends. It is rather a sword that they should lay on my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity.” It should be observed, however, that this Liberal had the most aristocratic contempt for the uncultured δημος, as is shown by passages such as the following: “The horny hands of the Socialists who will unpityingly break all the marble statues which are so dear to my heart”; and, “If Democracy really triumphs, it is all up with poetry.”
Yet there can be no gainsaying that Heine’s political orthodoxy was perfectly unimpeachable on that anti-clericalism which has always been one of the most cardinal points of Continental Liberalism.
He is rarely tired of tilting at Catholicism, and while he regarded ascetic mediæval Catholicism as the vampire which sucked the blood and light out of the hearts of men, he dubbed the modern Catholic reactionaries in Germany “the Party of lies, the ruffians of Despotism, the restorers of all the folly and abomination of the Past.”
Yet, if his beliefs were too wide to admit of the narrowness of a consistent partisanship, his enthusiasm was deep and sincere for the joy, light, and liberty of a new era that was to sweep away all the unhealthy and plaguy humours of that blind, delirious, and anæmic mediævaldom, which, to use his own phrase, has spread over the countries like an infectious disease, till Europe was but one huge hospital. Politically, in fine, Heine is a brilliant freelance, who, too proud to wear the uniform of party, none the less fought valiantly for the army of Progress and Humanity, a forlorn outpost in the War of Freedom.1
Heine’s polemical modernity manifested itself most efficiently in the Deutschland, which, together with its sequel, The Romantic School, was issued as a counter-blast to Madame de Staël’s work of the same name. This history of the religion, literature, and philosophy of Germany is the masterpiece of Heine’s extant prose. An academic philosophic treatise, of course, it neither is nor professes to be. As a description half-serious, half-flippant, however, of the main currents of modern and mediæval Germany by a writer who sees life from the bird’s-eye view of the combined poet, journalist, thinker, and man of the world, it is unrivalled. It contains some of Heine’s loftiest and most sublime flights, some of his most brilliant and trenchant epigrams.
Particularly happy is the comparison drawn between the furious onslaughts made by the French Revolutionists under Robespierre and the German philosophers under Kant on respectively the divine rights of kings and the divine rights of God.
How delicious is the conclusion of the parallel between the two men: “Each eminently represents the ideal middle-class type—Nature had decreed that they should weigh out coffee and sugar, but Fate willed that they should weigh out other things, and in the scales of the one did she lay a King and in the scales of the other a God....
“And they both gave exact weight.”
As, however, has been previously pointed out, Heine’s chief characteristic as a prose writer is that marvellous elasticity which can rebound from the frivolous to the sublime with the most consummate ease and celerity. Interspersed with the bright flash-light of the epigrammatic pyrotechnics lie really great passages, and pieces in particular like those on Luther and Goethe possess the clear golden ring of the grand style.
Heine’s political ideals were subjected to the inevitable disillusionment. The Revolution of July, which he had fondly hoped would complete the work of the great movement of 1793, merely resulted in the anti-climax of the establishment of a bourgeois constitution under a bourgeois monarch. He tended to become generally embittered. Money matters, too, began to irritate him, and his health to give him trouble, and though he found a devoted sick-nurse in Matilde Crescenzia Mirat, a grisette whom he married in 1841, the lady with whom “he quarrelled daily for six years in that life-long duel at the termination of which only one of the combatants would be left alive,” yet none the less his condition began to deteriorate. “The damp cold days and black long nights of his exile” oppressed him, and he began to yearn for the old German soil. He gratified his Heimweh by a flying and surreptitious visit to Germany that inspired the well-known Germany or a Winter Tale, which, together with the somewhat similar Atta Troll, constitutes his most sustained poetic achievement. These two poems are about as characteristic as anything which he wrote. They represent admirably his wild classic Dionysiac fantasy, his sudden dips from the most extravagant Romanticism to the harsh, crude facts of reality, the marvellous swing and sweep of his Aristophanic humour.
Very typical is the following satire on the intimate relation between anthropo- and arctomorphism.
“Up above in star-pavilion,
On his golden throne of lordship,
Ruling worlds with sway majestic,
Sits a Polar bear colossal.”
“Stainless, snow-white shines the glamour
Of his skin, his head is wreathed
With a diadem of diamonds,
Flashing light through all the heavens.”
“Harmony rests in his visage,
And the silent deeds of thought,
Just a whit he bends his sceptre,
And the spheres they ring and sing.”
The above quotation shows excellently the essentially poetic quality by which Heine’s wit is illumined. A satirist as keen and vivid as Voltaire, he possesses all the logical aptness of the Frenchman without his dryness. His chief characteristic, in fact, is the method by which in his imaginative flights he combines the maximum of this logical aptness with the maximum of humorous incongruity. No humorist dives for his metaphors into stranger water or brings up from the deep more bizarre and fantastic gems. A charming example of Heinean humour is the following passage from one of his prefaces: “A pious Quaker once sacrificed his whole fortune in buying up the most beautiful of the mythological pictures of Giulio Romano in order to consign them to the flames—verily he merits thereby to go to heaven and be whipped with birches regularly every day.”
