XVI., that worthy locksmith who became a king. But he as certainly took
part with Cæsar against Brutus, that dunce of a usurer, who could do
nothing but stick a knife into a great man.
Heine imagined himself to be a monarchist; he called himself so from
sincere conviction, because he was a Cæsarian, and had not the word to
express it. He imagined himself to be a democrat, and called himself
so; because he was born a plebeian, hated all unjust privileges of
birth, and felt himself in eternal opposition to the squirearchy and
the clergy. But in his inmost soul he was consistent. The apparent
contradiction in his political sympathies and tendencies arose from the
fact that he loved greatness and beauty as truly as he loved liberty,
and that he was not prepared to sacrifice the highest development of
humanity on the altar of unreal equality and real mediocrity.
[1] If I ever get hold of thee, thou ugly bird, I will pluck out thy
feathers and cut off thy claws, perch thee high in air on a pole, and
call the archers of the Rhineland to the merry shooting-match.
[2] K. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: _Preussen und Frankreich zur Zeit der
Julirevolution_, p. 25, &c.
[3] Haym: _Hegel und seine Zeit_.
[5] The German will ever treat royalty with respect. 'Tis in a carriage
of state, drawn by six horses with sable plumes and trappings--on the
box a weeping coachman with crape-bound whip--that the German monarch
will be driven to the place of execution, and there most submissively
guillotined.
[6] At times the fancy takes me to set sail for America, that great
liberty-stable, where the equality-bumpkins congregate....
XII
HEINE
It seems most probable that Heinrich Heine was born on the 13th of
December 1797. His father, Samson Heine of Hanover, as a young man
took part in a campaign in Flanders and Brabant, in the capacity of
quartermaster (with the rank of an officer) to the Duke of Cumberland,
but after his marriage with Peira (Betty) von Geldern, settled down
as a merchant in Düsseldorf. He was a handsome, placid, grave man,
without much ability, even as a merchant. He had no taste for art or
poetry, but he had a childish love of a fine uniform, and aristocratic
tastes for gambling, actresses, dogs, and horses. He is said to have
taken twelve horses with him when he removed to Düsseldorf. The poet's
mother was a woman of keen intelligence and deep feeling, and was very
musical. She had received a good education, spoke French and English as
fluently as German, was a disciple of Rousseau, whose _Émile_ she had
studied, and an admirer of Goethe. She early rebelled against prejudice
and conventionality, and differed from her husband, who reverenced
Napoleon, in being an ardent patriot. Education was her hobby, and she
taught her children with great care and patience. Both parents were
free-thinkers in the matter of religion--the father indifferent, the
mother a deist; but they brought up their children in the observance of
the old Jewish ritual.
After a short time at a Jewish school for young children, where, it may
be, the foundation was laid for that knowledge of the Bible which is
so conspicuous in his writings, Heinrich was placed in an educational
establishment carried on in an old Franciscan monastery by French
ecclesiastics, principally Jesuits, who were at the same time educated
men of the world. He had had a happy childhood in his home, and at
school, too, he found friends and protectors, who took his part when
his religion or his mocking tongue threatened to get him into trouble.
The earliest noticeable peculiarity in the future poet was a
nervousness, which steadily grew upon him, and which showed itself in
the disagreeable and even painful effect produced in him by any kind of
noise. Piano-playing and loud talk, at times even his sister's sweet,
melodious voice, affected him as screaming affects ordinary nerves. And
his sense of smell was as acute as his hearing. From a child he, like
Goethe, loathed tobacco smoke. He had no taste for music, and never
learned to dance. At fifteen he began to write good verse.
The Rhineland, with its joyousness, but also with its superstition,
tradition, and legend; the Catholic worship of these parts, with its
medieval buildings and ceremonies and pilgrimages, over which the
Romantic poetry of the day cast a transfiguring halo; the impressions
produced by Jewish descent, by the poetry of the Bible, and by the
craving for liberty, and the self-contempt engendered in the Jews
by oppression; the enthusiasm for the French and for Napoleon, and
afterwards, following quickly upon this, the patriotic awakening of
Germany, which led all the pupils in the highest class of the school,
Heine among them, to attempt (most of them in vain) to enlist as
volunteers in the War of Liberation--all these outward conditions and
psychological experiences formed and set their imprint on the boy's
mind. The great humorists, such as Cervantes and Swift, were his chosen
reading; _Don Quixote_ and _Gulliver's Travels_ his favourite books.
