“Short swallow flights of song that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away;”
and they are so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we feel as if
each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same
inspiration. Heine is too impressible and mercurial for any sustained
production; even in his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into
laughter and his laughter into tears; and his longer poems, “Atta Troll”
and “Deutschland,” are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His song has a
wide compass of notes; he can take us to the shores of the Northern Sea
and thrill us by the sombre sublimity of his pictures and dreamy fancies;
he can draw forth our tears by the voice he gives to our own sorrows, or
to the sorrows of “Poor Peter;” he can throw a cold shudder over us by a
mysterious legend, a ghost story, or a still more ghastly rendering of
hard reality; he can charm us by a quiet idyl, shake us with laughter at
his overflowing fun, or give us a piquant sensation of surprise by the
ingenuity of his transitions from the lofty to the ludicrous. This last
power is not, indeed, essentially poetical; but only a poet can use it
with the same success as Heine, for only a poet can poise our emotion and
expectation at such a height as to give effect to the sudden fall.
Heine’s greatest power as a poet lies in his simple pathos, in the
ever-varied but always natural expression he has given to the tender
emotions. We may perhaps indicate this phase of his genius by referring
to Wordsworth’s beautiful little poem, “She dwelt among the untrodden
ways;” the conclusion—
“She dwelt alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh!
The difference to me”—
is entirely in Heine’s manner; and so is Tennyson’s poem of a dozen
lines, called “Circumstance.” Both these poems have Heine’s pregnant
simplicity. But, lest this comparison should mislead, we must say that
there is no general resemblance between either Wordsworth, or Tennyson,
and Heine. Their greatest qualities lie quite a way from the light,
delicate lucidity, the easy, rippling music, of Heine’s style. The
distinctive charm of his lyrics may best be seen by comparing them with
Goethe’s. Both have the same masterly, finished simplicity and rhythmic
grace; but there is more thought mingled with Goethe’s feeling—his
lyrical genius is a vessel that draws more water than Heine’s, and,
though it seems to glide along with equal ease, we have a sense of
greater weight and force, accompanying the grace of its movements.
But for this very reason Heine touches our hearts more strongly; his
songs are all music and feeling—they are like birds that not only enchant
us with their delicious notes, but nestle against us with their soft
breasts, and make us feel the agitated beating of their hearts. He
indicates a whole sad history in a single quatrain; there is not an image
in it, not a thought; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a “big
round tear”—it is pure feeling, breathed in pure music:
“Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen
Und ich glaubt’ ich trug es nie,
Und ich hab’ es doch getragen—
Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie.” {134}
He excels equally in the more imaginative expression of feeling: he
represents it by a brief image, like a finely cut cameo; he expands it
into a mysterious dream, or dramatizes it in a little story, half ballad,
half idyl; and in all these forms his art is so perfect that we never
have a sense of artificiality or of unsuccessful effort; but all seems to
have developed itself by the same beautiful necessity that brings forth
vine-leaves and grapes and the natural curls of childhood. Of Heine’s
humorous poetry, “Deutschland” is the most charming specimen—charming,
especially, because its wit and humor grow out of a rich loam of thought.
“Atta Troll” is more original, more various, more fantastic; but it is
too great a strain on the imagination to be a general favorite. We have
said that feeling is the element in which Heine’s poetic genius
habitually floats; but he can occasionally soar to a higher region, and
impart deep significance to picturesque symbolism; he can flash a sublime
thought over the past and into the future; he can pour forth a lofty
strain of hope or indignation. Few could forget, after once hearing
them, the stanzas at the close of “Deutschland,” in which he warns the
King of Prussia not to incur the irredeemable hell which the injured poet
can create for him—the _singing flames_ of a Dante’s _terza rima_!
“Kennst du die Hölle des Dante nicht,
Die schrecklichen Terzetten?
Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt
Den kann kein Gott mehr retten.
“Kein Gott, kein Heiland, erlöst ihn je
Aus diesen singenden Flammen!
Nimm dich in Acht, das wir dich nicht
Zu solcher Hölle verdammen.” {135}
As a prosaist, Heine is, in one point of view, even more distinguished
than as a poet. The German language easily lends itself to all the
purposes of poetry; like the ladies of the Middle Ages, it is gracious
and compliant to the Troubadours. But as these same ladies were often
crusty and repulsive to their unmusical mates, so the German language
generally appears awkward and unmanageable in the hands of prose writers.
