“Nothing,” says Goethe, “is more significant of men’s character than what
they find laughable.” The truth of this observation would perhaps have
been more apparent if he had said _culture_ instead of character. The
last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar
is their jocularity; and we can hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide
gulf which separates him from them, than by comparing the object which
shakes the diaphragm of a coal-heaver with the highly complex pleasure
derived from a real witticism. That any high order of wit is exceedingly
complex, and demands a ripe and strong mental development, has one
evidence in the fact that we do not find it in boys at all in proportion
to their manifestation of other powers. Clever boys generally aspire to
the heroic and poetic rather than the comic, and the crudest of all their
efforts are their jokes. Many a witty man will remember how in his
school days a practical joke, more or less Rabelaisian, was for him the
_ne plus ultra_ of the ludicrous. It seems to have been the same with
the boyhood of the human race. The history and literature of the ancient
Hebrews gives the idea of a people who went about their business and
their pleasure as gravely as a society of beavers; the smile and the
laugh are often mentioned metaphorically, but the smile is one of
complacency, the laugh is one of scorn. Nor can we imagine that the
facetious element was very strong in the Egyptians; no laughter lurks in
the wondering eyes and the broad calm lips of their statues. Still less
can the Assyrians have had any genius for the comic: the round eyes and
simpering satisfaction of their ideal faces belong to a type which is not
witty, but the cause of wit in others. The fun of these early races was,
we fancy, of the after-dinner kind—loud-throated laughter over the
wine-cup, taken too little account of in sober moments to enter as an
element into their Art, and differing as much from the laughter of a
Chamfort or a Sheridan as the gastronomic enjoyment of an ancient Briton,
whose dinner had no other “removes” than from acorns to beech-mast and
back again to acorns, differed from the subtle pleasures of the palate
experienced by his turtle-eating descendant. In fact they had to live
seriously through the stages which to subsequent races were to become
comedy, as those amiable-looking preadamite amphibia which Professor Owen
has restored for us in effigy at Sydenham, took perfectly _au sérieux_
the grotesque physiognomies of their kindred. Heavy experience in their
case, as in every other, was the base from which the salt of future wit
was to be made.
Humor is of earlier growth than Wit, and it is in accordance with this
earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic tendencies,
while Wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humor
draws its materials from situations and characteristics; Wit seizes on
unexpected and complex relations. Humor is chiefly representative and
descriptive; it is diffuse, and flows along without any other law than
its own fantastic will; or it flits about like a will-of-the-wisp,
amazing us by its whimsical transitions. Wit is brief and sudden, and
sharply defined as a crystal; it does not make pictures, it is not
fantastic; but it detects an unsuspected analogy or suggests a startling
or confounding inference. Every one who has had the opportunity of
making the comparison will remember that the effect produced on him by
some witticisms is closely akin to the effect produced on him by subtle
reasoning which lays open a fallacy or absurdity, and there are persons
whose delight in such reasoning always manifests itself in laughter.
This affinity of wit with ratiocination is the more obvious in proportion
as the species of wit is higher and deals less with less words and with
superficialities than with the essential qualities of things. Some of
Johnson’s most admirable witticisms consist in the suggestion of an
analogy which immediately exposes the absurdity of an action or
proposition; and it is only their ingenuity, condensation, and
instantaneousness which lift them from reasoning into Wit—they are
_reasoning raised to a higher power_. On the other hand, Humor, in its
higher forms, and in proportion as it associates itself with the
sympathetic emotions, continually passes into poetry: nearly all great
modern humorists may be called prose poets.
Some confusion as to the nature of Humor has been created by the fact
that those who have written most eloquently on it have dwelt almost
exclusively on its higher forms, and have defined humor in general as the
_sympathetic_ presentation of incongruous elements in human nature and
life—a definition which only applies to its later development. A great
deal of humor may coexist with a great deal of barbarism, as we see in
the Middle Ages; but the strongest flavor of the humor in such cases will
come, not from sympathy, but more probably from triumphant egoism or
intolerance; at best it will be the love of the ludicrous exhibiting
itself in illustrations of successful cunning and of the _lex talionis_
as in _Reineke Fuchs_, or shaking off in a holiday mood the yoke of a too
exacting faith, as in the old Mysteries. Again, it is impossible to deny
a high degree of humor to many practical jokes, but no sympathetic nature
can enjoy them. Strange as the genealogy may seem, the original
parentage of that wonderful and delicious mixture of fun, fancy,
philosophy, and feeling, which constitutes modern humor, was probably the
cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy—such is
the tendency of things toward the good and beautiful on this earth!
Probably the reason why high culture demands more complete harmony with
its moral sympathies in humor than in wit, is that humor is in its nature
more prolix—that it has not the direct and irresistible force of wit.
Wit is an electric shock, which takes us by violence, quite independently
of our predominant mental disposition; but humor approaches us more
deliberately and leaves us masters of ourselves. Hence it is, that while
coarse and cruel humor has almost disappeared from contemporary
literature, coarse and cruel wit abounds; even refined men cannot help
laughing at a coarse _bon mot_ or a lacerating personality, if the
“shock” of the witticism is a powerful one; while mere fun will have no
power over them if it jar on their moral taste. Hence, too, it is, that
while wit is perennial, humor is liable to become superannuated.
As is usual with definitions and classifications, however, this
distinction between wit and humor does not exactly represent the actual
fact. Like all other species, Wit and Humor overlap and blend with each
other. There are _bon mots_, like many of Charles Lamb’s, which are a
sort of facetious hybrids, we hardly know whether to call them witty or
humorous; there are rather lengthy descriptions or narratives, which,
like Voltaire’s “Micromégas,” would be more humorous if they were not so
sparkling and antithetic, so pregnant with suggestion and satire, that we
are obliged to call them witty. We rarely find wit untempered by humor,
or humor without a spice of wit; and sometimes we find them both united
in the highest degree in the same mind, as in Shakespeare and Molière. A
happy conjunction this, for wit is apt to be cold, and thin-lipped, and
Mephistophelean in men who have no relish for humor, whose lungs do never
crow like Chanticleer at fun and drollery; and broad-faced, rollicking
humor needs the refining influence of wit. Indeed, it may be said that
there is no really fine writing in which wit has not an implicit, if not
an explicit, action. The wit may never rise to the surface, it may never
flame out into a witticism; but it helps to give brightness and
transparency, it warns off from flights and exaggerations which verge on
the ridiculous—in every _genre_ of writing it preserves a man from
sinking into the _genre ennuyeux_. And it is eminently needed for this
office in humorous writing; for as humor has no limits imposed on it by
its material, no law but its own exuberance, it is apt to become
preposterous and wearisome unless checked by wit, which is the enemy of
all monotony, of all lengthiness, of all exaggeration.