In his sixteenth year he had a first romantic attachment to a girl
of his own age, Josepha by name, the daughter of an executioner, who
lived with her aunt, the widow of another executioner, a woman avoided
and feared by all. Heine has told us that the young girl was strangely
pale, that her movements were rhythmic and dignified, that she had
finely cut features, large, dark eyes, and blood-red hair. She knew and
taught him many ballads, was, he himself tells us, the first to awaken
his taste for popular poetry, and altogether, what with her radiant
beauty and the atmosphere of weirdness and horror that surrounded her,
exercised no small influence on the budding poet. In Heine's first
poems we observe a tendency towards thoughts of death and the grave,
which seems to have been one result of the tender attachment of the two
children. In No. 6 of the _Dream Pictures_, the eternal damnation which
is the price that must be paid for the possession of the beautiful
woman who appears in the dream, seems to symbolise the dishonour which
clung to the executioner's whole race, and acted like a curse on all
who dared to connect themselves with it.
After 1816, Josepha's image is supplanted in Heine's soul by that of
another young girl. His parents, on whom the brilliant career of the
Rothschilds had made a great impression, destined their Harry (as he
was originally called) to be a merchant. They sent him first to a
commercial school in Düsseldorf, then for a few months to a banker in
Frankfort, and finally placed him in an office in Hamburg, where his
uncle, the well-known Salomon Heine, had risen to be a great man in
the commercial world. In 1818, with the help of this rich uncle, on
whom he remained practically dependent for the rest of his life, Heine
began business for himself, as a commission agent for English drapery
goods. Few were surprised when, in the following spring, the firm of
"Harry Heine & Co." stopped payment. But in his uncle's house Heine had
found not only the crusty benefactor who, generous to his nephew as he
was, never understood him and was always irritated by him, but also, in
that benefactor's third daughter Amalie, the woman who was to be the
fate of his youth, and whom he has extolled and execrated under various
names--Maria, Zuleima, in correspondence Molly. He is never tired of
celebrating her charms; she shines in beauty resplendent as that of
the goddess who emerged from the sea foam; her eyes, lips, and cheeks
are those of the Madonna in the Cathedral of Cologne; her eyes are
violets, her hands lilies, &c, &c. But it does not appear that she ever
loved him. He hoped in time to win her affections, and it is possible
that he may now and again have received tokens of her favour; from his
poems we are led to understand that her marriage to a landed proprietor
from Königsberg, in the year 1821, stunned him at the time, and was
afterwards regarded by him as unpardonable treachery.
Heine had shown how little fitted he was for the career of a merchant,
and had moreover acquired a thorough distaste for it; fresh help from
his uncle now enabled him to prepare himself for one of the learned
professions. In 1819, soon after the Jewish Reform secession, he left
Hamburg, and travelled by Düsseldorf to Bonn, there to study law and
work for the degree which his uncle required that he should take.
The University of Bonn, which was closed for several years during the
French rule, had lately been reopened, and had a staff of excellent
professors. But it was just at this time that, in consequence of the
Resolutions of Karlsbad, the prosecution of the students' unions
(Burschenschaften) and of all national movements among the students
began; and almost immediately after his arrival at the university,
Heine, having taken part in a fête on the anniversary of the battle of
Leipzig, was summoned before a magistrate and involved in a petty and
futile political law-suit, which could not fail to arouse in him a keen
personal detestation of the new reaction. The certificate he received
at the matriculation examination in 1819 was to the effect that he knew
no Greek, had only a slight and unpractical knowledge of Latin, and was
not qualified to enter for examination in mathematics at all; but that
he was "not entirely wanting in knowledge of history" and that "his
German work, though strange in style, showed praiseworthy effort."
The young student, in the velvet coat and frilled shirt, with lace
falling over his white, beautifully shaped hands, aimed at careless
elegance in dress and deportment. He was of middle height; his
light-brown hair, which he wore rather long, framed a beardless,
regular-featured face. The nose was almost Grecian, the eyes were blue,
the mouth was large and expressive, and the lips were often parted in
that cold, scornful smile so frequently referred to in his poems.
