then capital of the duchy of Jülich-Cleve-Berg. For six years the
town was garrisoned by French revolutionary troops. They took their
departure in 1801, and Max Joseph of Pfalz-Zweibrücken became Grand
Duke; but in 1806 he was made King of Bavaria, and Joachim Murat was
installed as Grand Duke in his stead. Only two years later Murat had to
make way for the eldest son of the King of Holland, or, in reality, as
the boy was not of age, for Napoleon, as his guardian. The country was
now governed exactly according to the French pattern; serfdom, feudal
law, and statute-labour were abolished, and complete religious liberty
was proclaimed. This last innovation led to Napoleon's being revered by
the Jewish population of the Rhine Provinces as their saviour from the
oppression of a thousand years.
There can be no doubt that the contact with the audacious, victorious
Frenchmen of that day powerfully influenced Heine's mental development.
His respect for traditional authority was early undermined. His natural
wit was developed in the direction of what the French call _esprit_.
The germs of his enthusiastic admiration for Napoleon were generated.
That enthusiasm seems to us to-day to be an isolated phenomenon in the
German literature of the century; in reality it was very far from being
so.
Let us go back to Wieland, and we shall find that he held Napoleon
in the same high estimation, even before such an opinion had been
justified by the events of history. In 1798 he declares that France
stands in need of a dictator, and that no one is fit for the post
except General Bonaparte, then in Egypt. In 1800 he prophesies that
Bonaparte will and must make himself king, and defends him against the
attacks of the English newspapers. Napoleon, having been told of these
prophecies, had a lengthy interview with Wieland at Erfurt in 1808.
None of the great Germans at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of
the nineteenth century knew what national enmity meant. It was without
a spark of any such feeling that Goethe, in the capacity of spectator,
made the campaign of 1793 in France. Schiller valued his certificate of
French citizenship, and believed that it might come to be of use to his
children. Knebel, Goethe's friend, wished that he dared sing Napoleon's
victories. Goethe himself looked on with complacency while Napoleon
shattered the kingdom of Frederick the Great into fragments; it is
evident that he must have regarded that kingdom of Prussia as a passing
phenomenon in the history of Germany. He had witnessed Napoleon's rise
and victorious career, and had seen him suppress that anarchy which
was so hateful to himself, the aristocrat and evolutionist. At last he
made his personal acquaintance, saw him surrounded by his marshals,
in an atmosphere of brightness, amiability, geniality, general
irresistibility. The personal impression made upon him by Napoleon was
such as to increase his previous admiration for him. Hence it was that
even after the Russian campaign, even during the rehabilitation of
Germany, Goethe continued to say: "It is all of no use; the man is too
strong for them." It was not till all was over that he made a sort of
compulsory amends by writing a play for the fête on the occasion of the
peace.
Goethe's valuation of Napoleon has been the subject of much discussion;
less well known is the impression which the great Frenchman made on
Hegel, who, as Heine's teacher and chosen philosopher, influenced
him quite as much as Goethe. Hegel was born a subject of the small,
despotically-ruled State of Würtemberg. He longed for a fatherland, but
had never known what it was to have one, and in the beginning of the
century he was so embittered by the situation in Germany, and roused
to such anger and scorn by the political stupidity of his countrymen,
that he, like Goethe, welcomed Napoleon with the unqualified enthusiasm
of a cosmopolitan. He had spent his youth dreaming of a possible
reconciliation of the real with the ideal, but had never come into
contact with a real living power until Napoleon crossed his path and
aroused his enthusiasm. It was said of Goethe that he took advantage
of the distraction caused by the roar of the cannon at Jena to marry
Christiane Vulpius without rousing remark; of Hegel it was said that
he finished his work _Die Phænomenologie des Geistes_ ("Philosophy of
Mind") in Jena itself, while the battle was raging. It is a fact that
it was exactly at this time that he despatched the last pages of the
work to his publisher; and there is a very striking contrast between
his calm indifference to the ruin of Prussia and his keen anxiety lest
any of the precious packets of manuscript should be lost in transit at
that unsettled time. A letter to his publisher, which accompanied one
of the packets, bears the date of the battle.