Perhaps the nearest approach Nature has given us to a complete analysis,
in which wit is as thoroughly exhausted of humor as possible, and humor
as bare as possible of wit, is in the typical Frenchman and the typical
German. Voltaire, the intensest example of pure wit, fails in most of
his fictions from his lack of humor. “Micromégas” is a perfect tale,
because, as it deals chiefly with philosophic ideas and does not touch
the marrow of human feeling and life, the writer’s wit and wisdom were
all-sufficient for his purpose. Not so with “Candide.” Here Voltaire
had to give pictures of life as well as to convey philosophic truth and
satire, and here we feel the want of humor. The sense of the ludicrous
is continually defeated by disgust, and the scenes, instead of presenting
us with an amusing or agreeable picture, are only the frame for a
witticism. On the other hand, German humor generally shows no sense of
measure, no instinctive tact; it is either floundering and clumsy as the
antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lapland day, in
which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will ever come. For
this reason, Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorists, is unendurable
to many readers, and frequently tiresome to all. Here, as elsewhere, the
German shows the absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility to
gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the necessary
concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region of
metaphysics. For _Identität_ in the abstract no one can have an acuter
vision, but in the concrete he is satisfied with a very loose
approximation. He has the finest nose for _Empirismus_ in philosophical
doctrine, but the presence of more or less tobacco smoke in the air he
breathes is imperceptible to him. To the typical German—_Vetter
Michel_—it is indifferent whether his door-lock will catch, whether his
teacup be more or less than an inch thick; whether or not his book have
every other leaf unstitched; whether his neighbor’s conversation be more
or less of a shout; whether he pronounce _b_ or _p_, _t_ or _d_; whether
or not his adored one’s teeth be few and far between. He has the same
sort of insensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like a
German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it should ever
come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of
Providence rather than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word
_Langeweile_, the equivalent for ennui, and we have secretly wondered
_what_ it can be that produces ennui in a German. Not the longest of
long tragedies, for we have known him to pronounce that _höchst fesselnd_
(_so_ enchaining!); not the heaviest of heavy books, for he delights in
that as _gründlich_ (deep, Sir, deep!); not the slowest of journeys in a
_Postwagen_, for the slower the horses, the more cigars he can smoke
before he reaches his journey’s end. German ennui must be something as
superlative as Barclay’s treble X, which, we suppose, implies an
extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction.
It is easy to see that this national deficiency in nicety of perception
must have its effect on the national appreciation and exhibition of
Humor. You find in Germany ardent admirers of Shakespeare, who tell you
that what they think most admirable in him is his _Wortspiel_, his verbal
quibbles; and one of these, a man of no slight culture and refinement,
once cited to a friend of ours Proteus’s joke in “The Two Gentlemen of
Verona”—“Nod I? why that’s Noddy,” as a transcendant specimen of
Shakespearian wit. German facetiousness is seldom comic to foreigners,
and an Englishman with a swelled cheek might take up _Kladderadatsch_,
the German Punch, without any danger of agitating his facial muscles.
Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that, among the five great races
concerned in modern civilization, the German race is the only one which,
up to the present century, had contributed nothing classic to the common
stock of European wit and humor; for _Reineke Fuchs_ cannot be regarded
as a peculiarly Teutonic product. Italy was the birthplace of Pantomime
and the immortal Pulcinello; Spain had produced Cervantes; France had
produced Rabelais and Molière, and classic wits innumerable; England had
yielded Shakspeare and a host of humorists. But Germany had borne no
great comic dramatist, no great satirist, and she has not yet repaired
the omission; she had not even produced any humorist of a high order.
Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically
witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit—the “flavor of
mind”—throughout his writings; and it is often concentrated into pungent
satire, as every reader of the _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ remembers.
Still Lessing’s name has not become European through his wit, and his
charming comedy, _Minna von Barnhelm_, has won no place on a foreign
stage. Of course we do not pretend to an exhaustive acquaintance with
German literature; we not only admit—we are sure that it includes much
comic writing of which we know nothing. We simply state the fact, that
no German production of that kind, before the present century, ranked as
European; a fact which does not, indeed, determine the _amount_ of the
national facetiousness, but which is quite decisive as to its _quality_.
Whatever may be the stock of fun which Germany yields for home
consumption, she has provided little for the palate of other lands. All
honor to her for the still greater things she has done for us! She has
fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, has produced the
grandest inventions, has made magnificent contributions to science, has
given us some of the divinest poetry, and quite the divinest music in the
world. No one reveres and treasures the products of the German mind more
than we do. To say that that mind is not fertile in wit is only like
saying that excellent wheat land is not rich pasture; to say that we do
not enjoy German facetiousness is no more than to say that, though the
horse is the finest of quadrupeds, we do not like him to lay his hoof
playfully on our shoulder. Still, as we have noticed that the pointless
puns and stupid jocularity of the boy may ultimately be developed into
the epigrammatic brilliancy and polished playfulness of the man; as we
believe that racy wit and chastened delicate humor are inevitably the
results of invigorated and refined mental activity, we can also believe
that Germany will, one day, yield a crop of wits and humorists.
Perhaps there is already an earnest of that future crop in the existence
of Heinrich Heine, a German born with the present century, who, to
Teutonic imagination, sensibility, and humor, adds an amount of _esprit_
that would make him brilliant among the most brilliant of Frenchmen.
True, this unique German wit is half a Hebrew; but he and his ancestors
spent their youth in German air, and were reared on _Wurst_ and
_Sauerkraut_, so that he is as much a German as a pheasant is an English
bird, or a potato an Irish vegetable. But whatever else he may be, Heine
is one of the most remarkable men of this age: no echo, but a real voice,
and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth studying; a
surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious
song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his
fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art—who sheds his sunny
smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy
background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most
scorching lightnings of satire; an artist in prose literature, who has
shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose;
and—in spite of all charges against him, true as well as false—a lover of
freedom, who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men.
He is, moreover, a suffering man, who, with all the highly-wrought
sensibility of genius, has to endure terrible physical ills; and as such
he calls forth more than an intellectual interest. It is true, alas!
that there is a heavy weight in the other scale—that Heine’s magnificent
powers have often served only to give electric force to the expression of
debased feeling, so that his works are no Phidian statue of gold, and
ivory, and gems, but have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay
mingled with the precious metal. The audacity of his occasional
coarseness and personality is unparalleled in contemporary literature,
and has hardly been exceeded by the license of former days. Hence,
before his volumes are put within the reach of immature minds, there is
need of a friendly penknife to exercise a strict censorship. Yet, when
all coarseness, all scurrility, all Mephistophelean contempt for the
reverent feelings of other men, is removed, there will be a plenteous
remainder of exquisite poetry, of wit, humor, and just thought. It is
apparently too often a congenial task to write severe words about the
transgressions committed by men of genius, especially when the censor has
the advantage of being himself a man of _no_ genius, so that those
transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; _he_, forsooth, never
lacerated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse
allusion, and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the
temptation that lies in transcendent power. We are also apt to measure
what a gifted man has done by our arbitrary conception of what he might
have done, rather than by a comparison of his actual doings with our own
or those of other ordinary men. We make ourselves overzealous agents of
heaven, and demand that our brother should bring usurious interest for
his five Talents, forgetting that it is less easy to manage five Talents
than two. Whatever benefit there may be in denouncing the evil, it is
after all more edifying, and certainly more cheering, to appreciate the
good. Hence, in endeavoring to give our readers some account of Heine
and his works, we shall not dwell lengthily on his failings; we shall not
hold the candle up to dusty, vermin-haunted corners, but let the light
fall as much as possible on the nobler and more attractive details. Our
sketch of Heine’s life, which has been drawn from various sources, will
be free from everything like intrusive gossip, and will derive its
coloring chiefly from the autobiographical hints and descriptions
scattered through his own writings. Those of our readers who happen to
know nothing of Heine will in this way be making their acquaintance with
the writer while they are learning the outline of his career.
We have said that Heine was born with the present century; but this
statement is not precise, for we learn that, according to his certificate
of baptism, he was born December 12th, 1799. However, as he himself
says, the important point is that he was born, and born on the banks of
the Rhine, at Düsseldorf, where his father was a merchant. In his
“Reisebilder” he gives us some recollections, in his wild poetic way, of
the dear old town where he spent his childhood, and of his schoolboy
troubles there. We shall quote from these in butterfly fashion, sipping
a little nectar here and there, without regard to any strict order:
“I first saw the light on the banks of that lovely stream, where
Folly grows on the green hills, and in autumn is plucked, pressed,
poured into casks, and sent into foreign lands. Believe me, I
yesterday heard some one utter folly which, in anno 1811, lay in a
bunch of grapes I then saw growing on the Johannisberg. . . . Mon
Dieu! if I had only such faith in me that I could remove mountains,
the Johannisberg would be the very mountain I should send for
wherever I might be; but as my faith is not so strong, imagination
must help me, and it transports me at once to the lovely Rhine. . . .
