satire is naturally more cautious than the old Greek's; the modern
world does not stand jesting on this subject as well as the ancient
world did. In the works of Heine, who wrote under the censorship of the
police and of modern society, we have no counterpart to the scene in
_The Frogs_, where Dionysus, the god of comedy, who has shown himself
both boastful and cowardly, gets one thrashing after another, and at
last appeals to his own priest, who occupied a place of honour among
the spectators, to help him in his extremity. And yet there is not
very much, from playful banter to broad jocularity and the most biting
sarcasm, that Heine does not allow himself. Hyacinth's valuation of
the various religions (in the _Reisebilder_) is well known. He will
have nothing to say to Catholicism, which, with its pealing of bells,
its incense fumes, and its "Melancholik," is no religion for a citizen
of Hamburg; he tests Protestantism by buying lottery tickets with the
numbers which he finds on the hymn-board in a Lutheran church; and he
disposes of Judaism in the well-known words: "It is not a religion at
all, but a misfortune." In the amusing and audacious verses entitled
_Disputation_, a rabbi and a Capucin monk defend their respective
dogmas; each, in offensive terms, boasts of the happiness conferred by
his doctrine; the royal bride who is to decide the dispute declares
herself incapable of doing so, as the only thing she has noted is that
they both stink. In a passage in his book on Börne, Heine's mockery
of religion becomes almost dramatic. He tells how, when he was living
on the island of Heligoland, he was often drawn into arguments with a
Prussian Councillor of Justice on the subject of the Trinity. During
one of these discussions, the thinness of the flooring permitted them
to hear distinctly what was being said in the room below, where a
phlegmatic Dutchman was instructing their hostess how to distinguish
between cod, haberdine, and stock-fish--which are in reality one and
the same fish, but with three names, denoting three different degrees
of saltness.
As far as earthly potentates are concerned, Heine's comic assaults are
not less audacious, not less fantastic than those of Aristophanes.
Aristophanes showed courage in his attacks on Kleon and Theramenes;
he occasionally chanced to defend the good cause; but as a rule it
was the bad cause he upheld, for he made himself the spokesman of an
indefensible conservatism, and of unjust personal animosities. Heine
was less frequently unjust or mean, and he was never conservative.
But he recalls Aristophanes to us by his aristocratic propensities,
by the grim character of his personal attacks (those on Meyerbeer,
for instance), and also by the form of these attacks, for example the
amusing way in which he turns to account well-known, pathetic passages
from other poets.
He made witty attacks on Frederick William IV., in _Deutschland_, where
Hammonia warns Heine himself against "the king of Thule," and in the
poem _Der neue Alexander_; and he wrote a whole series of satirical
poems on King Ludwig of Bavaria and his doings. This latter king, whom
Heine in past days had extolled, was flattered as a Mæcenas by a whole
band of contemporary artists and poets. In the _Lobgesänge auf König
Lüdewig_, Heine falls foul of all his weaknesses, his gallery of beauty
in the Munich palace, his bad verses, his annoyance when several of the
famous men of science and artists whom he patronised allowed themselves
to be persuaded to leave Bavaria and settle in Prussia. On the subject
of the gallery of beauty we have:
"Er liebt die Kunst, und die schönsten Frau'n,
Die lässt er porträtiren,
Er geht in diesem gemalten Serail
Als Kunst-Eunuch spazieren."[2]
[2]
In love with art, he collects fair dames
In counterfeit presentment,
And in this painted harem finds,
Art-eunuch-like, contentment.
When writing of the migration to Prussia of the various men of note,
Heine seizes the opportunity to give a side-hit at his old scape-goat,
Massmann:
"Der Schelling und der Cornelius,
Sie mögen von dannen wandern.
Dem einen erlosch im Kopf die Vernunft,
Die Phantasie dem Andern.
Doch dass man aus meiner Krone stahl
Die beste Perle, dass man
Mir meinen Turnkunstmeister geraubt,
Das Menschenjuwel, den Massmann,
Das hat mich gebeugt, das hat mich geknickt,
Das hat mir die Seele zerschmettert,
Mir fehlt jetzt der Mann, der in seiner Kunst
Den höchsten Pfahl erklettert...."[3]
[3]
That Schelling should go, and Cornelius too,
Without a tear I can see--
The one has lost his reasoning power,
The other all his fancy.
But to steal from my crown its brightest gem,
Its pearl of price, was cruel;
My master-gymnast they've filched away,
Massmann, mankind's chief jewel.