He attended lectures on the history of the German language, on the
_Germania_ of Tacitus, on the _Niebelungenlied,_ and other historical
and literary subjects; dividing his time between these and the law
course, lectures on Roman law, German law, &c. A professor who had an
undoubted influence upon the young poet was A. W. Schlegel, the leader
of the Romantic school. To him Heine showed his verses. _Almansor_ was
written about this time.
Towards the end of 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen, with the good
intention of applying himself diligently to the study of law at the
university there. But, as he tells us very plainly in the _Harzreise_,
the place was distasteful to him, and in the course of a few months,
moreover, on account of some trifling quarrel with another student,
he was rusticated. This led to his going to Berlin in 1821. There,
in Varnhagen's house, the intellectual centre of the day, where
Rahel gathered around her the aristocracy of culture, talent, and
birth, he soon made acquaintance with the élite of the best society
of the capital. At night, in Lutter and Wegener's restaurant in the
Behrenstrasse (still in existence), he met the leading lights and
genial Bohemians of the day, among them men like E. T. W. Hoffmann and
Grabbe. And here, after several fruitless attempts, he succeeded in
finding a publisher, who was willing to take the risk of bringing out
his first collection of poems and to give him forty copies of the book
by way of payment. It appeared in December, 1821, made his name known,
almost famous, and at once called forth both imitations and parodies.
At the university Heine attended the lectures of the first scholars
of the day--Hegel, to whom he was ardently devoted; Bopp, the great
authority on Sanscrit; Wolf, the classical philologist; and Eduard
Gans, the great lawyer. He entered with youthful zeal into the schemes
of a circle of men whose object it was to bring about a reform of
Judaism, and who were attempting to initiate the Jews into the ideas
of European culture. With an equal amount of youthful bitterness, he
attacked in _Almansor_, in foreign garb, the renegade Jews who deserted
the common cause; and also, though indirectly, Christianity, which
he regarded as a hostile power. _Almansor_ was published, along with
Heine's other youthful work, _William Ratcliff_, in 1823; it was acted,
but had no success, because of the race hatred felt for its author.[1]
The life Heine led in Berlin was not compatible with any proper
progress in his studies. It was but a continuation of the dissipated
life to which he had accustomed himself in Hamburg. In 1823 he
determined to turn over a new leaf, and consequently left Berlin, went
first to his parents at Lüneburg, thence to Hamburg, and from Hamburg
returned to Göttingen, where in 1825 he took his degree of Doctor of
Law. Immediately after this he was baptized. He did not change his
religion from conviction of the truth of Christianity; on the contrary,
his antipathy to it was strong, and he was thoroughly ashamed of the
step which he took simply with the aim of extricating himself from the
humiliating and galling position of dependence on his uncle; income,
office, or profession being attainable on no other condition. His frame
of mind at this time is depicted in that overrated fragment, _Der Rabbi
von Bacharach_, which, in spite of some spirited and artistic passages,
really proves that Heine was incapable of writing a historical novel.
At the end of this work, the author, in the disguise of a fictitious
character, confesses the shame he felt at going over to a religion
which to him was the enemy's camp.
In the correspondence between Varnhagen and Rahel, we find occasional
allusions to Heine, which give us a good idea of him as he was in those
days. Curiously enough, the first time Varnhagen mentions "our little
Heine," he quotes an exhortation of Rahel's to the young man, which is
very remarkable, because it shows with what acute perception she had
at once discovered the very author with whom he had, indeed, something
in common, but whom it would have been fatal to him, both personally
and in a literary sense, to resemble. The exhortation is: "You must not
become a Brentano. I cannot stand that!" At another time she writes
jestingly: "Heine must and shall be real, even if he has to be thrashed
into it.
'Be real, O man!'"
And Varnhagen, too, understood him well. How acute is the following
remark in a letter to Rahel, written six years later: "And now, in
addition to all the other wise and clever people who entertain you, you
have Heine with you, the original, the far-travelled, the fresh Heine!