I am again a child, and playing with other children on the
Schlossplatz, at Düsseldorf on the Rhine. Yes, madam, there was I
born; and I note this expressly, in case, after my death, seven
cities—Schilda, Krähwinkel, Polkwitz, Bockum, Dülken, Göttingen, and
Schöppenstädt—should contend for the honor of being my birthplace.
Düsseldorf is a town on the Rhine; sixteen thousand men live there,
and many hundred thousand men besides lie buried there. . . . . Among
them, many of whom my mother says, that it would be better if they
were still living; for example, my grandfather and my uncle, the old
Herr von Geldern and the young Herr von Geldern, both such celebrated
doctors, who saved so many men from death, and yet must die
themselves. And the pious Ursula, who carried me in her arms when I
was a child, also lies buried there and a rosebush grows on her
grave; she loved the scent of roses so well in life, and her heart
was pure rose-incense and goodness. The knowing old Canon, too, lies
buried there. Heavens, what an object he looked when I last saw him!
_He was made up of nothing but mind and plasters_, and nevertheless
studied day and night, as if he were alarmed lest the worms should
find an idea too little in his head. And the little William lies
there, and for this I am to blame. We were schoolfellows in the
Franciscan monastery, and were playing on that side of it where the
Düssel flows between stone walls, and I said, ‘William, fetch out the
kitten that has just fallen in’—and merrily he went down on to the
plank which lay across the brook, snatched the kitten out of the
water, but fell in himself, and was dragged out dripping and dead.
_The kitten lived to a good old age_. . . . Princes in that day were
not the tormented race as they are now; the crown grew firmly on
their heads, and at night they drew a nightcap over it, and slept
peacefully, and peacefully slept the people at their feet; and when
the people waked in the morning, they said, ‘Good morning, father!’
and the princes answered, ‘Good morning, dear children!’ But it was
suddenly quite otherwise; for when we awoke one morning at
Düsseldorf, and were ready to say, ‘Good morning, father!’ lo! the
father was gone away; and in the whole town there was nothing but
dumb sorrow, everywhere a sort of funeral disposition; and people
glided along silently to the market, and read the long placard placed
on the door of the Town Hall. It was dismal weather; yet the lean
tailor, Kilian, stood in his nankeen jacket which he usually wore
only in the house, and his blue worsted stockings hung down so that
his naked legs peeped out mournfully, and his thin lips trembled
while he muttered the announcement to himself. And an old soldier
read rather louder, and at many a word a crystal tear trickled down
to his brave old mustache. I stood near him and wept in company, and
asked him, ‘_Why we wept_?’ He answered, ‘The Elector has
abdicated.’ And then he read again, and at the words, ‘for the
long-manifested fidelity of my subjects,’ and ‘hereby set you free
from your allegiance,’ he wept more than ever. It is strangely
touching to see an old man like that, with faded uniform and scarred
face, weep so bitterly all of a sudden. While we were reading, the
electoral arms were taken down from the Town Hall; everything had
such a desolate air, that it was as if an eclipse of the sun were
expected. . . . I went home and wept, and wailed out, ‘The Elector
has abdicated!’ In vain my mother took a world of trouble to explain
the thing to me. I knew what I knew; I was not to be persuaded, but
went crying to bed, and in the night dreamed that the world was at an
end.”
The next morning, however, the sun rises as usual, and Joachim Murat is
proclaimed Grand Duke, whereupon there is a holiday at the public school,
and Heinrich (or Harry, for that was his baptismal name, which he
afterward had the good taste to change), perched on the bronze horse of
the Electoral statue, sees quite a different scene from yesterday’s:
“The next day the world was again all in order, and we had school as
before, and things were got by heart as before—the Roman emperors,
chronology, the nouns in _im_, the _verba irregularia_, Greek,
Hebrew, geography, mental arithmetic!—heavens! my head is still dizzy
with it—all must be learned by heart! And a great deal of this came
very conveniently for me in after life. For if I had not known the
Roman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite
indifferent to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that
they never really existed. . . . But oh! the trouble I had at school
with the endless dates. And with arithmetic it was still worse.
What I understood best was subtraction, for that has a very practical
rule: ‘Four can’t be taken from three, therefore I must borrow one.’
But I advise every one in such a case to borrow a few extra pence,
for no one can tell what may happen. . . . As for Latin, you have no
idea, madam, what a complicated affair it is. The Romans would never
have found time to conquer the world if they had first had to learn
Latin. Luckily for them, they already knew in their cradles what
nouns have their accusative in _im_. I, on the contrary, had to
learn them by heart in the sweat of my brow; nevertheless, it is
fortunate for me that I know them . . . and the fact that I have them
at my finger-ends if I should ever happen to want them suddenly,
affords me much inward repose and consolation in many troubled hours
of life. . . . Of Greek I will not say a word, I should get too much
irritated. The monks in the Middle Ages were not so far wrong when
they maintained that Greek was an invention of the devil. God knows
the suffering I endured over it. . . . With Hebrew it went somewhat
better, for I had always a great liking for the Jews, though to this
very hour they crucify my good name; but I could never get on so far
in Hebrew as my watch, which had much familiar intercourse with
pawnbrokers, and in this way contracted many Jewish habits—for
example, it wouldn’t go on Saturdays.”
Heine’s parents were apparently not wealthy, but his education was cared
for by his uncle, Solomon Heine, a great banker in Hamburg, so that he
had no early pecuniary disadvantages to struggle with. He seems to have
been very happy in his mother, who was not of Hebrew but of Teutonic
blood; he often mentions her with reverence and affection, and in the
“Buch der Lieder” there are two exquisite sonnets addressed to her, which
tell how his proud spirit was always subdued by the charm of her
presence, and how her love was the home of his heart after restless weary
ramblings:
“Wie mächtig auch mein stolzer Muth sich blähe,
In deiner selig süssen, trauten Nahe
Ergreift mich oft ein demuthvolles Zagen.
* * * * *
Und immer irrte ich nach Liebe, immer
Nach Liebe, doch die Liebe fand ich nimmer,
Und kehrte um nach Hause, krank und trübe.
Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen,
Und ach! was da in deinem Aug’ geschwommen,
Das war die süsse, langgesuchte Liebe.”
He was at first destined for a mercantile life, but Nature declared too
strongly against this plan. “God knows,” he has lately said in
conversation with his brother, “I would willingly have become a banker,
but I could never bring myself to that pass. I very early discerned that
bankers would one day be the rulers of the world.” So commerce was at
length given up for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the
University of Bonn. He had already published some poems in the corner of
a newspaper, and among them was one on Napoleon, the object of his
youthful enthusiasm. This poem, he says in a letter to St. Réné
Taillandier, was written when he was only sixteen. It is still to be
found in the “Buch der Lieder” under the title “Die Grenadiere,” and it
proves that even in its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly
specific character.
It will be easily imagined that the germs of poetry sprouted too
vigorously in Heine’s brain for jurisprudence to find much room there.
Lectures on history and literature, we are told, were more diligently
attended than lectures on law. He had taken care, too, to furnish his
trunk with abundant editions of the poets, and the poet he especially
studied at that time was Byron. At a later period, we find his taste
taking another direction, for he writes, “Of all authors, Byron is
precisely the one who excites in me the most intolerable emotion; whereas
Scott, in every one of his works, gladdens my heart, soothes, and
invigorates me.” Another indication of his bent in these Bonn days was a
newspaper essay, in which he attacked the Romantic school; and here also
he went through that chicken-pox of authorship—the production of a
tragedy. Heine’s tragedy—_Almansor_—is, as might be expected, better
than the majority of these youthful mistakes. The tragic collision lies
in the conflict between natural affection and the deadly hatred of
religion and of race—in the sacrifice of youthful lovers to the strife
between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and Christian. Some of the situations
are striking, and there are passages of considerable poetic merit; but
the characters are little more than shadowy vehicles for the poetry, and
there is a want of clearness and probability in the structure. It was
published two years later, in company with another tragedy, in one act,
called _William Ratcliffe_, in which there is rather a feeble use of the
Scotch second-sight after the manner of the Fate in the Greek tragedy.
