why he requires to employ so little imagery. In Heine's the words
are constantly allegories, devoid of perspicuity and of that inward
connection which is the logic of poetry. Take as an instance: "Aus
meinen Thränen spriessen--vie' blühende Blumen hervor,"[1] where by
flowers poems are meant; or: "Sprüh'n einmal vert dächt'ge Funken--aus
den Rosen, sorge nie--diese Welt glaubt nicht an Flammen--und sie
nimmt's für Poesie,"[2] where we are presented with a skein of
images more entangled than those of the notorious old Scandinavian
transcriptions of the decadent period in Skaldic poetry--sparks struck
out of roses; sparks, which the everyday world will not accept as fire;
rose sparks, which are called poetry!
[1]
Up from my tears are growing
Fair flowers in many vales.
(LELAND)
[2]
If suspicious sparks should issue
From the roses--fearless be!
This dull world in flames believes not,
But believes them poetry.
(BOWRING)
What one objects to most in these poems with their allegorical
rhetoric is the combination of sentimentality and materialism. Sighs
and tears are talked of as if sighs were very loud breaths and tears
very tangible substances. We have, for instance: "Und meine Seufzer
werden--ein Nachtigallenchor" (And from my sighs go flying, A choir of
nightingales), still further materialised by the addition of: "Und
vor deinem Fenster soll singen--das Lied der Nachtigall" (And the
nightingales at thy window, Shall sing all the summer hours). A still
more striking instance is to be found in the typical poem of the lonely
tear:--
"Was will die einsame Thräne?
Sie trübt mir ja den Blick,
Sie blieb aus alten Zeiten
In meinem Auge zurück."[3]
[3]
What means this lonely tear-drop
Which dims mine eye to-day?
It is the last now left me
Where once so many lay.
We are initiated into this particular tear's family history and present
lonely situation; it had many bright sisters, who now are no more, so
that it is left solitary in its eyecorner. It is addressed much as one
would address any good old comrade, told to go its way, now that all
the others have gone:--
"Du alte, einsame Thräne,
Zerfliesse jetzunder auch!"[4]
[4]
Thou tear-drop old and lonely,
Do thou, too, pass away!
The sentimentality is so crude that no parody could be more comic than
this mournful apostrophe, which the arch-scoffer wrote in all good
faith.
Every defect in the artist as a man, comes out in his art. It is always
a want of simplicity, of genuine feeling, that produces the sentimental
or ostentatious or clap-trap expression. Heine's shortcomings in this
way are strongly felt when we compare certain outbursts of his with
Goethe's expression of similar feelings.
Take, for example, the poem in which Heine describes himself as the
ill-fated Atlas; condemned to bear the whole world of suffering:
"Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt,
Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich,
Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz!
Und jetzo bist du elend."[5]
[5]
Proud heart, 'twas thine own choice,
Thou chosest to be happy, infinitely happy,
Or infinitely miserable, proud heart!
And now thou art miserable.
These are lines one does not forget. But the exclamation of the first
line, which expresses a perilous extreme of self-reliance, becomes
self-complacency when Heine's stanza is placed alongside of Goethe's
simple and grand
"Alles geben die Götter, die Unendlichen,
Ihren Lieblingen ganz:
Alle Freuden, die unendlichen,
Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen,
Ganz."[6]
[6] What the eternal Gods, give to their favourites, they give without
alloy-infinite joy, infinite sorrow--without alloy.
It would be most unreasonable to blame Heine because he employs other
and more violent methods than Goethe does--to say, for instance, of
a poem like _Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen_ ("A young man loves a
maiden"), that Goethe would have shrunk from the grotesqueness of the
bitter, desperate ending: "Und wem sie just passieret, Dem bricht das
Herz entzwei" (And he to whom it happens, It breaks his heart in two).
It would have been abhorrent to him for much the same reason that it
would have been abhorrent to an old Greek. What is simply new, simply
_modern_ in the feeling, is justifiable. Even the grotesqueness is in
this case artistically led up to.