Indeed, the number of really fine German prosaists before Heine would
hardly have exceeded the numerating powers of a New Hollander, who can
count three and no more. Persons the most familiar with German prose
testify that there is an extra fatigue in reading it, just as we feel an
extra fatigue from our walk when it takes us over ploughed clay. But in
Heine’s hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull,
becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic,
brilliant; it is German in an _allotropic_ condition. No dreary
labyrinthine sentences in which you find “no end in wandering mazes
lost;” no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no
digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and
clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision, all
those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest order
of prose. And Heine has proved—what Madame de Stäel seems to have
doubted—that it is possible to be witty in German; indeed, in reading
him, you might imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit,
so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his management.
He is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth
and repose, and the calm development which belong to Goethe’s style, for
they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in
susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over
its effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow: he
alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion,
and daring piquancy; and athwart all these there runs a vein of sadness,
tenderness, and grandeur which reveals the poet. He continually throws
out those finely chiselled sayings which stamp themselves on the memory,
and become familiar by quotation. For example: “The People have time
enough, they are immortal; kings only are mortal.”—“Wherever a great soul
utters its thoughts, there is Golgotha.”—“Nature wanted to see how she
looked, and she created Goethe.”—“Only the man who has known bodily
suffering is truly a _man_; his limbs have their Passion history, they
are spiritualized.” He calls Rubens “this Flemish Titan, the wings of
whose genius were so strong that he soared as high as the sun, in spite
of the hundred-weight of Dutch cheeses that hung on his legs.” Speaking
of Börne’s dislike to the calm creations of the true artist, he says, “He
was like a child which, insensible to the glowing significance of a Greek
statue, only touches the marble and complains of cold.”
The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine’s prose writings are
the “Reisebilder.” The comparison with Sterne is inevitable here; but
Heine does not suffer from it, for if he falls below Sterne in raciness
of humor, he is far above him in poetic sensibility and in reach and
variety of thought. Heine’s humor is never persistent, it never flows on
long in easy gayety and drollery; where it is not swelled by the tide of
poetic feeling, it is continually dashing down the precipice of a
witticism. It is not broad and unctuous; it is aërial and sprite-like, a
momentary resting-place between his poetry and his wit. In the
“Reisebilder” he runs through the whole gamut of his powers, and gives us
every hue of thought, from the wildly droll and fantastic to the sombre
and the terrible. Here is a passage almost Dantesque in conception:
“Alas! one ought in truth to write against no one in this world.
Each of us is sick enough in this great lazaretto, and many a
polemical writing reminds me involuntarily of a revolting quarrel, in
a little hospital at Cracow, of which I chanced to be a witness, and
where it was horrible to hear how the patients mockingly reproached
each other with their infirmities: how one who was wasted by
consumption jeered at another who was bloated by dropsy; how one
laughed at another’s cancer in the nose, and this one again at his
neighbor’s locked-jaw or squint, until at last the delirious
fever-patient sprang out of bed and tore away the coverings from the
wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was to be seen but
hideous misery and mutilation.”
And how fine is the transition in the very next chapter, where, after
quoting the Homeric description of the feasting gods, he says:
“Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew, with drops of blood
on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great cross
laid on his shoulders; and he threw the cross on the high table of
the gods, so that the golden cups tottered, and the gods became dumb
and pale, and grew ever paler, till they at last melted away into
vapor.”
The richest specimens of Heine’s wit are perhaps to be found in the works
which have appeared since the “Reisebilder.” The years, if they have
intensified his satirical bitterness, have also given his wit a finer
edge and polish. His sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slily
allusive, that they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not
very acute; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors
of style, there can hardly be any wit more irresistible than Heine’s. We
may measure its force by the degree in which it has subdued the German
language to its purposes, and made that language brilliant in spite of a
long hereditary transmission of dulness. As one of the most harmless
examples of his satire, take this on a man who has certainly had his
share of adulation:
“Assuredly it is far from my purpose to depreciate M. Victor Cousin.