One of the most cardinal traits of Heine’s wit and humour is a phenomenal freedom of tone and language, a freedom that is occasionally not always in the most unimpeachable taste. Heine, in fact, is a writer who admits the public gratis to his psychological toilette, where he exposes with studied recklessness his most private thoughts. This question cuts too deep into Heine’s life-outlook to be lightly passed over, and necessitates some examination. In the first place even Heine’s most enthusiastic admirer will admit that a great deal of this licence is sheer gaminerie; Heine is the mischievous schoolboy of literature who thoroughly revels in being naughty, grimacing by an almost mechanical instinct, so soon as he catches a glimpse of the sacred figures of religion and sex. Like Baudelaire, he loves, almost indeed as a matter of conscientious principle, to make the hairs of the philistines stand on end. His one excuse, however, is that even when he causes the hairs of the philistines almost to spring from their roots, as indeed he does not infrequently, he conducts the operation with so light a touch, so exquisite a grace, that the offence is almost redeemed. Let him speak in his own defence, in the lines from the great Jewish poem, “Jehudah Halevy”:
“As in Life so too in poetry
Grace is aye Man’s highest Good;
Who has grace, he never sinneth
Not in verse nor e’en in prose.”
“And by God’s grace such a poet
Genius we do entitle,
King supreme and uncontrolled
In the great desmesne of thought.”
Not unnaturally his coarseness grew apace with the virulence of his disease, and he himself explains his cause to his friend “La Mouche”: “Vois-tu c’est la faute de la mort qui arrive à grands pas, et quand je la sens ainsi tout près de moi comme à present j’ai besoin de me cramponner la vie ne fût ce par une poutre pourrie.” This final phase in fact was simply a reaction against his fate, and is not altogether without analogy to that same psychological principle which dictated much of the crude buffoonery of Swift and Carlyle by way of an heroic protest against their own helplessness.
Far more important, however, is the fact that this particular trait of Heine is profoundly symbolic of his outlook on life, especially where an obscene jest marks the climax of a genuinely poetical flight. Circumstance turned him into a cynic, who saw frequently in Liberty but the uprising of a squalid proletariate, who heard in the “sweet lies of the nightingale, the flatterer of spring,” merely the “harbingers of the decay of its queenliness,” and who beheld in love but a mere illusion of the senses that vanishes so soon as the beloved one utters a syllable. Held fast in the grip of the great World-paradox, Heine is forced to look at life as a glaring phantasmagoria of blacks and whites, in which the sublime and the ridiculous, the pathetic and the grotesque, the refined and the crude, dance along hand in hand till they become so confused that it is impossible for the observer to distinguish the individual partners, and he is reduced to describing, in pairs, the giddy, whirling couples that make up the fantastic medley.
This incessant antithesis makes Heine one of the most complete of modern writers.
The poet’s world is composed of two hemispheres: one is the abode of the beautiful, the grand, the tragic; the other of the ugly, the petty, the comic. Most poets confine their efforts to only a small portion of one of these hemispheres. Heine, however, is the Atlas of poetry, who supports both of the half-spheres of the world, and who, by way of proving how easily his burden sits upon him, suddenly turns juggler, and after showing his audience one side of the magic globe, will, hey presto! whisk the whole world round, and before they know where they are smilingly confront them with the other.
In 1848 the spinal affection from which he suffered became so acute that Heine was compelled to take to that mattress-grave where, paralytic and half-blind and racked intermittently by the most agonising spasms, he dragged out the eight most ghastly years of his life. At first the death-chamber was one of the favourite rendezvous of fashionable Paris, but as the novelty wore off, his circle of friends grew narrower and narrower, until eventually a visit from Berlioz seemed only the crowning proof of the musician’s inveterate eccentricity.
Heine, however, rose manfully to the occasion, and did all that he could under the circumstances. Always a passionate lover of the paradoxical, he now began to appreciate with an intense and unprecedented relish the infinite humour of the great Life-farce, one of the most effective scenes of which was even now being enacted in the person of the poet of joie de vivre, who, enduring all the agonies of the damned, lay dying in La Rue d’Amsterdam to the quick music of the piano on the story underneath, while only a few feet away shone all the glow and glitter of Parisian life.
The chief occupation and solace of the dying man was the writing of his Memoirs, the great Apologia pro vitâ suâ which was to square his accounts with the world, and win for him the future as his own.
Yet at times the greatness of his sufferings would soften his heart. He would find in the Bible the magic book which had power to dispel his earthly torments; the “Heimweh for heaven” would fall upon him, and again would he know his God. It would seem, however, that Heine’s death-bed reconversion is simply to be regarded as one of the numerous instances of the Prince of Darkness exhibiting monastic proclivities under the stress of severe physical malaise. For eight years Heine lay a-dying, and with the skeleton of Death assiduously serving the few bitter crumbs that yet remained of his feast of life, he was, as a simple matter of pathology, almost bound to believe once more, even if he had been the most hardened infidel in existence. Heine, however, was no cynical atheist. The current religions, it is true, he considered pretty poetry, but bad logic, yet none the less he was genuinely imbued with the ethical idea.