This crime has bent and broken me,
'Tis soul-destroying, cynical--
I have lost the man who had clambered up
To his art's supremest pinnacle.
Of King Ludwig's essays in poetry he writes:
"Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet,
Und singt er, so stürzt Apollo
Vor ihm auf die Knie und bittet und fleht:
Halt ein! ich werde sonst toll, o!"[4]
[4]
King Ludwig is a poet great;
When he sings, the mighty Apollo
Falls on his knees and begs and prays:
O stop! or my death will follow!
Still wittier is the parody of King Ludwig's poetical style, in the
inscription above the resting-place of Atta Troll in the Bavarian
_Walhalla_:
"Atta Troll, Tendenzbär, sittlich--
Religiös; als Gatte brünstig;
Durch Verfuhrtsein von dem Zeitgeist
Waldursprünglich Sansculotte;
Sehr schlecht tanzend, doch Gesinnung
Tragend in der zott'gen Hochbrust
Manchmal auch gestunken habend;
Kein Talent, doch ein Charakter!"[5]
[5]
Atta Troll, a bear of impulse;
Devotee; a loving husband;
Full of sans-culottic notions,
Thanks to the prevailing fashion.
Wretched dancer; strong opinions
Bearing in his shaggy bosom;
Often stinking very badly;
Talentless, a character!
(BOWRING)
The harshness and the strained participial construction both remind us
of the style of the royal effusions which any visitor to Munich may
study for himself below the frescoes on the walls of the arcades.
This is merely personal satire of crowned heads; but Heine's satire,
like that of Aristophanes, is frequently directed against existing
political, social, and literary conditions, and it is then that he is
obliged to call the dream to his aid. With its help he descends into
the depth of the earth, or mounts to a fantastic world above the clouds.
This, as already mentioned, happens more especially in _Deutschland_.
Observe with what care and skill Heine prepares for the fantastic
description of Barbarossa's subterranean dwelling-place in the
Kyffhäuser. First he introduces the refrain of an old legendary ballad:
"Sonne, du klagende Flamme!" (Sun, thou accusing flame!) with a sketch
of the legend which tells how the sun acted as the accuser of the
murderer of a young maiden; then he describes the good old nurse who
sang this ballad and told many an entrancing tale--the tale of the
princess disguised as a goose-herd, the tale of the emperor who lived
deep down in the earth below the mountain; this second he relates at
length--and presently all else is forgotten; we see Barbarossa with
his mail-clad followers, we hear him call them to horse, to arms,
to battle, to avenge the wrong which the murderers have done to the
golden-haired Germania. Then we return to the mood of the nursery
ballad, and to its refrain: "Sonne! du klagende Flamme!" now chanted
with enthusiasm and rejoicing. There is an Aristophanic _verve_
in this poetic description of the old arsenal, the empty suits of
armour, the faded flags, the sleeping soldiers, and then the sudden
revulsion, the appeal to awakening power, the supplication that the
Middle Ages may return again, as being infinitely preferable to the
sanctimonious Prussia of the day, with her mixture of Gothic folly and
modern falsehood. The two following cantos, which contain a further
description of the interior of the mountain, and conversations with
Barbarossa, take the form of an account of a dream which the poet had
while travelling at night in the stage-coach.
The anti-Prussian rhapsody in the inn at Minden is prepared for in the
same manner. Heine wants to summon forth the Prussian eagle, and to
pluck him and shoot him. If Aristophanes had had the same designs, he
would have introduced the eagle without more ado. Heine goes to work in
his roundabout way. In the act of falling asleep he dreams that the red
bed-curtain tassel above his head turns into an eagle with feathers and
claws, which threatens to tear the liver out of his breast, and which
he taunts with bitter hatred.
In a few single instances Heine's artistic procedure is bolder, more
like that of the great Greek. One of these is the splendid harangue to
the wolves at night in the Teutoburgerwald. At midnight the traveller
hears them howling round his carriage, which has lost a wheel. He comes
out and makes a speech to the savage brutes:
"Mitwölfe, ich bin glücklich, heut'
In eurer Mitte zu weilen,
Wo so viel' edle Gemüther mir
Mit Liebe entgegen heulen."[6]
[6]
Brother wolves! it gives me great pleasure to-day
To tarry awhile midst your growling,
Where so many noble spirits have met,
Around me lovingly howling.