We smile to find Heine saying of his tragedies, in a letter to a friend
soon after their publication: “I know they will be terribly cut up, but I
will confess to you in confidence that they are very good, better than my
collection of poems, which are not worth a shot.” Elsewhere he tells us,
that when, after one of Paganini’s concerts, he was passionately
complimenting the great master on his violin-playing. Paganini
interrupted him thus: “But how were you pleased with my _bows_?”
In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen. He there pursued his omission of
law studies, and at the end of three months he was rusticated for a
breach of the laws against duelling. While there, he had attempted a
negotiation with Brockhaus for the printing of a volume of poems, and had
endured the first ordeal of lovers and poets—a refusal. It was not until
a year after that he found a Berlin publisher for his first volume of
poems, subsequently transformed, with additions, into the “Buch der
Lieder.” He remained between two and three years at Berlin, and the
society he found there seems to have made these years an important epoch
in his culture. He was one of the youngest members of a circle which
assembled at the house of the poetess Elise von Hohenhausen, the
translator of Byron—a circle which included Chamisso, Varnhagen, and
Rahel (Varnhagen’s wife). For Rahel, Heine had a profound admiration and
regard; he afterward dedicated to her the poems included under the tide
“Heimkehr;” and he frequently refers to her or quotes her in a way that
indicates how he valued her influence. According to his friend F. von
Hohenhausen, the opinions concerning Heine’s talent were very various
among his Berlin friends, and it was only a small minority that had any
presentiment of his future fame. In this minority was Elise von
Hohenhausen, who proclaimed Heine as the Byron of Germany; but her
opinion was met with much head-shaking and opposition. We can imagine
how precious was such a recognition as hers to the young poet, then only
two or three and twenty, and with by no means an impressive personality
for superficial eyes. Perhaps even the deep-sighted were far from
detecting in that small, blonde, pale young man, with quiet, gentle
manners, the latent powers of ridicule and sarcasm—the terrible talons
that were one day to be thrust out from the velvet paw of the young
leopard.
It was apparently during this residence in Berlin that Heine united
himself with the Lutheran Church. He would willingly, like many of his
friends, he tells us, have remained free from all ecclesiastical ties if
the authorities there had not forbidden residence in Prussia, and
especially in Berlin, to every one who did not belong to one of the
positive religions recognized by the State.
“As Henry IV. once laughingly said, ‘_Paris vaut bien une messe_,’ so
I might with reason say, ‘_Berlin vaut bien une prêche_;’ and I could
afterward, as before, accommodate myself to the very enlightened
Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be
had in the churches of Berlin, and which was even free from the
divinity of Christ, like turtle-soup without turtle.”
At the same period, too, Heine became acquainted with Hegel. In his
lately published “Geständnisse” (Confessions) he throws on Hegel’s
influence over him the blue light of demoniacal wit, and confounds us by
the most bewildering double-edged sarcasms; but that influence seems to
have been at least more wholesome than the one which produced the mocking
retractations of the “Geständnisse.” Through all his self-satire, we
discern that in those days he had something like real earnestness and
enthusiasm, which are certainly not apparent in his present theistic
confession of faith.
“On the whole, I never felt a strong enthusiasm for this philosophy,
and conviction on the subject was out of question. I never was an
abstract thinker, and I accepted the synthesis of the Hegelian
doctrine without demanding any proof; since its consequences
flattered my vanity. I was young and proud, and it pleased my
vainglory when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my
grandmother believed, the God who lives in heaven, but myself here
upon earth. This foolish pride had not in the least a pernicious
influence on my feelings; on the contrary, it heightened these to the
pitch of heroism. I was at that time so lavish in generosity and
self-sacrifice that I must assuredly have eclipsed the most brilliant
deeds of those good _bourgeois_ of virtue who acted merely from a
sense of duty, and simply obeyed the laws of morality.”
His sketch of Hegel is irresistibly amusing; but we must warn the reader
that Heine’s anecdotes are often mere devices of style by which he
conveys his satire or opinions. The reader will see that he does not
neglect an opportunity of giving a sarcastic lash or two, in passing, to
Meyerbeer, for whose music he has a great contempt. The sarcasm conveyed
in the substitution of _reputation_ for _music_ and _journalists_ for
_musicians_, might perhaps escape any one unfamiliar with the sly and
unexpected turns of Heine’s ridicule.
“To speak frankly, I seldom understood him, and only arrived at the
meaning of his words by subsequent reflection. I believe he wished
not to be understood; and hence his practice of sprinkling his
discourse with modifying parentheses; hence, perhaps, his preference
for persons of whom he knew that they did not understand him, and to
whom he all the more willingly granted the honor of his familiar
acquaintance. Thus every one in Berlin wondered at the intimate
companionship of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich Beer, a
brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by his
reputation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists.
This Beer, namely Heinrich, was a thoroughly stupid fellow, and
indeed was afterward actually declared imbecile by his family, and
placed under guardianship, because instead of making a name for
himself in art or in science by means of his great fortune, he
squandered his money on childish trifles; and, for example, one day
bought six thousand thalers’ worth of walking-sticks. This poor man,
who had no wish to pass either for a great tragic dramatist, or for a
great star-gazer, or for a laurel-crowned musical genius, a rival of
Mozart and Rossini, and preferred giving his money for
walking-sticks—this degenerate Beer enjoyed Hegel’s most confidential
society; he was the philosopher’s bosom friend, his Pylades, and
accompanied him everywhere like his shadow. The equally witty and
gifted Felix Mendelssohn once sought to explain this phenomenon, by
maintaining that Hegel did not understand Heinrich Beer. I now
believe, however, that the real ground of that intimacy consisted in
this—Hegel was convinced that no word of what he said was understood
by Heinrich Beer; and he could therefore, in his presence, give
himself up to all the intellectual outpourings of the moment. In
general, Hegel’s conversation was a sort of monologue, sighed forth
by starts in a noiseless voice; the odd roughness of his expressions
often struck me, and many of them have remained in my memory. One
beautiful starlight evening we stood together at the window, and I, a
young man of one-and-twenty, having just had a good dinner and
finished my coffee, spoke with enthusiasm of the stars, and called
them the habitations of the departed. But the master muttered to
himself, ‘The stars! hum! hum! The stars are only a brilliant
leprosy on the face of the heavens.’ ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried, ‘is
there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is rewarded after
death?’ But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said, cuttingly,
‘So you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick mother, and
refrained from poisoning your worthy brother?’ At these words he
looked anxiously round, but appeared immediately set at rest when he
observed that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite
him to a game at whist.”
In 1823 Heine returned to Göttingen to complete his career as a
law-student, and this time he gave evidence of advanced mental maturity,
not only by producing many of the charming poems subsequently included in
the “Reisebilder,” but also by prosecuting his professional studies
diligently enough to leave Göttingen, in 1825, as _Doctor juris_.
Hereupon he settled at Hamburg as an advocate, but his profession seems
to have been the least pressing of his occupations. In those days a
small blonde young man, with the brim of his hat drawn over his nose, his
coat flying open, and his hands stuck in his trousers pockets, might be
seen stumbling along the streets of Hamburg, staring from side to side,
and appearing to have small regard to the figure he made in the eyes of
the good citizens. Occasionally an inhabitant more literary than usual
would point out this young man to his companion as _Heinrich Heine_; but
in general the young poet had not to endure the inconveniences of being a
lion. His poems were devoured, but he was not asked to devour flattery
in return. Whether because the fair Hamburgers acted in the spirit of
Johnson’s advice to Hannah More—to “consider what her flattery was worth
before she choked him with it”—or for some other reason, Heine, according
to the testimony of August Lewald, to whom we owe these particulars of
his Hamburg life, was left free from the persecution of tea-parties.
Not, however, from another persecution of Genius—nervous headaches, which
some persons, we are told, regarded as an improbable fiction, intended as
a pretext for raising a delicate white hand to his forehead. It is
probable that the sceptical persons alluded to were themselves untroubled
with nervous headaches, and that their hands were _not_ delicate. Slight
details, these, but worth telling about a man of genius, because they
help us to keep in mind that he is, after all, our brother, having to
endure the petty every-day ills of life as we have; with this difference,
that his heightened sensibility converts what are mere insect stings for
us into scorpion stings for him.
It was, perhaps, in these Hamburg days that Heine paid the visit to
Goethe, of which he gives us this charming little picture:
“When I visited him in Weimar, and stood before him, I involuntarily
glanced at his side to see whether the eagle was not there with the
lightning in his beak. I was nearly speaking Greek to him; but, as I
observed that he understood German, I stated to him in German that
the plums on the road between Jena and Weimar were very good. I had
for so many long winter nights thought over what lofty and profound
things I would say to Goethe, if ever I saw him. And when I saw him
at last, I said to him, that the Saxon plums were very good! And
Goethe smiled.”
During the next few years Heine produced the most popular of all his
works—those which have won him his place as the greatest of living German
poets and humorists. Between 1826 and 1829 appeared the four volumes of
the “Reisebilder” (Pictures of Travel) and the “Buch der Lieder” (Book of
Songs), a volume of lyrics, of which it is hard to say whether their
greatest charm is the lightness and finish of their style, their vivid
and original imaginativeness, or their simple, pure sensibility. In his
“Reisebilder” Heine carries us with him to the Hartz, to the isle of
Norderney, to his native town Düsseldorf, to Italy, and to England,
sketching scenery and character, now with the wildest, most fantastic
humor, now with the finest idyllic sensibility—letting his thoughts
wander from poetry to politics, from criticism to dreamy reverie, and
blending fun, imagination, reflection, and satire in a sort of exquisite,
ever-varying shimmer, like the hues of the opal.
Heine’s journey to England did not at all heighten his regard for the
English. He calls our language the “hiss of egoism (_Zischlaute des
Egoismus_); and his ridicule of English awkwardness is as merciless
as—English ridicule of German awkwardness. His antipathy toward us seems
to have grown in intensity, like many of his other antipathies; and in
his “Vermischte Schriften” he is more bitter than ever. Let us quote one
of his philippics, since bitters are understood to be wholesome:
“It is certainly a frightful injustice to pronounce sentence of
condemnation on an entire people. But with regard to the English,
momentary disgust might betray me into this injustice; and on looking
at the mass I easily forget the many brave and noble men who
distinguished themselves by intellect and love of freedom. But
these, especially the British poets, were always all the more
glaringly in contrast with the rest of the nation; they were isolated
martyrs to their national relations; and, besides, great geniuses do
not belong to the particular land of their birth: they scarcely
belong to this earth, the Golgotha of their sufferings. The mass—the
English blockheads, God forgive me!—are hateful to me in my inmost
soul; and I often regard them not at all as my fellow-men, but as
miserable automata—machines, whose motive power is egoism. In these
moods, it seems to me as if I heard the whizzing wheelwork by which
they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray: their praying, their
mechanical Anglican church-going, with the gilt Prayer-book under
their arms, their stupid, tiresome Sunday, their awkward piety, is
most of all odious to me. I am firmly convinced that a blaspheming
Frenchman is a more pleasing sight for the Divinity than a praying
Englishman.”
On his return from England Heine was employed at Munich in editing the
_Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen_, but in 1830 he was again in the north,
and the news of the July Revolution surprised him on the island of
Heligoland. He has given us a graphic picture of his democratic
enthusiasm in those days in some letters, apparently written from
Heligoland, which he has inserted in his book on Börne. We quote some
passages, not only for their biographic interest as showing a phase of
Heine’s mental history, but because they are a specimen of his power in
that kind of dithyrambic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily
becomes ridiculous:
“The thick packet of newspapers arrived from the Continent with these
warm, glowing-hot tidings. They were sunbeams wrapped up in
packing-paper, and they inflamed my soul till it burst into the
wildest conflagration. . . . It is all like a dream to me; especially
the name Lafayette sounds to me like a legend out of my earliest
childhood. Does he really sit again on horseback, commanding the
National Guard? I almost fear it may not be true, for it is in
print. I will myself go to Paris, to be convinced of it with my
bodily eyes. . . . It must be splendid, when he rides through the
street, the citizen of two worlds, the godlike old man, with his
silver locks streaming down his sacred shoulder. . . . He greets,
with his dear old eyes, the grandchildren of those who once fought
with him for freedom and equality. . . . It is now sixty years since
he returned from America with the Declaration of Human Rights, the
decalogue of the world’s new creed, which was revealed to him amid
the thunders and lightnings of cannon. . . . And the tricolored flag
waves again on the towers of Paris, and its streets resound with the
Marseillaise! . . . It is all over with my yearning for repose. I
now know again what I will do, what I ought to do, what I must do. .
. . I am the son of the Revolution, and seize again the hallowed
weapons on which my mother pronounced her magic benediction. . . .
Flowers! flowers! I will crown my head for the death-fight. And the
lyre too, reach me the lyre, that I may sing a battle-song. . . .
Words like flaming stars, that shoot down from the heavens, and burn
up the palaces, and illuminate the huts. . . . Words like bright
javelins, that whirr up to the seventh heaven and strike the pious
hypocrites who have skulked into the Holy of Holies. . . . I am all
joy and song, all sword and flame! Perhaps, too, all delirium. . . .
One of those sunbeams wrapped in brown paper has flown to my brain,
and set my thoughts aglow. In vain I dip my head into the sea. No
water extinguishes this Greek fire: . . . Even the poor Heligolanders
shout for joy, although they have only a sort of dim instinct of what
has occurred. The fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little
sand island, which is the bathing-place here, said to me smilingly,
‘The poor people have won!’ Yes; instinctively the people comprehend
such events, perhaps, better than we, with all our means of
knowledge. Thus Frau von Varnhagen once told me that when the issue
of the Battle of Leipzig was not yet known, the maid-servant suddenly
rushed into the room with the sorrowful cry, ‘The nobles have won!’ .
. . This morning another packet of newspapers is come, I devour them
like manna. Child that I am, affecting details touch me yet more
than the momentous whole. Oh, if I could but see the dog Medor. . .
. The dog Medor brought his master his gun and cartridge-box, and
when his master fell, and was buried with his fellow-heroes in the
Court of the Louvre, there stayed the poor dog like a monument of
faithfulness, sitting motionless on the grave, day and night, eating
but little of the food that was offered him—burying the greater part
of it in the earth, perhaps as nourishment for his buried master!”
The enthusiasm which was kept thus at boiling heat by imagination, cooled
down rapidly when brought into contact with reality. In the same book he
indicates, in his caustic way, the commencement of that change in his
political _temperature_—for it cannot be called a change in opinion—which
has drawn down on him immense vituperation from some of the patriotic
party, but which seems to have resulted simply from the essential
antagonism between keen wit and fanaticism.
“On the very first days of my arrival in Paris I observed that things
wore, in reality, quite different colors from those which had been
shed on them, when in perspective, by the light of my enthusiasm.
The silver locks which I saw fluttering so majestically on the
shoulders of Lafayette, the hero of two worlds, were metamorphosed
into a brown perruque, which made a pitiable covering for a narrow
skull. And even the dog Medor, which I visited in the Court of the
Louvre, and which, encamped under tricolored flags and trophies, very
quietly allowed himself to be fed—he was not at all the right dog,
but quite an ordinary brute, who assumed to himself merits not his
own, as often happens with the French; and, like many others, he made
a profit out of the glory of the Revolution. . . . He was pampered
and patronized, perhaps promoted to the highest posts, while the true
Medor, some days after the battle, modestly slunk out of sight, like
the true people who created the Revolution.”
That it was not merely interest in French politics which sent Heine to
Paris in 1831, but also a perception that German air was not friendly to
sympathizers in July revolutions, is humorously intimated in the
“Geständnisse.”
“I had done much and suffered much, and when the sun of the July
Revolution arose in France, I had become very weary, and needed some
recreation. Also, my native air was every day more unhealthy for me,
and it was time I should seriously think of a change of climate. I
had visions: the clouds terrified me, and made all sorts of ugly
faces at me. It often seemed to me as if the sun were a Prussian
cockade; at night I dreamed of a hideous black eagle, which gnawed my
liver; and I was very melancholy. Add to this, I had become
acquainted with an old Berlin Justizrath, who had spent many years in
the fortress of Spandau, and he related to me how unpleasant it is
when one is obliged to wear irons in winter. For myself I thought it
very unchristian that the irons were not warmed a trifle. If the
irons were warmed a little for us they would not make so unpleasant
an impression, and even chilly natures might then bear them very
well; it would be only proper consideration, too, if the fetters were
perfumed with essence of roses and laurels, as is the case in this
country (France). I asked my Justizrath whether he often got oysters
to eat at Spandau? He said, No; Spandau was too far from the sea.
Moreover, he said meat was very scarce there, and there was no kind
of _volaille_ except flies, which fell into one’s soup. . . . Now, as
I really needed some recreation, and as Spandau is too far from the
sea for oysters to be got there, and the Spandau fly-soup did not
seem very appetizing to me, as, besides all this, the Prussian chains
are very cold in winter, and could not be conducive to my health, I
resolved to visit Paris.”
Since this time Paris has been Heine’s home, and his best prose works
have been written either to inform the Germans on French affairs or to
inform the French on German philosophy and literature. He became a
correspondent of the _Allgemeine Zeitung_, and his correspondence, which
extends, with an interruption of several years, from 1831 to 1844, forms
the volume entitled “Französische Zustände” (French Affairs), and the
second and third volume of his “Vermischte Schriften.” It is a witty and
often wise commentary on public men and public events: Louis Philippe,
Casimir Périer, Thiers, Guizot, Rothschild, the Catholic party, the
Socialist party, have their turn of satire and appreciation, for Heine
deals out both with an impartiality which made his less favorable
critics—Börne, for example—charge him with the rather incompatible sins
of reckless caprice and venality. Literature and art alternate with
politics: we have now a sketch of George Sand or a description of one of
Horace Vernet’s pictures; now a criticism of Victor Hugo or of Liszt; now
an irresistible caricature of Spontini or Kalkbrenner; and occasionally
the predominant satire is relieved by a fine saying or a genial word of
admiration. And all is done with that airy lightness, yet precision of
touch, which distinguishes Heine beyond any living writer. The charge of
venality was loudly made against Heine in Germany: first, it was said
that he was paid to write; then, that he was paid to abstain from
writing; and the accusations were supposed to have an irrefragable basis
in the fact that he accepted a stipend from the French government. He
has never attempted to conceal the reception of that stipend, and we
think his statement (in the “Vermischte Schriften”) of the circumstances
under which it was offered and received, is a sufficient vindication of
himself and M. Guizot from any dishonor in the matter.
It may be readily imagined that Heine, with so large a share of the
Gallic element as he has in his composition, was soon at his ease in
Parisian society, and the years here were bright with intellectual
activity and social enjoyment. “His wit,” wrote August Lewald, “is a
perpetual gushing fountain; he throws off the most delicious descriptions
with amazing facility, and sketches the most comic characters in
conversations.” Such a man could not be neglected in Paris, and Heine
was sought on all sides—as a guest in distinguished salons, as a possible
proselyte in the circle of the Saint Simonians. His literary
productiveness seems to have been furthered by his congenial life, which,
however, was soon to some extent embittered by the sense of exile; for
since 1835 both his works and his person have been the object of
denunciation by the German governments. Between 1833 and 1845 appeared
the four volumes of the “Salon,” “Die Romantische Schule” (both written,
in the first instance, in French), the book on Börne, “Atta Troll,” a
romantic poem, “Deutschland,” an exquisitely humorous poem, describing
his last visit to Germany, and containing some grand passages of serious
writing; and the “Neue Gedichte,” a collection of lyrical poems. Among
the most interesting of his prose works are the second volume of the
“Salon,” which contains a survey of religion and philosophy in Germany,
and the “Romantische Schule,” a delightful introduction to that phase of
German literature known as the Romantic school. The book on Börne, which
appeared in 1840, two years after the death of that writer, excited great
indignation in Germany, as a wreaking of vengeance on the dead, an insult
to the memory of a man who had worked and suffered in the cause of
freedom—a cause which was Heine’s own. Börne, we may observe
parenthetically for the information of those who are not familiar with
recent German literature, was a remarkable political writer of the
ultra-liberal party in Germany, who resided in Paris at the same time
with Heine: a man of stern, uncompromising partisanship and bitter humor.
Without justifying Heine’s production of this book, we see excuses for
him which should temper the condemnation passed on it. There was a
radical opposition of nature between him and Börne; to use his own
distinction, Heine is a Hellene—sensuous, realistic, exquisitely alive to
the beautiful; while Börne was a Nazarene—ascetic, spiritualistic,
despising the pure artist as destitute of earnestness. Heine has too
keen a perception of practical absurdities and damaging exaggerations
ever to become a thoroughgoing partisan; and with a love of freedom, a
faith in the ultimate triumph of democratic principles, of which we see
no just reason to doubt the genuineness and consistency, he has been
unable to satisfy more zealous and one-sided liberals by giving his
adhesion to their views and measures, or by adopting a denunciatory tone
against those in the opposite ranks. Börne could not forgive what he
regarded as Heine’s epicurean indifference and artistic dalliance, and he
at length gave vent to his antipathy in savage attacks on him through the
press, accusing him of utterly lacking character and principle, and even
of writing under the influence of venal motives. To these attacks Heine
remained absolutely mute—from contempt according to his own account; but
the retort, which he resolutely refrained from making during Börne’s
life, comes in this volume published after his death with the
concentrated force of long-gathering thunder. The utterly inexcusable
part of the book is the caricature of Börne’s friend, Madame Wohl, and
the scurrilous insinuations concerning Börne’s domestic life. It is
said, we know not with how much truth, that Heine had to answer for these
in a duel with Madame Wohl’s husband, and that, after receiving a serious
wound, he promised to withdraw the offensive matter from a future
edition. That edition, however, has not been called for. Whatever else
we may think of the book, it is impossible to deny its transcendent
talent—the dramatic vigor with which Börne is made present to us, the
critical acumen with which he is characterized, and the wonderful play of
wit, pathos, and thought which runs through the whole. But we will let
Heine speak for himself, and first we will give part of his graphic
description of the way in which Börne’s mind and manners grated on his
taste:
“To the disgust which, in intercourse with Börne, I was in danger of
feeling toward those who surrounded him, was added the annoyance I
felt from his perpetual talk about politics. Nothing but political
argument, and again political argument, even at table, where he
managed to hunt me out. At dinner, when I so gladly forget all the
vexations of the world, he spoiled the best dishes for me by his
patriotic gall, which he poured as a bitter sauce over everything.
Calf’s feet, _à la maître d’hôtel_, then my innocent _bonne bouche_,
he completely spoiled for me by Job’s tidings from Germany, which he
scraped together out of the most unreliable newspapers. And then his
accursed remarks, which spoiled one’s appetite! . . . This was a sort
of table-talk which did not greatly exhilarate me, and I avenged
myself by affecting an excessive, almost impassioned indifference for
the object of Börne’s enthusiasm. For example, Börne was indignant
that immediately on my arrival in Paris I had nothing better to do
than to write for German papers a long account of the Exhibition of
Pictures. I omit all discussion as to whether that interest in Art
which induced me to undertake this work was so utterly irreconcilable
with the revolutionary interests of the day; but Börne saw in it a
proof of my indifference toward the sacred cause of humanity, and I
could in my turn spoil the taste of his patriotic _sauerkraut_ for
him by talking all dinner-time of nothing but pictures, of Robert’s
‘Reapers,’ Horace Vernet’s ‘Judith,’ and Scheffer’s ‘Faust.’ . . .
That I never thought it worth while to discuss my political
principles with him it is needless to say; and once when he declared
that he had found a contradiction in my writings, I satisfied myself
with the ironical answer, ‘You are mistaken, _mon cher_; such
contradictions never occur in my works, for always before I begin to
write, I read over the statement of my political principles in my
previous writings, that I may not contradict myself, and that no one
may be able to reproach me with apostasy from my liberal
principles.’”
And here is his own account of the spirit in which the book was written:
“I was never Börne’s friend, nor was I ever his enemy. The
displeasure which he could often excite in me was never very
important, and he atoned for it sufficiently by the cold silence
which I opposed to all his accusations and raillery. While he lived
I wrote not a line against him, I never thought about him, I ignored
him completely; and that enraged him beyond measure. If I now speak
of him, I do so neither out of enthusiasm nor out of uneasiness; I am
conscious of the coolest impartiality. I write here neither an
apology nor a critique, and as in painting the man I go on my own
observation, the image I present of him ought perhaps to be regarded
as a real portrait. And such a monument is due to him—to the great
wrestler who, in the arena of our political games, wrestled so
courageously, and earned, if not the laurel, certainly the crown of
oak leaves. I give an image with his true features, without
idealization—the more like him the more honorable for his memory. He
was neither a genius nor a hero; he was no Olympian god. He was a
man, a denizen of this earth; he was a good writer and a great
patriot. . . . Beautiful, delicious peace, which I feel at this
moment in the depths of my soul! Thou rewardest me sufficiently for
everything I have done and for everything I have despised. . . . I
shall defend myself neither from the reproach of indifference nor
from the suspicion of venality. I have for years, during the life of
the insinuator, held such self-justification unworthy of me; now even
decency demands silence. That would be a frightful
spectacle!—polemics between Death and Exile! Dost thou stretch out
to me a beseeching hand from the grave? Without rancor I reach mine
toward thee. . . . See how noble it is and pure! It was never soiled
by pressing the hands of the mob, any more than by the impure gold of
the people’s enemy. In reality thou hast never injured me. . . . In
all thy insinuations there is not a _louis d’or’s_ worth of truth.”
In one of these years Heine was married, and, in deference to the
sentiments of his wife, married according to the rites of the Catholic
Church. On this fact busy rumor afterward founded the story of his
conversion to Catholicism, and could of course name the day and spot on
which he abjured Protestanism. In his “Geständnisse” Heine publishes a
denial of this rumor; less, he says, for the sake of depriving the
Catholics of the solace they may derive from their belief in a new
convert, than in order to cut off from another party the more spiteful
satisfaction of bewailing his instability:
“That statement of time and place was entirely correct. I was
actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was,
moreover, a Jesuit church, namely, St. Sulpice; and I then went
through a religious act. But this act was no odious abjuration, but
a very innocent conjugation; that is to say, my marriage, already
performed, according to the civil law there received the
ecclesiastical consecration, because my wife, whose family are
staunch Catholics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough
without such a ceremony. And I would on no account cause this
beloved being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views.”
For sixteen years—from 1831 to 1847—Heine lived that rapid concentrated
life which is known only in Paris; but then, alas! stole on the “days of
darkness,” and they were to be many. In 1847 he felt the approach of the
terrible spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed
in acute suffering. The last time he went out of doors, he tells us, was
in May, 1848:
“With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank
down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess
of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her
feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied
me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time
disconsolately, as if she would say, Dost thou not see, then, that I
have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?”
Since 1848, then, this poet, whom the lovely objects of Nature have
always “haunted like a passion,” has not descended from the second story
of a Parisian house; this man of hungry intellect has been shut out from
all direct observation of life, all contact with society, except such as
is derived from visitors to his sick-room. The terrible nervous disease
has affected his eyes; the sight of one is utterly gone, and he can only
raise the lid of the other by lifting it with his finger. Opium alone is
the beneficent genius that stills his pain. We hardly know whether to
call it an alleviation or an intensification of the torture that Heine
retains his mental vigor, his poetic imagination, and his incisive wit;
for if this intellectual activity fills up a blank, it widens the sphere
of suffering. His brother described him in 1851 as still, in moments
when the hand of pain was not too heavy on him, the same Heinrich Heine,
poet and satirist by turns. In such moments he would narrate the
strangest things in the gravest manner. But when he came to an end, he
would roguishly lift up the lid of his right eye with his finger to see
the impression he had produced; and if his audience had been listening
with a serious face, he would break into Homeric laughter. We have other
proof than personal testimony that Heine’s disease allows his genius to
retain much of its energy, in the “Romanzero,” a volume of poems
published in 1851, and written chiefly during the three first years of
his illness; and in the first volume of the “Vermischte Schriften,” also
the product of recent years. Very plaintive is the poet’s own
description of his condition, in the epilogue to the “Romanzero:”
“Do I really exist? My body is so shrunken that I am hardly anything
but a voice; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave of the
magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in Brittany,
under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames toward heaven.
Alas! I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that moves their
branches, brother Merlin, for no green leaf rustles about my
mattress-grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but the
rolling of vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strumming. A
grave without repose, death without the privileges of the dead, who
have no debts to pay, and need write neither letters nor books—that
is a piteous condition. Long ago the measure has been taken for my
coffin and for my necrology, but I die so slowly that the process is
tedious for me as well as my friends. But patience: everything has
an end. You will one day find the booth closed where the puppet-show
of my humor has so often delighted you.”
As early as 1850 it was rumored that since Heine’s illness a change had
taken place in his religious views; and as rumor seldom stops short of
extremes, it was soon said that he had become a thorough pietist,
Catholics and Protestants by turns claiming him as a convert. Such a
change in so uncompromising an iconoclast, in a man who had been so
zealous in his negations as Heine, naturally excited considerable
sensation in the camp he was supposed to have quitted, as well as in that
he was supposed to have joined. In the second volume of the “Salon,” and
in the “Romantische Schule,” written in 1834 and ’35, the doctrine of
Pantheism is dwelt on with a fervor and unmixed seriousness which show
that Pantheism was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what
he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity as the
enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well-being. Now, however, it
was said that Heine had recanted all his heresies; but from the fact that
visitors to his sick-room brought away very various impressions as to his
actual religious views, it seemed probable that his love of mystification
had found a tempting opportunity for exercise on this subject, and that,
as one of his friends said, he was not inclined to pour out unmixed wine
to those who asked for a sample out of mere curiosity. At length, in the
epilogue to the “Romanzero,” dated 1851, there appeared, amid much
mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced Theism and the
belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and
reliability to this affirmation was the fact that he took care to
accompany it with certain negations:
“As concerns myself, I can boast of no particular progress in
politics; I adhered (after 1848) to the same democratic principles
which had the homage of my youth, and for which I have ever since
glowed with increasing fervor. In theology, on the contrary, I must
accuse myself of retrogression, since, as I have already confessed, I
returned to the old superstition—to a personal God. This fact is,
once for all, not to be stifled, as many enlightened and well-meaning
friends would fain have had it. But I must expressly contradict the
report that my retrograde movement has carried me as far as to the
threshold of a Church, and that I have even been received into her
lap. No: my religious convictions and views have remained free from
any tincture of ecclesiasticism; no chiming of bells has allured me,
no altar candles have dazzled me. I have dallied with no dogmas, and
have not utterly renounced my reason.”
This sounds like a serious statement. But what shall we say to a convert
who plays with his newly-acquired belief in a future life, as Heine does
in the very next page? He says to his reader:
“Console thyself; we shall meet again in a better world, where I also
mean to write thee better books. I take for granted that my health
will there be improved, and that Swedenborg has not deceived me. He
relates, namely, with great confidence, that we shall peacefully
carry on our old occupations in the other world, just as we have done
in this; that we shall there preserve our individuality unaltered,
and that death will produce no particular change in our organic
development. Swedenborg is a thoroughly honorable fellow, and quite
worthy of credit in what he tells us about the other world, where he
saw with his own eyes the persons who had played a great part on our
earth. Most of them, he says, remained unchanged, and busied
themselves with the same things as formerly; they remained
stationary, were old-fashioned, _rococo_—which now and then produced
a ludicrous effect. For example, our dear Dr. Martin Luther kept
fast by his doctrine of Grace, about which he had for three hundred
years daily written down the same mouldy arguments—just in the same
way as the late Baron Ekstein, who during twenty years printed in the
_Allgemeine Zeitung_ one and the same article, perpetually chewing
over again the old cud of Jesuitical doctrine. But, as we have said,
all persons who once figured here below were not found by Swedenborg
in such a state of fossil immutability: many had considerably
developed their character, both for good and evil, in the other
world; and this gave rise to some singular results. Some who had
been heroes and saints on earth had _there_ sunk into scamps and
good-for-nothings; and there were examples, too, of a contrary
transformation. For instance, the fumes of self-conceit mounted to
Saint Anthony’s head when he learned what immense veneration and
adoration had been paid to him by all Christendom; and he who here
below withstood the most terrible temptations was now quite an
impertinent rascal and dissolute gallows-bird, who vied with his pig
in rolling himself in the mud. The chaste Susanna, from having been
excessively vain of her virtue, which she thought indomitable, came
to a shameful fall, and she who once so gloriously resisted the two
old men, was a victim to the seductions of the young Absalom, the son
of David. On the contrary, Lot’s daughters had in the lapse of time
become very virtuous, and passed in the other world for models of
propriety: the old man, alas! had stuck to the wine-flask.”
In his “Geständnisse,” the retractation of former opinions and profession
of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony that repels our sympathy
and baffles our psychology. Yet what strange, deep pathos is mingled
with the audacity of the following passage!
“What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my
marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged nurse are
pressing Spanish flies behind my ears? What avails it me, that all
the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me? Alas! Shiraz is
two thousand miles from the Rue d’Amsterdam, where, in the wearisome
loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it be, perhaps,
the perfume of warmed towels. Alas! God’s satire weighs heavily on
me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven,
was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little,
earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only
pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably
I am beneath him in humor, in colossal mockery.”
For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence with which Heine
professes his theoretical reverence as pathological, as the diseased
exhibition of a predominant tendency urged into anomalous action by the
pressure of pain and mental privation—as a delirium of wit starved of its
proper nourishment. It is not for us to condemn, who have never had the
same burden laid on us; it is not for pigmies at their ease to criticise
the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock.
On one other point we must touch before quitting Heine’s personal
history. There is a standing accusation against him in some quarters of
wanting political principle, of wishing to denationalize himself, and of
indulging in insults against his native country. Whatever ground may
exist for these accusations, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be
found in his writings. He may not have much faith in German revolutions
and revolutionists; experience, in his case as in that of others, may
have thrown his millennial anticipations into more distant perspective;
but we see no evidence that he has ever swerved from his attachment to
the principles of freedom, or written anything which to a philosophic
mind is incompatible with true patriotism. He has expressly denied the
report that he wished to become naturalized in France; and his yearning
toward his native land and the accents of his native language is
expressed with a pathos the more reliable from the fact that he is
sparing in such effusions. We do not see why Heine’s satire of the
blunders and foibles of his fellow-countrymen should be denounced as a
crime of _lèse-patrie_, any more than the political caricatures of any
other satirist. The real offences of Heine are his occasional coarseness
and his unscrupulous personalities, which are reprehensible, not because
they are directed against his fellow-countrymen, but because they are
_personalities_. That these offences have their precedents in men whose
memory the world delights to honor does not remove their turpitude, but
it is a fact which should modify our condemnation in a particular case;
unless, indeed, we are to deliver our judgments on a principle of
compensation—making up for our indulgence in one direction by our
severity in another. On this ground of coarseness and personality, a
true bill may be found against Heine; _not_, we think, on the ground that
he has laughed at what is laughable in his compatriots. Here is a
specimen of the satire under which we suppose German patriots wince:
“Rhenish Bavaria was to be the starting-point of the German
revolution. Zweibrücken was the Bethlehem in which the infant
Saviour—Freedom—lay in the cradle, and gave whimpering promise of
redeeming the world. Near his cradle bellowed many an ox, who
afterward, when his horns were reckoned on, showed himself a very
harmless brute. It was confidently believed that the German
revolution would begin in Zweibrücken, and everything was there ripe
for an outbreak. But, as has been hinted, the tender-heartedness of
some persons frustrated that illegal undertaking. For example, among
the Bipontine conspirators there was a tremendous braggart, who was
always loudest in his rage, who boiled over with the hatred of
tyranny, and this man was fixed on to strike the first blow, by
cutting down a sentinel who kept an important post. . . . . ‘What!’
cried the man, when this order was given him—‘What!—me! Can you
expect so horrible, so bloodthirsty an act of me? I—_I_, kill an
innocent sentinel? I, who am the father of a family! And this
sentinel is perhaps also father of a family. One father of a family
kill another father of a family? Yes. Kill—murder!’”
In political matters Heine, like all men whose intellect and taste
predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming
partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the
one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the
other as a half-hearted “trimmer.” He has no sympathy, as he says, with
“that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm,
which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of
generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had
so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from
the top of a mast into the sea, crying, “_I die for General Jackson_!”
“But thou liest, Brutus, thou liest, Cassius, and thou, too, liest,
Asinius, in maintaining that my ridicule attacks those ideas which
are the precious acquisition of Humanity, and for which I myself have
so striven and suffered. No! for the very reason that those ideas
constantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, he
is the more irresistibly overcome by laughter when he sees how
rudely, awkwardly, and clumsily those ideas are seized and mirrored
in the contracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mirrors
which have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in them
becomes a caricature, and excites our laughter. _But we laugh then
only at the caricature_, _not at the god_.”
For the rest, why should we demand of Heine that he should be a hero, a
patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than we should demand of a gazelle
that it should draw well in harness? Nature has not made him of her
sterner stuff—not of iron and adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the
juice of the grape, and Puck’s mischievous brain, plenteously mixing also
the dews of kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble thoughts. It is,
after all, a _tribute_ which his enemies pay him when they utter their
bitterest dictum, namely, that he is “_nur Dichter_”—only a poet. Let us
accept this point of view for the present, and, leaving all consideration
of him as a man, look at him simply as a poet and literary artist.