In the work, to which the finishing touches were put under such
circumstances, Hegel expounded his theory of the development of the
human mind with a curious mixture of historical and psychological
argument. He maintained that humanity had now reached its goal, that
such individual mortals as had attained to the highest degree of
understanding, now possessed the insight of gods, that their lives,
lives of far-reaching influence, were now simply the harmonious
unfolding of an existence such as the Greeks imagined that of their
gods to be, absolutely contented, absolutely reconciled. While Hegel
was writing his concluding words, which are to the effect that history
is but a play of the spirit that is conscious of itself as spirit,
Napoleon drew rein at the gates of Jena.
And Hegel saw him, and seeing him, rejoiced. "I have seen the emperor,
that soul of the world," he writes from Jena. "It truly gives one a
strange feeling to see one such single individual who, concentrated
on a single point, sitting on his horse here in Jena, influences and
rules the world. As far as the Prussians are concerned, nothing better
could have been prognosticated--but only such a man could have made
such way between Thursday and Monday; it is impossible to refuse him
admiration." And it is not only the emperor Hegel admires, but the
whole French people. Three months later he writes that in the history
of the day he sees convincing proof that culture overcomes barbarism,
that intellect overcomes unintellectuality. And he even adds: "I have
long wished the French army success, now all do so; nor can it fail to
be successful, considering the enormous difference between its leaders
and soldiers and those of the enemy."[3]
If Heine had ever imagined that his enthusiasm for Napoleon required
any apology, he might have found one in the fact that he was but
following in the footsteps of the man whom he invariably spoke of
with reverence as "the great Hegel, the greatest philosopher Germany
has produced since Leibnitz," the man of whom he makes the very
questionable assertion that he quite unquestionably "towers high
above Kant," and whom he criticises with such lenient and gentle
disparagement as the following utterance conveys: "Hegel allowed
himself to be crowned in Berlin, and alas, to be anointed too."
Not only Heine's great models and teachers, but contemporaries like
Varnhagen von Ense, who had actually shed his blood in the war against
Napoleon, shared his enthusiasm, and were equally free from patriotic
enmity to France. Of the Dane Baggesen, who, half German by nature, was
fain to be more German than the Germans, Varnhagen writes: "His hatred
of Napoleon and the French is peculiarly offensive; it is an aversion
which amounts to loathing, and yet it is groundless, for all that is
good in us Germans, all that we are proudest of in ourselves, he holds
in horror and would fain suppress with the help of Kant, Jacobi, Voss,
and Klopstock." Kant is evidently included in this list on account of
the very un-German "categorical imperative," the others on account of
the extreme narrowness of their patriotism.
The cult of Napoleon is thus, we see, to be traced in the words and
works of the men who had the greatest influence on Heine's development
and on that of young Germany in general.
It inspired Heine's muse several years before it became epidemic in
France, and Heine rises to an equal height of enthusiasm with Beyle
and Hugo. It is not too much to say that the poetic expression of this
enthusiasm in his youthful poem _The Two Grenadiers_ (which he probably
wrote at the age of eighteen, though he himself claims to have written
it at sixteen) surpasses anything of the same nature that exists
in French. Not even Béranger's _Souvenirs du Peuple_ is so simply
grand, although it, better than any other poem, has given tangible
and touching expression to the French popular Napoleonic legend. In
Heine's _Grenadiers_ the rhythm of each line answers exactly to its
mood and matter--the mournful iambics: _Der Andre sprach: das Lied
ist aus_; the fiery anapæsts: _Dann reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein
Grab_. The grenadier's impossible request to his comrade to carry his
corpse to France passes almost unnoticed. The wildness of the principal
strophe: _Was schert mich Weib, was schert mich Kind_, the grenadier's
protest against the supposition that he is tied by the wife and child
he has left at home, contrasts forcibly with the sentimentality of the
Romantic style. It is only ostensibly that this poem glorifies fidelity
to Napoleon personally; what it really glorifies is loving fidelity to
the great leader, unbounded enthusiasm for the great personality.
The gift of describing by means of introducing characters into lyric
poetry was common to both Béranger and Heine. But Béranger was a
song-writer, Heine a genius. _The Two Grenadiers_ begins, as Heine
almost always begins, quietly, smoothly. Nothing could be more unlike
this than Victor Hugo's lyric attack: _Lui! toujours lui!_ Heine does
not produce his effect by direct representation, but by delineation
of the less important, of the small things in which the great are
reflected, and which provide a standard to gauge them by; then at last,
following on and issuing from the simple dialogue, comes the burst of
visionary enthusiasm.