The titles of this celebrated philosopher even lay me under an
obligation to praise him. He belongs to that living pantheon of
France which we call the peerage, and his intelligent legs rest on
the velvet benches of the Luxembourg. I must indeed sternly repress
all private feelings which might seduce me into an excessive
enthusiasm. Otherwise I might be suspected of servility; for M.
Cousin is very influential in the State by means of his position and
his tongue. This consideration might even move me to speak of his
faults as frankly as of his virtues. Will he himself disapprove of
this? Assuredly not. I know that we cannot do higher honor to great
minds than when we throw as strong a light on their demerits as on
their merits. When we sing the praises of a Hercules, we must also
mention that he once laid aside the lion’s skin and sat down to the
distaff: what then? he remains notwithstanding a Hercules! So when
we relate similar circumstances concerning M. Cousin, we must
nevertheless add, with discriminating eulogy: _M. Cousin_, _if he has
sometimes sat twaddling at the distaff_, _has never laid aside the
lion’s skin_. . . . It is true that, having been suspected of
demagogy, he spent some time in a German prison, just as Lafayette
and Richard Cœur de Lion. But that M. Cousin there in his leisure
hours studied Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ is to be doubted on
three grounds. First, this book is written in German. Secondly, in
order to read this book, a man must understand German. Thirdly, M.
Cousin does not understand German. . . . I fear I am passing unawares
from the sweet waters of praise into the bitter ocean of blame. Yes,
on one account I cannot refrain from bitterly blaming M.
Cousin—namely, that he who loves truth far more than he loves Plato
and Tenneman is unjust to himself when he wants to persuade us that
he has borrowed something from the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel.
Against this self-accusation I must take M. Cousin under my
protection. On my word and conscience! this honorable man has not
stolen a jot from Schelling and Hegel, and if he brought home
anything of theirs, it was merely their friendship. That does honor
to his heart. But there are many instances of such false
self-accusation in psychology. I knew a man who declared that he had
stolen silver spoons at the king’s table; and yet we all knew that
the poor devil had never been presented at court, and accused himself
of stealing these spoons to make us believe that he had been a guest
at the palace. No! In German philosophy M. Cousin has always kept
the sixth commandment; here he has never pocketed a single idea, not
so much as a salt-spoon of an idea. All witnesses agree in attesting
that in this respect M. Cousin is honor itself. . . . I prophesy to
you that the renown of M. Cousin, like the French Revolution, will go
round the world! I hear some one wickedly add: Undeniably the renown
of M. Cousin is going round the world, and _it has already taken its
departure from France_.”
The following “symbolical myth” about Louis Philippe is very
characteristic of Heine’s manner:
“I remember very well that immediately on my arrival (in Paris) I
hastened to the Palais Royal to see Louis Philippe. The friend who
conducted me told me that the king now appeared on the terrace only
at stated hours, but that formerly he was to be seen at any time for
five francs. ‘For five francs!’ I cried with amazement; ‘does he
then show himself for money?’ ‘No, but he is shown for money, and it
happens in this way: There is a society of _claqueurs_, _marchands de
contremarques_, and such riff-raff, who offered every foreigner to
show him the king for five francs: if he would give ten francs, he
might see the king raise his eyes to heaven, and lay his hand
protestingly on his heart; if he would give twenty francs, the king
would sing the Marseillaise. If the foreigner gave five francs, they
raised a loud cheering under the king’s windows, and His Majesty
appeared on the terrace, bowed, and retired. If ten francs, they
shouted still louder, and gesticulated as if they had been possessed,
when the king appeared, who then, as a sign of silent emotion, raised
his eyes to heaven and laid his hand on his heart. English visitors,
however, would sometimes spend as much as twenty francs, and then the
enthusiasm mounted to the highest pitch; no sooner did the king
appear on the terrace than the Marseillaise was struck up and roared
out frightfully, until Louis Philippe, perhaps only for the sake of
putting an end to the singing, bowed, laid his hand on his heart, and
joined in the Marseillaise. Whether, as is asserted, he beat time
with his foot, I cannot say.’”
One more quotation, and it must be our last:
“Oh the women! We must forgive them much, for they love much—and
many. Their hate is properly only love turned inside out. Sometimes
they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they can in
this way gratify another man. When they write, they have always one
eye on the paper and the other on a man; and this is true of all
authoresses, except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who has only one eye.”