(BOWRING)
And the speech is a humorous imitation of those which great men are
in the habit of making on such occasions: This is an hour which to
him will be ever memorable. They lie who say that he has joined the
dogs; the idea of becoming court-councillor to the lambs has never
even occurred to him. From time to time he has dressed himself in a
sheepskin, but only for the sake of the warmth; he is and always will
be a wolf.
In the scene between the poet and the strapping woman with the mural
crown who represents Hamburg, we have, as Heine himself informs us, a
direct imitation of the wedding of Peithetaerus and Basileia in _The
Birds_. It is wanton and boyishly frolicsome; its licentiousness is
really more offensive than that of similar passages in Aristophanes,
who never appears in his own plays except in defence of himself as a
poet. Heine does not go the same length as Aristophanes, but he is more
personal.
In _Atta Troll_ the parallel between the two poets is still more
obvious. Here Heine's imagination has freer play, because the hero
is not a man, but a bear. There is fine fancy in the passage where
the bear, after his flight, is described dancing for his cubs in the
moonlight. There is inimitable humour in his declamation against the
rights of man, and in his boast of the more ancient rights of bears,
which recalls the charming parabasis in _The Birds_, in which it is
established that the bird world is the oldest: Everything proceeds from
the original egg, the egg of Night, Love first of all, and the birds
are children of Love. Atta Troll's pride in the animal world is most
amusing, especially so because Heine manages to insinuate into the
bear's utterances sarcastic hits at persons whom he himself wishes to
depreciate--Freiligrath, for instance, whose popular but foolish poem,
_Löwenritt_, and infelicitous _Mohrenkönig_ had roused his mirthful
derision:
"Giebt es nicht gelehrte Hunde?
Und auch Pferde, welche rechnen?
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Schreiben Esel nicht Kritiken?
Spielen Affen nicht Komödie?
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Singen nicht die Nachtigallen?
Ist der Freiligrath kein Dichter?
Wer besäng' den Löwen besser?
Als sein Landsmann, das Kamel?"[7]
7:
Are there not such things as learned
Dogs, and horses too, who reckon?
. . . . . . . .
Write not asses criticisms?
Are not apes all good comedians?
. . . . . . . .
Are not nightingales good singers?
And is Freiligrath no poet?
Who can sing of lions better
Than their countryman, the camel?[*]
(BOWRING)
[*]In German slang "camel" is equivalent to "blockhead."
A good deal of what the bear says, sounds like satire on foolish
communistic democracy. He holds forth volubly against property--bears
are born without pockets, but men have pockets and stuff them; and
discourses eagerly on equality:
"Strenge Gleichheit! Jeder Esel
Sei befugt zum höchsten Staatsamt,
Und der Löwe soll dagegen
Mit dem Sack zur Mühle traben."[8]
[8]
Strict equality! Each donkey
Be entitled to high office;
On the other hand, the lion
Carry to the mill the sack.
(BOWRING)
But on the whole it is harmless, stingless satire, fantastical
banter alike of the clerical party and communists, misanthropes and
revolutionists, cosmopolitans and patriots--for the bear speaks like
them all in turn. A very wonderful passage is Atta Troll's sermon
against atheism and its development from his deism, the passage
beginning:
"Hüte dich vor Menschendenkart,
Sie verdirbt dir Leib und Seele;
Unter allen Menschen giebt es
Keinen ordentlichen Menschen."[9]
[9]
Guard against man's ways of thinking,
They destroy both soul and body;
'Mongst all men there's no such thing as
Any good and decent man.
(BOWRING)
There is a gay profundity in the warning against Feuerbach and Bauer,
and there is wit, as brilliant as Voltaire's, but richer, and warmer,
in the description of the creative deity:
"Droben in dem Sternenzelte,
Auf dem gold'nen Herrscherstuhle,
Weltregierend, majestätisch,
Sitzt ein kolossaler Eisbär" &c.[10]
[10]
In yon starry bright pavilion,
On the golden seat of power,
World-directing and majestic,
Sits a mighty polar-bear.
(BOWRING)
What humour there is in the description of the bear-saints who dance
before his throne!
The bear gives us something of the phraseology of all the different
parties in turn, but it is the bigoted Teuton that he chiefly favours;
it is he who is most severely satirised. The sleek bear-damsels remind
us of a German pastor's daughters; the youngest cub turns somersaults
exactly like Massmann, and is, like him, the product of home education,
has never been able to learn Greek or Latin, or any language but his
mother-tongue.
By strange, fantastic detours Heine invariably brings his reader back
to the realities of his native land.
Aristophanic, in this respect, is the passage in which, when it
rains, the cry is heard: "Six-and-thirty kings for an umbrella!" and
again, when shelter is reached: "Six-and-thirty kings for a warm
dressing-gown!"
And absolutely Aristophanic is the suppressed passage, in which the
bird Hut-Hut tells how Solomon and Balkis ask each other riddles in the
realm of shades, riddles like:
"Wer ist wohl der grösste Lump
Unter allen deutschen Lumpen;
Die in allen sechs und dreissig
Deutschen Bundesstaaten leben?"[11]
[11]
Who, think you, is the paltriest wight
Amongst the crowd of worthless fellows
In all the different States of Germany,
Which are in number six-and-thirty?
Balkis, to whom the question is put, sends secret messengers to make
inquiry in every country and state in Germany, but each time she
informs Solomon of the discovery of a specially contemptible wretch, he
answers:
"Kind! es giebt noch einen grösser'n!
(Child! there is a worse one still!)
And it is explained to us as a peculiarity of Germany, that as often as
we imagine we have discovered her most despicable character, one still
more despicable makes his appearance. There is no progress so certain
as the progress in general contemptibility. It was only yesterday that
X. appeared to be the sorriest knave, to-day he is not to be named
in comparison with N. N. Heine must have felt that he had plentiful
stores of invention to draw upon, else he would hardly, in his final
revision of the poem, have rejected this means of satirising his
opponents, one by one, in the most amusing manner.
In purely literary satire, too, Heine's methods have a distinct
resemblance to those of Aristophanes. An example of this is the hit in
_Atta Troll_ at the Swabian school of poets--the cat in the witch's
cottage, which is a bewitched Swabian poet, who will turn into a man
again when a pure maiden can read Gustav Pfizer's poems on New Year's
eve without falling asleep. Another example is the satire in the same
poem on the following rather ridiculous lines of Freiligrath's _Der
Mohrenfürst_ (The Moorish Prince) with their far-fetched simile:
"Aus dem schimmernd weissen Zelte hervor
Tritt der schlachtgerüstete fürstliche Mohr;
So tritt aus schimmernder Wolken Thor
Der Mond, der verfinsterte, dunkle, hervor."[12]
[12] From the glistening white tent the royal Moor issues forth, armed
for the fray; even as the moon, gloomy and dark, issues from the
glistening gate-way of the clouds.
It is a poem about a negro king, who is taken prisoner, brought to
Europe, and made to play the drum outside a circus; while doing so
he thinks of his former greatness, and beats his drum to pieces. The
idea of the black man at the opening of the tent resembling the moon
appearing through the clouds is undoubtedly comical.
In _Atta Troll_ the red tongue hangs out of the bear's black jaws
as the moon shows herself through white clouds. And towards the end
of the poem Heine tells us how, in the Jardin des Plantes, he makes
acquaintance with a negro caretaker, who confides to him that he is
Freiligrath's negro king, that he has married a white Alsatian cook,
whose feet remind him of the feet of the elephants in his native land,
and whose French sounds to him like the negro tongue. She feeds him so
well that he has developed a little round black stomach, which shows
itself through the opening of his shirt like a black moon, appearing
from behind white clouds.
And there is something especially Aristophanic in the recklessly brutal
satire upon Platen in the second part of the _Reisebilder_. Certain
amusing artifices in their literary warfare are common to the Greek
and the German comic poet. In _The Frogs_, in the contest between
Æschylus and Euripides (a poet whom Aristophanes hates), Æschylus
tacks a refrain, equivalent to "spoiled his verse," to everything that
Euripides recites. In the _Reisebilder_ Heine revenges himself by
making Hyacinth alternately tack the words _von vorn_ (from the front)
and _von hinten_ (from behind) to the end of Platen's lines, thereby
maliciously perverting their meaning.
The Aristophanic comedy resembles the majestic frescoes that cover
the interior of some great dome; to compare Heine's comic writings
with those of Aristophanes, is to compare pictures carefully painted
on the easel with such frescoes. In the Greek comedies there is the
light and space of the Sistine Chapel; in them, as in the frescoes of
Michael Angelo, everything is large, sweeping, strong; the creation
of a mind that sets recognised rules at defiance by the vehemence of
its lyric emotion, the audacity of its fore-shortening, and the force
of its allegory. Only that Michael Angelo's world is solemnly, wildly
tragic, whereas the world of Aristophanes is dithyrambic, a world of
caricatures set in a framework of Greek social conditions.
Compared with Aristophanes, Heine is a private, stay-at-home citizen.
Aristophanes holds forth to an audience of thousands in the broad
daylight of the theatre; Heine communes with his public sitting alone
in his room. But the scenes that depict themselves simply on the retina
of his eye, are aglow with more ardent, passionate life than those
which Aristophanes embodied on the stage. And his aims are not the
purely local aims of the Greek poet. When he is at his best, he appeals
to millions who are not of his nationality, appeals, indeed, to the
elect among all who can read. His lyric poetry is more personal, more
intense, more nervous than that of any Greek; his satire is dedicated
to the cause of general ideas, which did not exist for Aristophanes. He
is not less witty than his Greek forerunner, and he always fought for
political progress and personal liberty, whereas the enemy of Euripides
and Socrates most frequently fought for a past that was gone beyond
recall, a past to which he himself most certainly did not belong.
XVII
HEINE
Heine's prose is not on the same level with his verse. In his most
famous prose book, the _Reisebilder_, he shows himself to be a pupil of
Sterne; in later works, where he has attained to greater independence,
he is always witty and lively, but seldom properly qualified to treat
the subjects of his choice. Whether he is writing on German philosophy
for French readers, or on French art for Germans, he does it in equally
dilettante fashion. Judged as journalism, his writing was always
excellent, but he is too strong, too great a man to be classified as a
journalist.
Too much has been made of Heine's superficiality by the pedants among
his detractors. He was not a hard worker, but he was by no means idle,
and he possessed a fund of solid and varied knowledge. Still, it is
only as a poet that he is great; most of his prose writings treat of
the passing topics of the day; and his fame has been actually injured
by the publication of his letters, which, as a rule, present him to
us in an unfavourable light, namely entirely taken up with his own
interests. Pecuniary difficulties are a tiresome subject, even when
they happen to be the pecuniary difficulties of a genius.
Heine, as every one knows, did not live to be an old man. He was
carried off in the prime of his mental powers by a terrible disease.
He had always been delicate and suffering; in his youth he was plagued
by severe headaches, and was obliged to be so moderate in the matter
of drink that his friends used laughingly to declare that he contented
himself with _smelling_ a bottle of Rhenish wine which he kept in his
room. His nervous system was undermined while he was still a young
man, but it is certain that this was to a much less extent the result
of excesses than is generally believed, for Heine is a real _fanfaron
des vices_, given to perpetual boasting of his own depravity. He was
attacked by the disease which is so frequently the fate of those who
have lived lives of unbroken mental productivity. An affection of the
spine, with paralysis first of the eyelids and in course of time of
almost the whole body, consigned him to that "mattress-grave" in Paris,
where he lay for nearly eight years.
His life, which can neither be called a great nor a happy one, falls
of itself into two distinctly defined parts--the life in Germany till
the Revolution of July, and the life in Paris from 1831 till his
death in 1856. It was a life led without calculation, but not without
instinctive perception of the direction in which possibilities of
development for his talent lay; it is hardly probable that Heine would
have attained to his great cosmopolitan fame, or even that he would
have become so eminent a satiric poet, if he had lived in his native
country all his life.
His youthful years in Germany are passed under the oppression of the
reaction--his _Reisebilder_ won popularity as an expression of the
general political dissatisfaction--but he soon makes up his mind that
it is useless to meddle with politics. The Revolution of July puts
new life into everything; Heine goes off to Paris, settles there,
and is kept there by the embargo placed upon his works in all the
states of the German Confederation. The Guizot Government secretly
give him the small pension which enables him to live in comparative
comfort. His acceptance of this laid him open to accusations, which,
though they were not altogether groundless, were in many points quite
unjustifiable. It must be borne in mind that Heine did not understand
the art of making money; and even if he had, it would have been of
little use to him. Many thousands of pounds must have been made by the
sale of his books, but he himself made over the most profitable of
them all, the _Buch der Lieder_, to Campe in payment of an old debt of
50 Louis d'ors, and was all his life long dependent on the unwilling
assistance of his rich uncle. If he, and if the little Parisian
grisette whom he married, had had more idea of economy, it might have
been unnecessary for him to accept Government support. The fact of his
accepting it no doubt occasionally prevented him from criticising the
French ministry freely in German newspapers, but it had no other bad
result, and least of all did it induce him to write anything he did not
mean.