But at times the grotesque grimace is all that is left of the modern
element. Take that famous poem: _Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig_
("My heart, my heart is heavy"). It contains an admirable description
of a wide landscape, viewed from the height of the old bastion. We
see the blue town moat, with a boy fishing from a boat, and away on
the other side of the moat, small and clear, we see summer-houses and
gardens, men and oxen, meadows and woods, girls bleaching clothes, a
turning mill-wheel sending out diamond dust, and at the foot of the
old grey tower a sentry-box, with the sentry walking up and down, his
gun flashing in the sunlight. H. C. Andersen, writing of this poem,
remarks, "And the end is so _affecting_: 'Ich wollt', er schösse mich
todt'" (I wish he would shoot me dead). Affecting? No. Startling;
for nothing has prepared us for it. The ejaculation is possibly not
entirely insincere; but it is so nervous that it is practically
meaningless; it is in so far untruthful, that these big words only
express a momentary mood, not a serious, determined desire.
Goethe has expressed, if not longing for death, at least reconciliation
to the idea of death, in the famous, immortal lines:
"Ueber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh.
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch."[7]
[7]
O'er all the hill tops
Is quiet now,
In all the tree tops
Hearest thou
Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the trees.
Wait; soon like these
Thou too shalt rest.
(LONGFELLOW)
It is unnecessary to direct attention to the contrast between the two
poet-natures which is revealed by a comparison of this melody in words
with Heine's discord; but note, from the purely artistic point of view,
how marvellously in keeping all the different parts of the little poem
are. It is one breath from the first word to the last: The calm of
evening over the forest and in the human soul, the cessation of all
desire, the resolution of all discords, the heart, great and tender,
feeling itself one with all nature.
Alongside of this perfection, the defects of Heine's lyric
effect-style, in its occasional inartistic application, show up only
too glaringly. It is akin, in its weaknesses, to the allegorising,
fantastic style of the German Romanticists, from whom Heine, the poet,
is lineally descended. And yet he is as far from being a genuine
Romanticist as he is from being what some consider him, a genuine
modern realist.
He calls his _Atta Troll_ the last free forest ditty of Romance. Others
have, in unfriendly criticism, called his poetry the decomposition
process of Romance. "I wrote _Atta Troll_" he says, "for my own
amusement, in the whimsical dream-style that prevailed in that Romantic
school in which I passed the pleasantest years of my youth, and ended
up by thrashing the schoolmaster." But in this case the Romanticism is
really only the rich, glittering garment, in which the modern spirit
masques, and which it finally throws off. None of the elements of
Romance are wanting--animals talk, bears exchange ideas, we listen to
a pug-dog's confidences, and we are conducted into a legendary region,
the valley of Roncesvalles. Not even the blue flower is wanting:
"Ronceval, du edles Thal,
Wenn ich deinen Namen höre,
Bebt und duftet mir im Herzen
Die verscholl'ne blaue Blume."[8]
[8]
Ronceval, thou noble valley!
Whensoe 'er I hear thy name,
That blue flower so long departed
O'er my spirit sheds its fragrance.
(BOWRING)
The dream-world reveals itself to us; great spirit eyes look into ours.
The poet, with his guide, goes hunting in the Pyrenees. This guide has
an old mother, who is reputed to be a witch. We are introduced into the
witch's hovel, with the stuffed birds, the ghost-like vultures, and at
night bears and ghosts perform a burlesque and weird dance.
The spirit as well as the style of this poem is Romantic to a certain
point; there are declamations against the clumsy, didactic poetry of
the day, against utilitarianism as applied to poetry, and there is
literary satire (of Freiligrath, Karl Mayer, Gustav Pfizer) in the
style favoured by the Romanticists.
And yet there is sedulous realism in the representation of localities
and circumstances. Strictly speaking, the poem is simply an account of
a stay which Heine and a young French lady friend make at Cauterets
in the Pyrenees, where they see a bear dance in the market-place. The
bear escapes from his master, takes flight to the mountains, where he
is hunted down, shot, and flayed by Laskaro, the guide. The poet's
Juliette gets the skin to lay on the floor by her bed; and Heine gives
us the superfluous information that many a night he himself has stood
bare-footed on this same skin.
So the tale is realistic enough. The details of the journey too are
faithfully reproduced. We get the impression that Heine's description
of the little mountain town up to which he clambered, and where the
children danced in a circle to the accompaniment of their own singing,
exactly corresponds with what he saw and heard. Even the refrain of the
song: _Girofflino, Girofflette_, is doubtless the real one.
Nevertheless the finest, most powerful parts of this poem are not in
the least realistic. They are visions. And the finest vision is that
in which by night from the window of the cottage the poet watches the
whole Wild Hunt tear three times round the horizon. He never did finer
figure-painting than the passage in which we follow the shining figures
across the darkness of the night sky--Diana, the fairy Abunde, and
the beautiful Herodias, in wild wantonness playing at ball with the
Baptist's bloody head.