Fresh in this case does not necessarily mean fresh from the sea; for
salt herring, too, and that because they _are_ salted, may be called
fresh." The same idea recurs in an observation he makes on Heine at the
age of thirty: "I hope you will see him often, and that he will try to
benefit by his intercourse with you. He requires to be preserved in a
good spiritual atmosphere, for there is something about him that spoils
easily."[2]
Rahel and Varnhagen were the first to proclaim Heine's talent. The
earliest laudatory notice of his poems was written by his fashionable
diplomatic patron. Yet it is plain that they detected and deplored the
weaknesses in his character, which might become dangerous, even fatal,
to his great poetic gifts.
[1] G. Karpeles: _Biographie Heinrich Heine's_, 1885.
[2] _Briefwechsel zwischen Varnhagen und Rahel_, vi. 48, 56, 316, 344.
Other interesting utterances of Rand's on the subject of Heine are as
follows: "I hardly see Heine; he is entirely taken up with himself,
says he must work hard, is almost surprised that such a real thing as
his father's death, his mother's grief, should affect him.... He looks
healthier, hardly complains now at all; but slight grimaces that used
to be only occasional with him, have grown to be habitual, and are not
becoming; for instance a twitching of the mouth in speaking, which I
used to think rather fascinating, though it was no good sign." "I was
intending to write about Heine. The conclusion I have come to is, that
his talent is very great, but that unless it matures, it will lose all
substance, will degenerate into hollow mannerism." Varnhagen answers:
"The one hope for Heine is that he should gain the foothold of truth;
once firmly established on that, he may let his talent sally forth to
seek prey and disport itself where it will" (vi. 347, 356, 365).
XIII
HEINE
The most popular of Heine's books in our day, that with which his name
is most inseparably connected, the _Buch der Lieder_ of 1827, consists
of groups of poems belonging to different years and periods.
The first group, _Junge Leiden_ (1817-1821), is, as such, the weakest.
It is divided into four parts: Dream Pictures, Songs, Romances,
Sonnets. The subjects treated are: early recollections of Düsseldorf
and of a happy childhood there, his love to his mother, Napoleon
worship, much Catholic Rhineland romance, churchyard dances of death
with rattle of bones, and all sorts of visions. We have the jesting
tone--jocose complaints of the embarrassments resulting from the
all too speedy disappearance of the ducats; and the bitter tone,
produced by the poet's resentment of the humiliations to which he, as
an unsuccessful and defaulting young merchant, was subjected by the
wealthy citizens of Hamburg. We have outbursts of affection for college
friends, and of admiration for A. W. Schlegel, a man as distinguished
in the literary world as at the university; and also patriotic
outbursts in the "Burschen" style, which Heine quickly tired of. We
have passionate expression of the self-consciousness of genius, and we
have love-griefs and plaints of various sorts--first love's aspirations
(blended in E. T. W. Hoffmann's manner with churchyard horrors),
and then exceedingly sentimental laments over unreturned love, and
outbursts of wild, despairing accusation of the false one, who has
given him his deathblow, and who drinks his blood and eats his heart
at her wedding feast. In one single poem, _Die Fensterschau_, the mood
suddenly changes into a sort of coarse jollity.
Of these youthful poems, which for the most part are old-fashioned
in form, the best are the famous epigrammatic quatrain beginning:
"Anfangs wollt' ich fast verzagen" (I at first was near despairing),
the earliest example of the condensation of Heine's style; a few of
the sonnets, which are much more passionate than the great majority of
German sonnets; and lastly, among the romances, _Belsazer_, probably
inspired by Byron's _Hebrew Melodies_, and the inimitable ballad of the
_Two Grenadiers_, already referred to.
The second group, which owes its odd title, _Lyric Intermezzo_, to the
fact that it first appeared as a lyric interlude between the two bad
tragedies, _Almansor_ and _Ratcliff_, published in 1823, treats of the
same subjects as the first, but in more uncommon forms and with freer
artistic manipulation. Two critics, Ernst Elster and Wilhelm Bölsche
(the former in the introduction to his edition of the original text of
the _Buch der Lieder_, the latter in an independent work on Heine),
have pointed out with much critical acumen that in this division we
seldom have a direct expression of the poet's love troubles, but
rather a sort of extract of them, which he gives us from memory. His
imagination runs riot among the old sufferings, now and again actually
playing with them; hence we have an occasional unlucky expression;
the reader at times doubts the reality of the feeling, and becomes
suspicious of the constant assurances of a killing grief, in despite of
which life goes on and art is not neglected.
