Und schau'n mitleidig mich an:
Sei unsrer Schwester nicht böse,
Du trauriger, blasser Mann!"[4]
[4]
The flowers are whispering and talking;
With pity my features they scan:
O, pray do not chide our sister,
Thou sorrowful, pale-faced man!
(C. G. LELAND.)
This is a madrigal style which Heine leaves behind in his later work.
Another of the verses in this wonderfully emotional song of the Ganges
has characteristics which point to Heine's derivation from the Romantic
school, with its arbitrary interpretation of nature:--
"Die Veilchen kichern und kosen
Und schau'n nach den Sternen empor."[5]
[5]
The violets titter, caressing,
Peeping up as the planets appear.
(C. G. LELAND.)
It is quite audacious enough to represent violets as caressing each
other; we are reminded of Hans Andersen's enchanted gardens; to make
them titter is certainly too much of a good thing. Émile Zola affects
this same style in his description of the Paradou garden.
The next song, which is conceived in the same spirit, the song of
the lotus flower that fears the splendour of the sun, is a charming
poem, despite its flower-innocence, marvellously, meltingly sensuous.
Sensual-spiritual desire is here intensified till it reaches the verge
of hysteria; for the poet, not content with making the lotus flower
blossom and glow and shine and exhale fragrance and tremble, when her
lover, the moon, awakes her with his rays, actually makes her weep.[6]
[6] _Cf_ W. Kirchbach: _Heine's Dichterwerkstatt_, in _Magazin für die
Litteratur_, Jahrgang 57, Nr. 18, 19, 20.
Next in real feeling to the poems of desire come those that express the
relinquishment, the cessation of the passion. The finest example is
poem No. 59 in the _Intermezzo_, which in its first verse describes the
falling of a star, the star of love, from heaven; in its second, the
falling of the apple-blossoms from the tree; in its third, the sinking
of a swan to its watery grave; then sums all up in the concluding
verse:
"Es ist so still und dunkel!
Verweht ist Blatt und Blüth',
Der Stern ist knisternd zerstoben,
Verklungen das Schwanenlied."[7]
[7]
The silence and the night fall,
The blossoms all have fled,
In sparks the star has vanished,
The swan and his song are dead.
(H. F.)
It is very characteristic of Heine that, as the poem stands, it does
not produce the impression that he has really witnessed any one of the
three natural scenes depicted; they are simply symbols, arbitrarily
selected and combined.
Amongst this passionate verse he has interspersed poems of a totally
different description, treating of far more trivial amours. Some of
the most exceptionable of these he did not include in the _Buch der
Lieder_, not even, for example, the very harmless:--
"Du sollst mich liebend umschliessen,
Geliebtes, schönes Weib!
Umschling mich mit Armen und Füssen
Und mit dem geschmeidigen Leib!"[8]
[8]
Come, twine in wild rapture round me,
Fair woman, beloved and warm,
Till thy feet and hands have bound me,
And I'm wreathed with thy supple form!
(LELAND.)
But we have, among others, _Die Welt ist dumm, die Welt ist blind_
("The world is stupid, the world is blind"), with its description of
burning kisses. There are also other epigrammatic verses of a serious,
passionate character, such as the well-known _Ich hab' dich geliebet
und liebe dich noch_ ("I have loved thee long, and I love thee now");
and, finally, in the very famous _Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen, die
hat einen Andern erwählt_ ("A young man loves a maiden, who another
to him prefers"), with intentional triviality of diction, and with an
impersonality which is unusual with him, Heine generalises the human
fate which has made of him an erotic poet.
To the collection of poems which form the second part of the _Lyric
Intermezzo_, the title _Heimkehr_ ("The Home-Coming") is given.
They were written in 1823-1824 in Hamburg and Cuxhaven, and the
"home-coming" is the poet's return to Hamburg, the scene of his love
romance, where the sight of all the familiar surroundings causes his
heart's wounds to bleed afresh. With this main theme is associated
another, new in German poetry--the sea, which Heine now saw for the
first time.
Mingled with the lamentations over his lost love, which the sight of
the environments of the old tragedy calls forth, are records of new
impressions. There is first a wild outbreak of the old passion; he
broods once more over all its agonies; he is miserable in the streets,
where he feels as if the houses were falling on him, and still more
miserable in the rooms where she plighted her faith to him. What is new
in these songs of unhappy love is the hatred, always alike passionate
and wild, that flames up over the grave of buried happiness.