That the object of this worship was hardly worthy of it, does not make
the feeling itself less admirable. It is a feeling of exactly the same
kind that Heine describes in the _Reisebilder_, when he tells how, as a
child, he saw Napoleon riding through the ducal garden in Düsseldorf.
The chapter begins: "But what were my feelings when I saw himself, saw
him with my own highly-favoured eyes, himself, Hosannah! the Emperor!"
Note the _Hosannah!_ In the moment of ecstasy, the recollections of
childhood bring the Old Testament cry of salutation and rejoicing to
his lips. And what did the child think on the occasion? He remembered
that it was forbidden, under a penalty of five thalers, to ride through
the avenue. And, lo and behold! there was the emperor, with all his
officers, riding straight through--the shuddering trees bent forward as
he passed....
As a political poet, Heine is considered to be revolutionary, and so
he was. But his political animosity is exclusively aroused by medieval
conditions, medieval beliefs. He is anti-clerical in good earnest,
but not democratic in good earnest. His longest political poem,
_Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_, ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), gives
abundant evidence of this. It rises to real passion only where the
poet's invisible companion, the lictor with the terrible axe, breaks
up the skeletons of the Three Kings in the Cathedral of Cologne, "the
miserable skeletons of superstition." But it is in this great poem,
Heine's most important work, that we have the clearest expression of
the political feelings and principles which animated him, the element,
new to German poetry, of warlike challenge and hand-to-hand struggle.
Nothing of the kind is to be found in Goethe. In the end, indeed,
Goethe was persuaded of "the absolute pitiableness of the time," but
he feared that the overthrow of existing authorities would only make
things worse. Not even in Schiller can we find any direct reference to
the politics of the day. His political feeling finds a vent in dramas
whose theme is liberty. But in Heine, from 1830 onwards, we have always
this direct expression of the faith that was in him. His soul was
in politics. And in politics he was honest, even in cases where his
honesty was misunderstood.
Turn to that passage in the _Reisebilder_ which is most frequently
cited as an expression of his boastfulness and affectation, the
passage following on the description of his visit to the battlefield
of Marengo: "'This will be a fine day,' called my travelling
companion.--Yes, it will be a fine day, silently echoed my heart,
uplifted in prayer, trembling with sadness and joyfulness. Yes, it will
be a fine day, and the sun of liberty will gladden the earth. A new
generation will spring up and flourish, begotten in free embrace, not
in a prison bed, under the control of clerical warders; and this free
birth will generate free thoughts and feelings, of which we born serfs
have not even a presentiment ..." then at the end these words: "I know
not if I deserve that a laurel wreath should one day be laid on my
coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it; has always been to me but a
divine plaything, or a weapon consecrated to divine purposes.... But
lay on my coffin a _sword_, for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation
War of humanity."
This political warfare of Heine's is spoken of with the utmost contempt
by German historians of literature, historians proper, and literary
critics; not only by Menzel, but by such men as Goedeke, Treitschke,
Grisebach (Heine's imitator and denouncer), and Hehn, whose perception
in other cases is so remarkably acute. Even Scherer is cold and
depreciatory. When the Italian poet Carducci some years ago celebrated
Heine in an ode as a hero in the struggle of liberty, even Karl
Hillebrand, the best literary critic in Germany, who had at one time
been Heine's secretary, and had always spoken of him with reverence
and admiration, made a sort of protest, declaring that Heine himself
had never taken the thing so seriously. This disfavour and distrust is
not surprising. The frivolity in Heine's character led in his youth
to repellent political vacillation. In 1827, in the hope of being
appointed to a professorship at Munich, he was ready to disown his
previous principles to please King Louis, but gained nothing by it. He
offered at the same time to defend the wretched Duke of Brunswick, the
diamond-Duke, in return for a Brunswick order; but in this case also he
was disappointed. It was not till 1830 that he began to show political
strength of character.