A parallel may be drawn between Heine's art and that of Rembrandt.
There is nothing academic about either of them; both bear the distinct
stamp of modernity. But when we call Heine a great realistic poet,
we make an assertion of the same qualified truth as when we call
Rembrandt the great colourist. Rembrandt cannot be said to be one of
the greatest colour-realists, for the reason that several painters
surpass him in the power of reproducing local colour and its exact
value, and of showing the actual form and colour of an object seen in
half darkness. It is not colour, but light, that is the main thing
with Rembrandt.[9] To him light is life; the battle of life is the
battle of light, and the tragedy of life is the tragedy of light,
struggling and dying in damp and darkness. To indicate in what his real
greatness as a painter lies, he ought rather to be called a luminist
(an expression of Fromentin's) than a colourist, if by luminist we
understand an artist whose specialty is the apprehension and treatment
of light. He sometimes sacrifices drawing, even painting, in his
eagerness to produce some effect of light. Think, for example, of the
badly painted corpse in the _Lesson in Anatomy_. But it is exactly
what makes him less successful than the realists in tasks requiring
absolute truthfulness--the painting of hands, the exact reproduction of
stuffs--that makes him so great when he causes light to express what it
alone indicates to him, the inner life, the world of waking visions.
[9] _Cf_. Fromentin: _Les maîtres d'autrefois_.
Something similar to this is the case with Heine. How few real figures
this great poet has bequeathed to us! Those who would measure his
deserts by what he has done in this way find themselves obliged to fall
back upon that crude, grotesque sketch of an old Jew servant, Hyacinth,
as his best character.
No, if Heine is to be judged by his pictures of real life, many an
inferior poet surpasses him.
But think of his visions, of the world of waking dreams in his poems
and in his prose! As a rule he starts closer to earth than other
poets, but presently, above the darkness of earth a gleaming vision
appears--and disappears.
This is felt even in such small poems as the one already referred to
as containing the talk in the fisherman's cottage about the Ganges and
Lapland.
Think too of the way in which Heine calls up the image of Napoleon
before his readers. In the _Two Grenadiers_ it has the effect of a
vision. The words, "Dann reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab" ('Tis
my Emperor riding, right over my grave), are like a revelation in the
darkness of night, illuminated by the glitter of swords. In the equally
admirable description in the _Reisebilder_, the vision is conjured up
in the form of a recollection of childhood.
Or remember how Heine brings the image of Jesus before us. In the poem
_Frieden_ ("Peace") he sees him, robed in glittering white, striding
over the waves. In _Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_ ("Germany, a
Winter's Tale"), he paints a grey, winter morning on the Paderborn
heath; when the mist rises, he sees by the side of the road, in
the dawning light, a wooden crucifix with the image of the great
enthusiast, who desired to save mankind, and now hangs there "as a
warning to others."
"Sie haben dir übel mitgespielt,
Die Herren vom hohen Rathe."[10]
[10]
A sorry trick they played thee indeed,
The lords of the council stately.
(BOWRING)
The heart-felt sadness, the bitter humour, that find expression in
familiar, disparaging comment, heighten the impression of human
grandeur, of solemn horror, much as this same impression is intensified
when Hamlet, hearing his father's ghost under ground, calls: "Well
said, old mole! Canst work i' the earth so fast?" In the flash of
Heine's wit the reader sees Jesus, not now as the Prince of Peace, but
as the man who scourged the desecrators of the Temple and sent fire
upon earth.
_The Winter 's Tale_ is, taken as a whole, a characteristic example
of Heine's artistic procedure. All the twenty-seven divisions of the
long poem are constructed on the same plan. They begin close to earth,
materially, with reminiscences of travel, vulgar realistic impressions;
then the writer, without warning, by unnoticeable transitions, rises
to the height of passion, to powerful pathos, wild contempt, glowing
admiration, destructive or constructive enthusiasm, divine madness
that, as it were, rolls thunderbolt on thunderbolt; and then all sinks
back once more into the grey dulness of everyday events and situations.
Heine arrives at Cologne, sups on an omelet and ham, drinks a bottle
of Rhenish wine, and then saunters out into the streets. He calls the
town's past days to mind: here the priests had free play, here men and
books were burned at the stake; here stupidity and malice wantoned like
dogs on the open street. Suddenly in the moonlight the Cathedral, the
great spiritual Bastille, appears to his sight and arouses his wrath.
As he saunters along, he catches sight of a figure behind him which
it seems to him he ought to know. And now we glide into a perfectly
new world, the world of vision. The figure follows him as if it were
his shadow, stopping when he stops. He has often noticed it beside
him before, when he sat late at night at his desk. Under its cloak
it holds, and always has held, something that glitters strangely and
that resembles an axe, an executioner's axe. This figure is the poet's
lictor, who follows his master, instead of preceding him as the Roman
lictor did.
In the succeeding divisions Barbarossa reveals himself in the same
visionary style, coming and going twice.
Heine is an epoch-maker, not only in German lyric poetry, but in poetry
in general. He introduced a new style, the combination of sentiment
and humour in lyric poetry, and a new idea, the introduction of prose
into poetry, either by way of foil or by way of parody. His position
as epoch-maker is due to his historic position, to his having lived
at the period when Romantic perversion of reality was giving way to
pessimistic realism; this explains the fusion of the two elements which
we find in his writings.
Hence, too, it comes that the most characteristic domain in the
province of his art is the domain of chiaroscuro, a chiaroscuro akin to
Rembrandt's.
To make the central objects stand out from the shadow or half-darkness
in which they are concealed; to make light, natural light, produce a
ghostly, supernatural effect by conjuring it forth from a sea of dark
shadow-waves, bringing it flickering or flaring out of half-darkness;
to make darkness penetrable, half-darkness transparent--this is
Rembrandt's art.
Heine's, which is closely related, consists in gradually,
imperceptibly, conjuring forth out of the world of reality, and back
into it again, a perfectly modern, fantastic dreamworld.
At times the vision is in a full blaze of light, and the reality hidden
in black darkness; but presently the vision fades, and the reality
gradually emerges into the light.
XV
HEINE AND GOETHE
It has already been mentioned that Heine, when a student in Bonn,
conceived an enthusiastic admiration for the founder of the Romantic
school. A. W. Schlegel's personality was as attractive to him as his
teaching. In Schlegel, Heine admired the man who had guided German
poetry from artificiality to truth. He was dazzled, too, by the
fashionable professor's aristocratic bearing, his knowledge of the
world, his acquaintance with the good society and famous people of the
day.
He was also touched by the kindly interest which Schlegel showed in
himself and his first literary efforts. It was to Schlegel that he was
indebted for his early initiation into the secrets of metrical art, and
for something more valuable still, confidence in his own powers and his
future.
In Heine's first prose article, that on Romanticism, written in 1820,
he expresses his gratitude and makes his Romantic confession of faith
in the same breath. He protests against the idea of Romanticism being
"a mixture of Spanish enamel, Scotch mists, and Italian jingle"; no,
Romantic poetry ought not to be obscure and vague; its images may
be as plastic in contour as those of classic poetry. "Hence it is,"
he writes, "that our two greatest Romanticists, Goethe and A. W.
Schlegel, are at the same time our greatest plastic artists." And he
names Goethe's _Faust_ and Schlegel's _Rome_ in the same breath, as
models of plastic outline, concluding pathetically: "O, that those
who love to call themselves Schlegelians would lay this to heart!"
This passage should be noted by those whose only knowledge of Heine's
connection with Schlegel is derived from the low attack on the latter's
private life in _Die Romantische Schule_. It was to A. W. Schlegel,
moreover, that Heine addressed his three first sonnets. In the earliest
he thanks him for his personal kindness, and declares his own great
indebtedness to him; in the second he extols him for the service which
he has rendered to German poetry by banishing that caricature in hoop
and patches which in his day figured as the Muse; in the third he
praises him for his introduction of English, Spanish, early German,
Italian, and Indian poetry into modern German literature. The tone is
enthusiastic:
"Der schlimmste Wurm: des Zweifels Dolchgedanken,
Das schlimmste Gift: an eigner Kraft verzagen,
Das wollt' mir fast des Lebens Mark zernagen;
Ich war ein Reis, dem seine Stützen sanken.
Da mochtest du das arme Reis beklagen,
An deinem güt'gen Wort lässt du es ranken,
Und dir, mein hoher Meister, soll ich's danken,
Wird einst das schwache Reislein Blüthen tragen," &c.[1]
[1] The most dangerous worm--doubt, with its dagger tooth; the most
deadly poison--distrust of one's own powers, were eating away my life;
I was a sapling bereft of its supports.
Thou hadst pity on the poor sapling, thou gavest it the support of
encouraging word; if ever the weak sapling blossoms, thine, great
master, be the praise.
It is under this first Romantic influence that Heine writes his
earliest, purely Romantic poems in archaistic style, verses like:
"Die du bist so schön und rein,
Wunnevolles Magedein,
Deinem Dienste ganz allein
Möcht' ich wohl mein Leben weihn.
Deine süssen Aeugelein
Glänzen mild wie Mondenschein,
Helle Rosenlichter streun
Deine rothen Wängelein."
This reminds us forcibly of Tieck's earliest verses, those introduced
into his tales. In the one little poem from which these stanzas are
taken, we come upon Wunne, Magedein, Aeugelein, Wängelein, Mündchen,
weiland, a whole string of diminutives and archaisms.
Heine's next model was a genial, true poet, who died in 1827, at
the early age of thirty-one--Wilhelm Müller, the author of the
_Müllerlieder_, particularly well known from Schubert's musical
setting, and of the _Griechenlieder_, which were equally admired in
their day. A son of Wilhelm Müller's is the well-known German-English
philologist, Max Müller, whose novel, _Deutsche Liebe_, the story
of the tender love of a young German savant for a sickly, bedridden
princess, is said to be based on events in his father's life.
On the 7th of June 1826, Heine writes to Müller: "I am magnanimous
enough to confess frankly that the resemblance of my little Intermezzo
metre [the one most frequently employed by Heine] to your usual
metre is not purely accidental; the secret of its cadence was in all
probability learned from your verses." He goes on to explain that he
had early felt the influence of the German popular ballad and song,
and that at Bonn, Schlegel had initiated him into the art of verses;
"but," he adds, "it is in your verse that I seem for the first time
to have found the clear ring, the true simplicity, which I have always
aimed at. How clear, how simple your poems are, and they are one and
all popular poems. In mine only the form is popular; the ideas are
those of conventional society."
It was from Müller that Heine first learned how to evolve new popular
forms out of the old. To behold as it were with our own eyes the birth
and growth of Heine's style, we only need to set certain of his verses
alongside of Müller's.
Müller writes:
"Wir sassen so traulich beisammen
Im kühlen Erlendach,
Wir schauten so traulich zusammen
Hinab in den rieselnden Bach."
And Heine:
"Wir sassen am Fischerhause
Und schauten nach der See,
Die Abendnebel kamen
Und stiegen in die Höh'."
How closely this last stanza resembles such a stanza of Müller's as:
"Die Abendnebel sinken
Hernieder kalt und schwer,
Und Todesengel schweben
In ihren Dampf umher."[2]
[2] Wilhelm Müller: _Gedichte_, i. p. 26; "Thränenregen," p. 194;
"Dasselbe noch einmal."
These are the introductory lines of a long, beautiful poem called
_Hirtenbiwouak in der römischen Campagna_, the most important part of
which is the shepherd's song of longing for his sweetheart. How much
Heine must have learned from such a verse as that which describes the
young girl:
"Darunter sitzt ein Mädchen,
Die Spindel in der Hand,
Und spinnt und sinnt und schauet
Herab in's eb'ne Land."
We do not find Wilhelm Müller marring the impression of his idyll by
any sudden revulsion of mood; there is nothing of the devil in him; the
gentle andante is maintained to the end of the piece. But it is not in
this that the principal difference between his style and Heine's lies;
for Heine at times retains his tranquil mood throughout a whole poem.
The essential difference is the extraordinary condensation of Heine's
style, as compared with Müller's. He gives in one verse, at most two,
what the other requires ten to express.
The novelty in his lyric style is its unparalleled condensation. The
poems are all epitomes. They present us with a spiced, fragrant essence
of passion, experience, bitterness, mockery, wit, emotion, and fancy;
an essence of poetry and prose in combination. Psychologists talk of a
condensation of thought;[3] in comparison with the pupil's thought,
the master's is condensed. In the history of all mechanism, increasing
condensation is to be observed. Once there were only church clocks; now
people carry clocks in their pockets. That is to say, the mechanism
which once required for its wheels and springs the space provided by a
church clock, now finds room enough in a watch. In like manner, many an
old tragedy does not contain more thoughts or more feeling than a Heine
poem of two or three verses.
[3] Lazarus: _Das Leben der Seele_, 2nd edition, p. 229.