But on his travels the poet has met the family of his beloved, and her
younger sister resembles her, especially when she laughs; she has the
same eyes, the eyes that have made him so unhappy. In a letter dated
August 23rd, 1823, he tells his best friend that "a new folly has been
engrafted on the old." Ernst Elster's careful study of letters and
poems has enabled him to show that about this time Heine's first and
very unfortunate passionate attachment to Amalie Heine was superseded
by a passion for Therese Heine, who was her sister's junior by eight
years. Eveline and Ottilie are the poetic names bestowed on Therese.
The new passion was a violent one, but in all probability met with as
little return as the first. Hence the well-known lines:
"Wer zum ersten Male liebt,
Sei's auch glücklos, ist ein Gott;
Aber wer zum zweiten Male
Glücklos liebt, der ist ein Narr.
Ich, ein solcher Narr, ich liebe
Wieder ohne Gegenliebe;
Sonne, Mond und Sterne lachen,
Und ich lache mit--und sterbe."[9]
[9]
He who for the first time loves,
Though unloved, is still a god;
But the man who loves a second
And in vain, must be a fool.
Such a fool am I, now loving
Once again, without return;
Sun and moon and stars are smiling,
And I smile with them--and perish.
(LELAND.)
In the year 1828 Therese Heine was engaged and married to a Dr. Adolf
Halle. Among Heine's posthumous poems are bitterly satirical verses on
the bridegroom and the wedding. He had the unchivalrous poet's habit of
revenging himself by satire when he met with a rebuff. But the poems in
_Heimkehr_ which refer to Therese are not inspired with the bitterness
and hatred which Heine frequently displays in writing of her elder
sister. He praises Therese's beauty, her lovely eyes, her purity; she
is like a flower; he prays to her as others pray to Paul and Peter and
the Madonna; and he struggles against his feelings, dreads this new
passion. Both pride and shyness forbid him to declare it; it would be
better for her if she did not love him; at times he has himself tried
to prevent the awakening of love in her soul; but, having been only too
successful in the attempt, the desire for her love once more asserts
itself. He is too proud to speak of his passion and of his suffering,
mockery and jests are on his lips, while inwardly he is bleeding to
death; but she does not understand him, does not see that his heart is
trembling, is breaking. Hence these lines:
"O, dieser Mund ist viel zu stolz
Und kann nur küssen und scherzen;
Er spräche vielleicht ein höhnisches Wort,
Während ich sterbe vor Schmerzen."[10]
[10]
Alas, this mouth is far too proud,
'Twas made but for kissing and sighing;
Perchance it may speak a scornful word,
While I with sorrow am dying.
(BOWRING.)
But this time the threat of dying is not intended to be taken
literally. For in another poem we find the sincere assurance:--
"Glaub' nicht, dass ich mich erschiesse,
Wie schlimm auch die Sachen steh'n!
Das Alles, meine Süsse,
Ist mir schon einmal gescheh'n."[11]
[11]
Fear not that I shall languish,
Or shoot myself: oh, no!
I've gone through all this anguish
Already, long ago.
(LELAND.)
Undoubtedly, however, he felt deeply and suffered greatly this time
also. Strange as it sounds, cousin-love, which is, as a rule, merely
the initiation into the life of passion, its first preliminary stage,[12]
(Note 20) was the only serious, and not perfectly transient passion
known to young Heine. And no feeling experienced later, in his mature
manhood, approached in intensity to this youthful twin-passion for two
sisters, the second of whom reminded him of the first.
[12]
Aux prés de l'enfance on cueille
Les petites amourettes
Qu'on jette au vent feuille à feuille,
Ainsi que des pâquerettes;
On cueille dans ces prairies
Les voisines, les cousines,
Les amourettes fleuries
Et qui n'ont pas de racines.
(RICHEPIN.)
Among the emotional poems which refer to this episode in his psychic
history, Heine introduced (exactly as he did in the _Intermezzo_)
verses relating to less serious love affairs, to college adventures,
and even to quite low, venal, erotic pleasures. He omitted from the
_Buch der Lieder_ some of the most objectionable of these, which
originally formed part of the _Heimkehr_, amongst others the amusing,
though impudent:
"Blamier mich nicht, mein schönes Kind,
Und grüss mich nicht unter den Linden;
Wenn wir nachher zu Hause sind,
Wird sich schon Alles finden."[13]
[13]
Don't compromise me, my pretty one,
Don't bow to me in "Rotten Row";
At home together afterwards
I'll make up for it, that you know.
--and even such a merry wanton rhyme as:--
"Himmlisch war's, wenn ich bezwang
Meine sündige Begier;
Aber wenn's mir nicht gelang,
Hatt' ich doch ein gross Plaisir."[14]
[14]
'Twas heavenly joy to overcome
Each sinful wish and thought;
But when I couldn't, truth to tell,
That, too, much pleasure brought.
What we are most struck by in the poems of this division is the
author's double gift of song and painting. Along with the capacity
for producing those outbursts of mixed passion, which sound like the
unaffected heart-cry of modern humanity, he here reveals a special
talent for painting, for producing figures by means of light and shade
and colour, without outline.
There is the scene in the lonely parsonage, with the disunited,
despairing family (_Der bleiche, herbstliche Halbmond_). The son is
determined to be a highway robber, the daughter has made up her mind to
sell herself to the Count. With all its vividness, however, this scene
is not one of the best. There is too much old-fashioned Romanticism
in the idea of the dead father in his black robes standing outside,
knocking at the window. The next poem, _Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter_,
is a most masterly production. We see the little old woman hobbling
across the street with her lantern late on the dark and stormy evening,
to make purchases for her tall, beautiful daughter, who is lying in the
arm-chair at home, blinking sleepily at the light, her golden locks
falling over her sweet face--it is like an old Dutch painting.
Still finer is the group of eight poems which was the result of his
stay at Cuxhaven. _Wir sassen am Fischerhause_ is a little marvel
of artistic ability--that talk with the girls, sitting outside the
fisherman's hut, in which far-off India and Ultima Thule are described
in a few words: "By the Ganges all is brightness and fragrance, giant
trees blossom, and beautiful, tranquil men and women kneel to the lotus
flowers. In Lapland the people are dirty and small; their heads are
flat and their mouths are wide; they cower round the fire, roast fish,
and screech and scream."
Then there are merry poems, treating of light characters like the girl
whom he searches for through the whole town and finds in a fashionable
hotel, and the girl in whose heart the blue hussars are quartered.
And lastly, there are single epigrammatic verses, which every one
now knows by heart, but which, at the time they appeared, gave great
offence and made enemies for their author. Especially noteworthy is the
famous:
"Selten habt ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich euch,
Nur wenn wir im Koth uns fanden,
So verstanden wir uns gleich."[15]
[15]
Little by thee comprehended,
Little knew I thee, good brother;
When we in the mud descended
Soon we understood each other.
(LELAND.)
It is incomprehensible that this verse should ever have been regarded
as a confession of unclean instincts. It only applies to those who find
their way straight to any exceptionable or indecent passage in a book,
as the sow finds her way to the mire, and stops there. That it never
occurred to Heine that he was making any admission of having desired to
appeal to his reader's sensual instincts or cynic tendencies is best
proved by the poem which immediately follows on the lines in question,
the one beginning:
"Doch die Kastraten klagten,
Als ich meine Stimm' erhob;
Sie klagten und sie sagten:
Ich sänge viel zu grob."[16]
[16]
How the eunuchs were complaining
At the roughness of my song!
Complaining and explaining
That my voice was much too strong.
(LELAND.)
He could not have declared more unmistakably that, where he is
straightforward, plain-spoken, or cynical, it is only the result of his
modern tendency to realistic truthfulness, of his antipathy to romantic
embellishment, and of his instinctive inclination to face the bitter
truth of life.
And there is quite as little justification for the general complaint
of what Julian Schmidt has called the low-mindedness of Heine's sudden
leaps from the sublime to the sordid. We have a typical instance of
these sudden changes of style and mood in the poem _Frieden_ ("Peace"),
one of the group of North Sea poems, in which Heine, during a calm at
sea, beholds the giant form of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, striding
over sea and land. He is clothed in white; his head touches the clouds;
the heart in his breast is the sun, the red, flaming sun, and this
sun-heart sheds its illuminating, warming rays over land and sea. Then
there is a sudden revulsion of mood. Heine calls to mind a miserable,
canting fellow in Berlin, weak in mind and body, strong in faith--what
would not _he_ give to be able to hit upon such pious imagery, by means
of which he might ingratiate himself with those in power and perhaps
attain to the position of court-councillor in the pious town on the
Spree--what dreams he would have of a hundred thalers rise in salary!
Heine most undoubtedly spoiled the effect of his beautiful vision.
He broke up his poem, shattered its melody with grotesque discords;
but yet it is easy to understand that in the case of a poet with
his experience of modern life, the second vision was a perfectly
natural sequel to the first; and in any case it is unjustifiable to
speak of this connection of ideas, this "idea-leap," as a symptom of
low-mindedness. In this connection Wilhelm Bölsche makes the true and
pertinent observation that no one has accused Goethe of low-mindedness
because he allows the gibes of Mephistopheles to follow directly upon
Faust's confession of faith to Gretchen (_Heinrich Heine_, p. 106). And
yet the only difference is that in _Faust_ the pathos and the ribaldry
are put into the mouths of two people, whereas in the lyric poem the
poet makes himself directly responsible for both.
Almost at the end of this collection (_Heimkehr_), we come upon a
couple of poems which are distinguished by depth of feeling and
perfection of form. The particular arrangement of their rhymes would
distinguish them from the majority of the small poems, if nothing else
did, as it is one we seldom meet with in Heine. The first, _Dämmernd
liegt der Sommerabend_ ("Summer eve with day is striving"), which
describes the beautiful elf-maiden bathing in the river by moonlight,
has the diaphanous haze of a Corot landscape. The rhythmic treatment
of the second gives it a unique place in the collection. It is the
pathetic, fantastic:
"Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht,
Das Leben ist der schwüle Tag.
Es dunkelt schon, mich schläfert,
Der Tag hat mich müd gemacht.
Über mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum,
Drin singt die junge Nachtigall;
Sie singt von lauter Liebe,
Ich hör' es sogar im Traum."[17]
[17]
Death is a cool and pleasant night,
Life is a sultry day.
'Tis growing dark-I'm weary,
For day has tired me with his light.
Over my bed a fair tree gleams,
And in it sits a nightingale:
She sings of naught save love,
I hear it even in dreams.
(LELAND.)
The next division of the _Buch der Lieder, Aus der Harzreise_ (1824),
contains the delightful mountain-rhymes conceived in the course of
a walking tour which Heine took by way of refreshment after his law
studies in Göttingen. Here we have charming pictures of mountain
scenery and peasant life, and a tone of witty, bold self-laudation,
kept up with irresistible audacity. The beautiful and witty poem
about the knight of the Holy Spirit was doubtless suggested by the
catechising scene in _Faust_, but has an originality of its own which
has made it popular all the world over.
The _Buch der Lieder_ closes with the North Sea poems (_Die Nordsee_,
1825-1826), inspired by two visits to Norderney, and written in
forcible, irregular rhythm. In them we observe first and foremost a
particular understanding of nature which is a new gain for German
poetry.
As far as nature was concerned, Goethe seemed to have exhausted
everything. His love for every living thing, his feeling of kinship
with animals and plants, his persuasion that the human being is one
with all other beings, his intuition of the unity that underlies
perpetual change of form--this gift of resolving all nature into
feeling was his earliest characteristic. It was soon superseded, or
rather supplemented, by his capacity for observing and reproducing
natural scenes without any ascription of his own feelings to them. He
studies nature, becomes an observer and investigator, and finally,
thanks to the steadily increasing profundity of his observation, in
combination with his genial intuition, an epoch-making discoverer in
two great domains of natural science. We see him pass through all the
phases of a great mind in its relation to nature--the emotional, the
religious-pantheistic, the poetic-scientific--and see him in the end
lay such exclusive stress upon material impressions that he thrusts all
that is psychical from him as merely disturbing. His views become more
and more positive and realistic. In his essay on granite he writes: "I
do not fear the reproach of its being a spirit of contradiction that
has led me from the observation and delineation of the human heart,
that youngest, most multiform, most mobile, most changeable part of
creation, that which it is easiest to unsettle and to shake, to the
observation of nature's oldest, firmest, deepest, most immovable son"[18]
--namely, granite.
[18] Goethe: _Werke_, xxxiii. 164.
In what domain was it still possible for a German poet to display
fresh, original understanding of nature? From the human heart to
granite Goethe had embraced them all.
There was one left. Goethe had never sung the sea. He saw it for the
first time when he was nearly forty, in Venice, from the Lido. "I
heard a loud noise," he writes; "it was the sea, and I soon saw it,
rolling high waves up the beach, as it drew back. It was midday and
ebb-tide. At last, then, I have seen the sea also with my own eyes."
A little further on we come upon the short sentence: "Yes, the sea is
a wonderful sight." In the Fifth Act of the Second Part of _Faust_,
where the sea and navigation are touched on, it is less the sea itself
that is in question than the rescuing of land from it and the making of
canals. This was all that Goethe had written about the sea.
In Heine's North Sea poems we hear, for the first time in German
poetry, the roar of the ocean, with all its freshness and in all its
might. Here for the first time we have shells in the sand beneath our
feet, and sea-gulls in the air above us. The sea is painted in storm
and calm, from the shore and from the ship, by day and by night, with
the peace that at times lies over it, and with the madness of the
hurricane; we have the sweet day-dreams to which it gives rise, and
also the sea-sickness; there arise from its depths and there hover
over its expanse a whole company of mythic figures, old and new, old
that have been metamorphosed into new, a world of gods and goddesses,
Tritons and Oceanides, at times pathetic, more frequently burlesque.
And yet there is comparatively little description; it is the poet's
own memories, griefs, and hopes that fill these poems. And it is his
intense longing to be able to breathe freely that breaks forth in
the famous cry with which the ten thousand Greeks, after their long
and terrible march, hailed the element that spoke to them of home:
"Thalatta! Thalatta!--I salute thee, O eternal sea!"
Amongst these poems are some of Heine's most beautiful and
unforgettable. First there is the humorously frivolous idyll _Die Nacht
am Strande_ ("Night by the Seashore"); the poet's visit to the pretty
fisherman's daughter, with the masterly description of her appearance,
as she sits bending over the fire:
"Dass die flackernd rothen Lichter
Zauberlieblich wiederstrahlen
Auf das glühende Antlitz,
Auf die zarte, weisse Schulter,
Die rührend hervorlauscht
Aus dem groben, grauen Hemde,
Und auf die kleine, sorgsame Hand,
Die das Unterröckchen fester bindet
Um die feine Hüfte."[19]
[19]
Till the flashing, ruddy flame-rays
Shine again in magic lustre
On her glowing countenance,
On the soft and snow-white shoulder
Which so touchingly peers out
From its coarse grey linen covering,
And on the busy little hand
Which is fastening the garment
That conceals her slender limbs.
(Adapted from LELAND.)
Then we come on a poem which is unique in its lyric vigour, _Erklärung_
("Declaration"), to that Agnes whose name the poet would fain write on
the dark vault of heaven with the highest fir of Norway, dipped in the
crater of Etna. And there is also the little, reflective poem _Fragen_
("Questions"), admirable in its pregnant brevity, which gives us an
idea of the mood in which Heine conceived the foolhardy idea of writing
a "Faust," after Goethe, a plan which he actually did not hesitate to
mention to Goethe himself, when he visited him in Weimar. In some of
these North Sea poems, and that even when he is belittling and sneering
at himself, there is a repellent tone of self-satisfaction. Amongst
those which are quite free from it, must be mentioned that masterly
piece of pure humour, _Im Hafen_ ("In Harbour"), the immortal fantasy
of the Town Cellar of Bremen, in which Heine, whose sobriety was almost
equivalent to total abstinence, gives us a most irresistible picture of
a clever man's merry carouse.
XIV
HEINE
It is impossible for a northerner of mature years and fairly sound
artistic training to study Heinrich Heine's poems without feeling his
taste offended by figures and expressions which in Heine's case early
became lifeless mannerisms. The Romance nations do not feel this.
One actually hears competent critics of Romance nationality compare
Heine's lyrics with Goethe's, and give the preference to Heine's as
more plastic and more spiritual. To Romance readers Goethe is, as a
rule, wanting in transparency; the French say of Heine: _On y voit
mieux_. They do not feel that in Goethe's case words always represent
things; whereas in Heine's case, expressions are often set pieces,
which are inserted to produce a certain poetical effect, but which
have no vision, no actuality behind them. Few poets have made such
abuse of lily-hands, rose-cheeks, and violet-eyes, these monstrous
colour-blotches, in describing female beauty, or of the various
attributes of spring--flowers that exhale fragrance, nightingales that
sing both day and night--in proclaiming the praises of the lovely month
of May. The nightingale in particular becomes under his treatment a
purely heraldic bird in the coat-of-arms of love.