We must also remember that in Heine's writings there is an absence of
all "pathetic gesture." He was too proud to employ it. Germans cannot
understand this. But grievous wrong is done him. The pathos was in his
soul. His whole soul is in the little poem _Enfant Perdu_, with which
one of the divisions of _Romancero_ concludes, and which he wrote when
he was no longer young. He really was what he here calls himself, an
advanced and forgotten outpost, left to be shot down. And when, in his
posthumous prose hymn, he cries: "I am the sword, I am flame," it is
but the truth. The light of his flame, the sparks of his sword-blows,
still shine bright. Many still warm themselves at his fire.
As already mentioned, Börne, in his _Letters from Paris_, calls Heine
an inconsistent, vacillating, characterless politician. He does not
so much reproach him with overrating himself personally as with
overrating the influence of the individual human being. For it is
Börne's opinion that the individual is no longer of much importance.
Even a Voltaire or a Rousseau would not be a powerful influence
nowadays. Individuals are now merely the heralds of the people. This
Heine forgets. Then, in his desire to please the democrats, he declares
that the Jesuitic-aristocratic party in Germany malign him because he
makes a bold stand against absolutism; but almost at the same time, in
order to curry favour with the aristocrats, says that he has made a
stand against Jacobinism, and that he is, and always will be, a good
monarchist.
Börne does not always understand a joke. Heine gives a droll account of
a Paris millinery establishment which he frequented the summer before
he writes, where he, as a royalist, was one against sixteen, the eight
young shop-girls and their eight lovers being all violently aggressive
republicans. Elsewhere he writes: "God knows I am no Republican. I know
that when the Republicans are victorious, they will cut off my head ...
a piece of foolishness for which I am quite ready to forgive them."
Börne adds: "Not I. A lunatic asylum would be the proper place for
Republicans that were such fools as to suppose that it was necessary to
get rid of Heine in order to attain their aims."
In spite of their jesting tone, there is something in these and similar
utterances of Heine's which puzzles the reader. Intermittent outbursts
of violent Radicalism, everywhere an undertone of the most pronounced
revolutionary feeling--and these constantly recurring assurances that
he is not a Jacobin, not even a Republican.
An explanation is required, an explanation which no one has yet offered.
For to say that Heine was characterless, characterless to such a
degree, that in the most serious matters, and with the eyes of two
great nations upon him, he perpetually contradicted himself, is no
explanation at all. The vagueness, the contradiction must lie in his
principles.
Remember his faithful, boundless devotion to Napoleon, which once more
and for the last time finds expression in the _Winter's Tale_, in the
dirge of the dead emperor, brought in his coffin from St. Helena to
Paris:
"Die elysäischen Felder entlang,
Durch des Triumphes Bogen,
Wohl durch den Nebel, wohl über den Schnee
Kam langsam der Zug gezogen...."[4]
And then think of the scene (from the _Reisebilder_) on the battlefield
of Marengo. The Russian asks Heine: "Are you a good Russian?" And
Heine answers: "Yes, I am a good Russian." For, he goes on to explain,
the incessant change of war-cries and of representatives in the great
struggle has now led to this--that the most enthusiastic friends of
the Revolution look for the salvation of the world from the domination
of Russia, look upon the Emperor Nicholas as the standard-bearer of
liberty in Europe. The Russian government is permeated with Liberal
ideas, its absolutism is simply a dictatorship, which gives it the
power to put these ideas into practice, &c, &c.
The mistake is colossal in its simplicity. But for our present purpose
this is of no consequence. What interests us is the fact that Russian
absolutism, thus understood by Heine, received from him the same
measure of approval and sympathy as he had formerly bestowed on the
rule of Napoleon. Give this due consideration. Heine, the most advanced
representative of Radicalism among the poets of his time, declares
the Emperor Nicholas, the most tyrannical autocrat of his time, to be
the standard-bearer of liberty! Can this be the same man who took a
childish pleasure in invariably associating in his mind the thought of
royal or imperial rank with the thought of the guillotine? Remember his
words to Barbarossa: "Du wirst hier an ein Brett geschnallt--das senkt
sich, &c, &c." (They fasten you to a plank--it is lowered, &c), and the
concluding apostrophe to the venerable old emperor: "Die Republikaner
lachen uns aus--sehn sie an unserer Spitze--so ein Gespenst mit Scepter
und Krön." (The Republicans will laugh us to scorn, if they see us led
by an old spectre like you, with sceptre and crown). We see that he
sets some value on the opinion of the Republicans, sees things to a
certain extent from their standpoint.
Or again, think of that extraordinarily witty poem "1649-1793-?" which
first treats of the short and sharp justice meted out to kings in the
English and French Revolutions, and then prophesies the impending
German revolution, but declares that:
"Der Deutsche wird die Majestät
Behandeln stets mit Pietät.
In einer sechsspännigen Hofkarosse,
Schwarz panaschirt und beflort die Rosse--
Hoch auf dem Bock mit der Trauerpeitsche
Der weinende Kutscher--so wird der deutsche
Monarch einst nach dem Richtplatz kutschirt,
Und unterthänigst guillotinirt."[5]
If this is not simply playing with words and with feelings, there
must be an explanation of it, a key to it which Heine himself did
not possess. For that there is self-contradiction in such words is
undeniable.
The explanation is that Heine was at one and the same time a
passionate lover of liberty and an out-and-out aristocrat. He had
the freedom-loving nature's thirst for liberty, pined and languished
for it, and loved it with his whole soul; but he had also the great
nature's admiration for human greatness, and the refined nature's
nervous horror of the rule of mediocrity.
In other words, there was not a drop of conservative blood in Heinrich
Heine's heart. His blood was revolutionary. But neither was there a
drop of democratic blood in his heart. His blood was aristocratic, his
desire was to see genius acknowledged as leader and ruler.
When, in his historical retrospects or previsions, he sees a worthless
king or emperor guillotined, he applauds. But he would give to Cæsar
that which is Cæsar's. _Apodote ta Kaisaros Kaisari_ is the saying of
Jesus which is most deeply engraved on his mind. He does not dread a
condition of liberty, to which any liberty we have yet known on earth
is child's play; but he does not believe that liberty would result
from the realisation of the Philistine ideals of the average mind. All
mediocrity, Liberal and Republican mediocrity included, he abhors, as
inimical to great individuality, to great liberty.
Hence his distrust of the North American Republic, his want of
enthusiasm for its liberty:
"Manchmal kommt mir in den Sinn
Nach Amerika zu segeln,
Nach dem grossen Freiheitsstall,
Der bewohnt von Gleichheitsflegeln...."[6]
If Heine adores the _Marseillaise_, it is because the _Marseillaise_
is to him the symbol of the great revolt. If he worships Napoleon,
it is because Napoleon is the over-thrower of kings and of the old
order of the world; and if, in Napoleon's case, he overlooks all that
is inimical to liberty, it is because Napoleon is in his eyes the
representative of the people, free from any suspicion of democratic
mediocrity.
It is only at a rare time, when he is despondent, when he is not
himself, but is making use of a borrowed formula, that Heine commits
himself to the foolish, plebeian assertion that the power of the great
personality is a thing of the past--a theory which is in reality
nothing but the classic expression of middle-class envy. In his heart
of hearts Heine is so convinced of the contrary that he can go to the
mad extreme of imagining Nicholas, the obdurate representative of the
principle of coercion, to be the chief champion of liberty in Europe.
But Nicholas was at least a personality, a power. And Heine was genius
enough to feel that in the last instance personalities and powers are
the only things that count. Numbers do not, neither do monarchs, not
even in quantities. Hence Heine's standing joke on the subject of the
three dozen German monarchs.
What Heine dreaded was perhaps in the first place a life without
beauty. Fourier's Phalanstery, the great home of labour, where
everything, down to the beer, is equally distributed, where there is no
room for any superfluity, not even for the superfluity which is known
by the name of art, seemed to him to be inevitable in the future, but
did not satisfy him.
But still more repugnant to him was a life without all greatness,
with equality in mediocrity as its religion, and hatred to genius, to
inquiring minds, to those who openly discard Nazarene asceticism, as
its only real morality. And equally repugnant to him was society as
he knew it, dominated by an unintellectual clergy and an unrefined
aristocracy, and society as he foresaw it, composed of emancipated
slave souls, who had only exchanged the servility which was their
instinct for free indulgence in the envy which lay at the root of all
their morality.