“I am too proud,” he writes, “to be influenced by greed for the heavenly wages of virtue or by fear of hellish torments. I strive after the good because it is beautiful and attracts me irresistibly, and I abominate the bad because it is hateful and repugnant to me.”
What, in fact, served Heine in the stead of a theology was his fervid enthusiasm for Progress and Humanity. His real religion was the religion of Freedom, the religion of the poor people, the new creed of which Jean Rousseau was the John the Baptist and Voltaire the chief apostle; Heine’s Madonna was the red goddess of Revolution, who exacted from her worshippers innumerable hecatombs of human victims; the Man-god whom he revered as the Saviour of Society was Napoleon, the Son of the Revolution, the drastic reorganiser of the world, who, unappreciated by the pharisees and reactionaries of his time, and finding his Golgotha on the “martyr-cliffs of St. Helena,” endured for more than five years all the agonies of a moral crucifixion; while to complete our version of the Heinesque theology, his Heilige Geist was the Holy Spirit of the Human Intellect which he says “is seen in its greatest glory in Light and Laughter,” and the Revelation which inspired him most deeply was, to use once more his own phrase, “the sacred mystic Revelation that we name poesy.”
It is interesting to trace the influence of these last ghastly years on Heine’s writings. His almost complete physical prostration brought with it its own compensation in the shape of a marvellous psychic exaltation, and the Romanzero and the Poetische Nachlese contain some of his greatest and most moving poems. Nowhere do we see more clearly his most characteristic excellences, his delicacy, his power of antithesis, his concision.
It is Heine’s compression, in fact, which is one of the most pronounced features of his poetic style. The whole quintessence of joy and pain, of love and sorrow, is frequently distilled into one short poem. This Heinesque condensation is a variant of the same theory that can be traced in the old Impressionist school of painters which is concerned with the outline and the proper light and shading of the outline to the exclusion of minor details, and in the journalistic cult of the “story” in which the ideal aimed at is “the point, the whole point, and nothing but the point.” Heine, in fact, is unique among the poets for narrating a tale with the minimum of space and the maximum of effect, for narrating it in such a way that each line serves to heighten the level of intensity, till at length the edifice is crowned by the climax. This feature of his style is well illustrated by the end of the frequently quoted poem, “The Asra,” in the Romanzero:
“And the slave spake, I am called
Mohammed, I am from Yemen,
And my stock is from those Asras,
They who die whene’er they love.”
Though, moreover, he protested to the last against his fate, his tone in the Romanzero and the earlier Poetische Nachlese is more mellow than in his earlier writings. His cry from the heart is not the cry of defiance but rather of the pathetic wistfulness of impotence. Yet before the candle of his life became extinguished it leapt up in one final flicker, the most marvellous of all. A characteristic caprice of fate made him acquainted during the last months of his life with his one true soul-affinity, the charming woman who is known under the pseudonym of Camille Selden or La Mouche.
Is it then to be wondered at that when the rich feast of a perfect love, for which he had craved Tantalus-like all his life, was offered to him almost at the very minute that his lips were being sealed by the cold kiss of death, the whole soul of the man should leap up in indignant protest, and that such poems as “Lass die heiligen Parabolen,” and the even more wonderful series of stanzas with the refrain, “O schöne Welt du bist abscheulich,” should exhibit the cold insolent shrug of the man convinced of the righteousness of his plea that of all the places in the universe this human earth “where the just man drags himself along beneath the blood-stained burden of his cross, while the wicked man rides in triumph on his high steed,” is the most iniquitous?
Heine died at four o’clock in the morning of February 17, 1856. He was buried by his own directions in Montmartre, “in order to avoid being disturbed by the crowd and bustle of Père Lachaise.”
His writings form an incessant stream of paradoxes, but his life is the greatest paradox of all. The prophet of the new religion of liberty, he was repudiated by his country, and his happiest days were spent in the land of exile; throughout his life he sought for love, to live years of the most healthy prosaic domesticity with his mistress, and to find his one true romance on his death-bed; he imagined that he was a great political force, but it is rather as a poet that he survives; as a poet his chief theme was the Joy and Light of Life, and he drew his truest inspiration from the darkest depths of his agony; even as a great writer he has been chiefly known by the comparatively inferior Book of Songs and Reisebilder, while his masterpiece, the Memoirs, the great highly barbed Parthian arrow shot from the grave to transfix his enemies for all eternity, lay mouldering for many years amid the dusty archives of the Vienna Library.
His message, too, the core and kernel of his philosophy, is again a paradox. To the sphinx-like riddle with which every thinker is confronted, “Is Life poetry or prose, tragedy or farce?” Heine made answer that the pathos and poetry of life were contained in the fact that life was so essentially grim and unpoetical, and that the real tragedy of the world lay in the ghastly farce of it all.
Notes
1 Cf. the poem “Enfant perdu,” beginning “Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheits Kriege.” ⁂