But it was only natural that Heine should fall back upon this one
passion, even though it had received no new nourishment in the
interval. He had felt none since which could compare with it in
strength or in influence upon his inner life. It was, and it remained,
the most important incident in his life. It seems as if any happiness
it brought him had been most transient; hence the first time he sang
of his love he dwelt exclusively on its woes, on the absence of all
return, on his forsakenness, on the treachery and cold cruelty of the
beloved. Now that he was so far disenthralled, he related the whole
real or imaginary history of the passion, from the day when it first
awoke to life to the hour when he was as dead for her; and imparted
greater piquancy and fulness to its life story by giving each of its
separate moments some background drawn from nature in one or other of
her many moods. In the _Dream Pictures_ night reigned supreme. Now
we have the budding of the leaf, the singing of the birds, and the
starlight of May.
That the love supposed to be at first felt by the beloved one for the
poet is only a fiction, and does not really agree with the facts of
the case, Heine involuntarily discloses when he paints tender scenes
between them. For in these the lover never feels himself to be the
possessor; even when he holds the object of his desire in his arms his
only feeling is longing:
"Lehn deine Wang' an meine Wang',
Dann fliessen die Thränen zusammen!
Und an mein Herz drück fest dein Herz,
Dann schlagen zusammen die Flammen!
Und wenn in die grosse Flamme fliesst
Der Strom von unseren Thränen,
Und wenn dich mein Arm gewaltig umschliesst--
_Sterb' ich vor Liebessehnen._"[1]
[1]
Thy cheek incline, dear love to mine,
Then our tears in one stream will meet, love!
Let thy heart be pressed till on mine it rest,
Then the flames together will beat, love!
And when the stream of our tears shall light
On that flame so fiercely burning,
And within my arms I clasp thee tight--
I shall die with love's wild yearning.
(Translated by SIR THEODORE MARTIN.)
This favoured lover, who, when the flames meet, dies of longing,
betrays himself to be in reality a thoroughly unsatisfied lover.
Hence the best of the purely erotic poems are those which express
love's longing and those which depict its sad decay. Conspicuous
amongst the poems of tender longing is the charming Oriental song,
_Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, Herzliebchen, trag' ich dich fort_, which
fascinates by its exotic Indian landscape and by its delicate fervency
of feeling. Heine longed for India as Goethe longed for Italy; his
spiritual home was on the banks of the Ganges, as Goethe's was on the
banks of the Tiber. It is probable that Bopp's lectures first turned
his thoughts in the direction of that Oriental dream-land; but in
picturing it he employs the purely imaginative, Romantic style, which
he inherited, remodelled for himself, and used in painting the far-off
and alluring.
How simply beautiful is such a verse as:
"Dort wollen wir niedersinken
Unter dem Palmenbaum,
Und Lieb' und Ruhe trinken
Und träumen seligen Traum."[2]
[2]
We'll lie there, in slumber sinking,
'Neath the palm tree by the stream,
Raptures and rest deep drinking,
Dreaming the happiest dream.
(C. G. LELAND.)
But a verse like:
"Dort liegt ein rothblühender Garten
Im stillen Mondenschein,
Die Lotosblumen erwarten
Ihr trautes Schwesterlein."[3]
[3]
There a red-blooming garden is lying
In the moonlight silent and clear;
The lotus flowers are sighing
For their sister so gentle and dear.
(E. A. BOWRING.)
beautiful as it is, caressing as it sounds, has something of the
unnaturalness which often strikes the reader in Heine's painting of
nature. The colouring is vivid, but not real; local colours obtrude
themselves to the detriment of the general tone. "Rothblühender,"
(red-blooming) is hardly the word that it would naturally occur
to one to use in describing a garden seen by moonlight. In the
lines: "Gegenüber am Fenster sassen _Rosengesichter_ dämmernd und
_mond_beglänzt." (At the opposite window glimmered rose-faces,
bright in the moonlight glow), from the later poem _Abenddämmerung_
("Twilight"), we have the same sort of effect, produced at the same
expense of naturalness. The declaration that the lotus flowers are
expecting their dear sister sounds like an old-fashioned compliment
in the midst of this gorgeous Ganges imagery. We have much the same
expression in the stanza: