warfare with the European reaction. In this respect he may be called
Byron's great successor. Only a few years after the sword of sarcasm,
wielded in the cause of liberty, had slipped from the hands of the
dying Byron, it was seized by Heine, who wielded it for a whole
generation with equal skill and power. Yet for the eight last years it
was a mortally wounded man who fought.
At no time did he write truer, more incisive, more brilliant verse
than when he lay nailed to the low, broad bed of torture in Paris. And
never, so far as we know, has a great productive mind borne superhuman
sufferings with more undaunted courage and endurance. The power of
the soul over the body has seldom displayed itself so unmistakably.
To bear such agonies as his in close-lipped silence would have been
admirable; but to create, to bubble over with sparkling, whimsical jest
and mockery, to let his spirit wander the world round in charming and
profound reverie, while he himself lay crippled, almost lifeless, on
his couch--this was great.
He lay there shrunk to a skeleton, with his eyes closed, his hands
almost powerless, his noble features painfully emaciated; the white,
perfectly formed hands were nearly transparent; at times, when he
spoke, a Mephistophelian smile passed over the suffering, martyr-like
face. At last, as in the case of Tithonus of old, all that really
remained of the man was his voice; but it was a voice of many notes, of
many whimsies, many jests.
He continued to be mentally active. It was as if the driving-wheel went
on turning without steam, as if the lamp went on burning without oil.
It is not true that he reverted to a connection with any church; but
the suffering man clung to a kind of piety and faith in God which was a
legacy from the days of his youth. At this faith he himself sometimes
smiled. We have such a smile in the words with which on the last day
of his life he tried to pacify an excited acquaintance: _Dieu me
pardonnera--c'est son métier._
It is a touching proof of his strength of mind and of his filial
affection that during his whole long illness he took the greatest care
that all knowledge of his sufferings should be kept from his old mother
in Hamburg; to the last he wrote her cheerful, amusing letters, and he
caused any passages that might have awakened her suspicions to be taken
out of the copies of his works that were sent to her.
Another pleasant impression of his spiritual condition is conveyed by
the circumstance that he, the most wanton-tongued of men and poets on
the subject of love, changed during his illness into the tenderest and
most spiritual exponent of that passion. The last year of his life was,
as is well known, sweetened by the admiration and devotion of the young
and beautiful woman who, though German born, made her appearance as
a French authoress under the pseudonym of Camille Selden.[1]
[1] Meissner: _Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine_. Camille Selden: _Les
derniers jours de Henri Heine_, 1884.
She was then about twenty-eight, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and so
charming, gentle, and attractive, that she won Heine's heart the first
time she visited him. Soon he could not live without her; he was
miserable if a few days passed without his seeing her, though he was
often in such pain that he was obliged to request her to delay her
visit.
It is in the poems and letters to her, published after Heine's death,
that we find that fervency, depth, and fulness of passion which we feel
to be wanting in the rest of his love poetry.
He calls her his spiritually affianced bride, whose life is bound
up with his by the will of fate. United, they would have known what
happiness is; separated, they are doomed to misery:
"Ich weiss es jetzt. Bei Gott! du bist es,
Die ich geliebt. Wie bitter ist es,
Wenn im Momente des Erkennens
Die Stunde schlägt des ew'gen Trennens!
Der Willkomm ist zu gleicher Zeit
Ein Lebewohl!"[2]
[2]
I know it now. By heaven! 'tis thou
Whom I have loved. How bitter now,
The moment we are joined for ever,
To find the hour when we must sever!
The welcome must at once give way
To sad farewell!
(BOWRING)
Half laughing, half weeping, he bemoans the compulsory platonic
affection of two lovers, to whom an embrace is an impossibility:
"Worte! Worte! keine Thaten!
Niemals Fleisch, geliebte Puppe,
Immer Geist und keinen Braten,
Keine Knödel in der Suppe!"[3]
[3]
Words, empty words, and never deeds!
No roast for us, my puppet sweet,
Not even dumplings in the soup;
A feast of mind, but not of meat!
When, at a rare time, she keeps him waiting, he is frantic with
impatience:
"Lass mich mit glüh'nden Zangen kneipen,
Lass grausam schinden mein Gesicht,
Lass mich mit Ruthen peitschen, stäupen--
Nur warten, warten lass mich nicht!"[4]
[4]
With red-hot irons scar my flesh,
Pinch me with pincers glowing hot,
Or have me heat with many stripes--
But oh! to wait compel me not!
But the great mystic poem which celebrates the nuptials of the dead
poet with the passion-flower that blossoms on his grave, is a poem of
resignation, resignation in the presence of Death:
"Du warst die Blume, du geliebtes Kind,
An deinen Küssen musst' ich dich erkennen.
So zärtlich keine Blumenlippen sind,
So feurig keine Blumenthränen brennen.
Geschlossen war mein Aug', doch angeblickt
Hat meine Seel' beständig dein Gesichte,
Du sahst mich an, beseeligt und verzückt
Und geisterhaft beglänzt vom Mondenlichte."[5]
[5] Thou wast that flower, beloved! I knew thee by thy kisses; no
flower lips kiss so tenderly, no flower tears burn so scorchingly. My
eyes were fast closed, but my soul gazed steadfastly upon thy face; and
in the moonlight's ghostly sheen, blissful and trembling, thou did'st
return my gaze.
These images, these feelings, belong to an insubstantial world, a world
like the blind man's, where there are kisses, but not from visible
lips, and tears which fall from unseen eyes, a world fragrant with the
perfume of flowers that cannot be touched, and illuminated by magic,
spirit-like moonshine instead of the light of the sun. There is no
substantiality and there is no sound:
"Wir sprachen nicht, jedoch mein Herz vernahm
Was du verschwiegen dachtest im Gemüthe--
Das ausgesprochene Wort ist ohne Scham,
Das Schweigen ist der Liebe keusche Blüthe."[6]
[6] We said not a word, but my heart felt all thy unspoken
thoughts--the spoken word is a shameless thing, silence is love's
chaste blossom.
They held noiseless converse, but what they talked of we are forbidden
to ask:
"Frag, was er strahlet, den Karfunkelstein,
Frag, was sie duften, Nachtviol' und Rosen--
Doch frage nie, wovon im Mondenschein
Die Marterblume und ihr Todter kosen!"[7]
[7] Ask the ruby to explain its fiery glow, ask violet and rose
to analyse their perfume, but never seek to know of what the
passion-flower and her dead lover talk so caressingly in the pale
moonlight.
Heine rises here to a level with Shelley, the sublimest of modern lyric
poets. This is Shelley's note--the violin strain of an Ariel, clear and
spirit-like and full, and entirely modern in its trembling, thrilling,
almost morbid tenderness.
XVIII
LITERATURE AND PARTY
Börne and many later critics have maintained that Heine was never in
earnest about anything, and have condemned him accordingly. Setting
aside slighter and unimportant causes, Börne's resentment was really
aroused by what appeared to him to be Heine's determination not to
espouse the cause of any party. He himself, as far as it was possible
in those unparliamentary days, was an extreme partyman in literature.
It is now a generally accepted, trite axiom, that art is its own
aim and end, but then people were accustomed to look upon it as the
handmaid of the great general aims of the day; and in all German
literary productions of that period, important and unimportant, we feel
exactly what it was that induced the writer to take up his pen. Even an
author as strongly actuated by a purpose as Heine was, did not satisfy
those who, like Börne, lived for their convictions. They applied to him
the expression "talented but characterless" ("wohl ein Talent, aber
kein Charakter"), which he ridicules so unmercifully in _Atta Troll_.
Even in the introduction he alludes jestingly to the consolation for
the great majority which is contained in the doctrine that respectable
people are as a rule bad musicians, while, to make up for this, good
musicians are anything but respectable people--and every one knows that
respectability and not music is the important thing in this world.
Elsewhere Heine maintains that it is, as a rule, a sign of a man's
narrowmindedness when he is straightway discerned and held in high
esteem by the narrow-minded majority as a man of character; the chief
reason for such distinction being that a narrow, superficial, but
always consistent philosophy of life is what the multitude most easily
understands.
Stoic firmness was assuredly not one of the qualities of Heine's
nature. Allowing that in certain given circumstances he showed want of
character, we proceed to what is really the vital question: Ought the
poet to be a party-man?
At the time when Heine was jeering in _Atta Troll_ at those who in
their philanthropic and political ardour imagined strength of character
to be a sufficient substitute for talent, a serious literary war
was being waged in Germany over the question whether the poet ought
to be a party-man or to take up a position superior to all parties.
_Atta Troll_, which pours such ridicule on Freiligrath's youthful
poems, appeared in the autumn of 1841; in November of the same year
Freiligrath, who till then had been best known by oriental poems in
Victor Hugo's style, and who had a short time previously accepted
a pension from the King of Prussia, wrote, in a poem entitled _Año
Spanien_ (on Diego Leon, the Spanish general shot in 1841) the
following lines on the poet as such:
"Er beugt sein Knie dem Helden Bonaparte,
Und hört mit Zürnen d'Enghien's Todesschrei:
Der Dichter steht auf einer höhern Warte
Als auf den Zinnen der Partei."[1]
This sentiment was condemned by Georg Herwegh in the poem _Die Partei
(an Ferdinand Freiligrath_), the most striking lines of which are:
"Partei! Partei! wer sollte sie nicht nehmen,
Die noch die Mutter aller Siege war!
Wie mag ein Dichter solch ein Wort verfehmen,
Ein Wort, das alles Herrliche gebar!
Nur offen wie ein Mann: Für oder wider?
Und die Parole: Sklave oder frei?
Selbst Götter stiegen vom Olymp hernieder
Und kämpften auf den Zinnen der Partei."[2]
A year later, in his poem _Duett der Pensionirten_, Herwegh taunted
Freiligrath with accepting a pension from the King of Prussia,
whereupon Freiligrath, as is well known, threw up his pension, joined
the ranks of the political poets, and developed so rapidly into a
Radical and revolutionary, that at the time of the outbreak in 1848, he
was looked upon as the representative revolutionary poet in Germany. It
is plain, then, that Freiligrath considered Herwegh to be in the right.
Still this does not prove him to have been so.
The question whether and to what extent the poet ought to be a
party-man is a very complex one. It is so in the first instance because
of the ambiguity of the word party, a word which Heine and Börne,
Freiligrath and Herwegh employed with a different meaning at different
times.
The poet, even if he is a small-minded man, can only lose by pinning
his faith to any narrow, political, party programme, to any social or
religious theory. How is it possible that his ideals should exactly
correspond with the limited, definite aims of any party! Thomas Moore
was a Whig poet, Walter Scott a Tory poet, because, with all their
great talent, they were not great minds. Byron went more to the
root of things than either of them, or than either of the political
parties--yet every one instinctively feels that it is absurd to say
that Byron, as a poet, did not take a side in politics or religion. He
did so even more markedly than Schiller, who also could not be said to
belong to any political party, for one reason because there were none
in the Germany of his day.
There are certain branches of literature which plainly have nothing
to do with party. The poet of love, as such, belongs to no political
or religious party; though it is not impossible that he may belong to
an art party, for as soon as there is any question of style in art,
we at once encounter party again. But the moment he begins to treat a
theme in which there is any trace of theory, of thought, of fundamental
principle, he is obliged to choose his side, to rank himself among the
disciples of this or that philosophy of life.
When, however, as in Freiligrath's case, we have simply an assertion of
the poet's right to admire Napoleon and yet to be incensed by the death
of d'Enghien, party does not come into question at all; for all that is
meant is, that the poet has not dispossessed himself of his right to
judge the past with equity and to see the vices as well as the virtues
of his heroes. The question of party, strictly so called, is not a
question of the judging of the past, but of the shaping of the future;
and no man can proceed in two directions at the same time.
Another difficulty presents itself to us in the word party. It means,
generally speaking, part of the population of one's own country. And
the poet ought to belong to his country and his people, not only to
part of them. Looked upon in this light, party is the narrower, country
the wider conception, and if by party an actual political party,
corresponding more or less perfectly to its name or its programme, is
meant, then as a matter of course country is superior to party.
But if we take the word party in the sense in which we use it when we
speak of Schiller and of Byron as party-men, then party is a wider,
a grander conception than country. For by country we understand a
definitely bounded tract of land, definitely limited interests, a
definitely circumscribed history; but by party in this sense we
understand a system of ideas which, from their very nature, are not
confined to any place--world-wide thoughts, the great general interests
of humanity. And even if the party sided with represents only the great
moving ideas of one age, an age is a wider, greater native land than
a country; and the poet does his people a service by extending their
horizon beyond their country's bounds.
Börne and Heine were, in my opinion, both strong party-men, but none
the less both zealous patriots, their patriotism quite uninjured by
their partisanship.
The official press of the day proclaimed Börne to be not only a mad
Radical, but a libeller of his country. He had the dangerous habit of
expressing all his opinions in such violent terms that they offended,
wounded, or incited to action. There was an outcry of indignation when
he wrote that any nation had a right to depose its king even if it
were only because it had taken a dislike to the shape of his nose. And
whole volumes of invective were called forth by his observations on the
servility (_Bedientennatur_) of the Germans. He had gone so far as to
call them "a nation of flunkeys."
He himself writes: "What can I do with people who really seriously
believe that I have advised the nations of Europe to depose their
kings as soon as they take a dislike to their noses.... If I were to
say: Gentlemen! I did not mean you to take me so literally, they would
perhaps believe me--but that would avail me nothing. They would say:
You ought to have remembered that you do not write for educated readers
only, but that a large proportion of your readers are uneducated men.
To this I would answer nothing but: Take me to prison! Then when I was
brought into court I would say: Gentlemen! The German is a crocodile!
(Cries of indignation. Crocodile! Order!) Gentlemen! The German is a
crocodile! (Order! Judge: You are abusing your right of self-defence.)
Gentlemen! The German is a crocodile--I beg of you to allow me to
continue. When I use the word crocodile I am not hinting at savage
instincts or crocodile tears. The German is tame and good-natured,
and weeps tears that are as sincere as the tears of a whipped child.
If I have applied the name of crocodile to the German, it is only on
account of his skin, which does resemble that of the crocodile. It
consists of hard scales, and is like a slated roof. Anything solid
that falls upon it rebounds, anything liquid runs off. Suppose, now,
gentlemen, that you wished to mesmerise such a crocodile, with the
final intention of curing his weak nerves, but in the first instance of
making him so clear sighted that he could see inside himself, discover
his own disease, and find out the proper remedy for it. How would you
set about it? Would you gently stroke the crocodile coat-of-mail with
your warm hand? No, you would not be so foolish; you know that would
make no impression on it. You would stamp on it, drive nails into it,
and if that were not enough, you would fire a hundred bullets at it,
calculating that ninety-nine of them would take no effect, and that
the hundredth would bring about just the mild, modest results your
mesmerism was intended to produce. This is what I have done."[3]
One sees that Börne's strong language on the subject of German
servility and indolence is simply the negative expression of his
patriotism. It is a patriotism which as a rule finds only indirect
expression, but we feel it as distinctly in his melancholy derision as
in the enthusiastic demonstrations of others.
As regards Heine, Börne's charges were, no doubt, to a certain extent
well founded. The versatile poet's temperament made the monotonous
struggle for a political conviction hard for him, and he was, as
we have already shown, drawn two ways and rendered vague in his
utterances by feeling himself to be at one and the same time a popular
revolutionist and an enthusiastic aristocrat. But his objection to
connecting himself with any of the existing political or religious
parties was more a proof of his high intellectual standard than of
anything else. His raillery in _Atta Troll_ at the canting preachers of
the Opposition is delightful and perfectly justifiable; it only shows
that he abhorred dogmatism in all its forms.
Börne is wrong in assuming that Heine, the man, was false to his
party, taking that word in its greater, wider, signification, namely,
the ideas for which he contended. For to these he was faithful, even
throughout the eight long years when he lay on his deathbed, with
difficulty opening his paralysed eyelids to look for God in that heaven
whose emptiness he himself had so sadly and defiantly described.
And Heine was as true a patriot as Börne. Every reader of his
works must remember the beautiful passage at the conclusion of the
_Reisebilder_, in which he tells how the Emperor Maximilian sate in
sore straits in the Tyrol, encompassed by his enemies, forgotten by his
knights and courtiers. Suddenly the door of his prison cell was opened,
and there entered a man in disguise, whom the Emperor recognised as
Kunz von der Rosen, his faithful court jester.
I feel it to be not only beautiful but true when Heine says: "O German
fatherland! beloved German people! I am thy Kunz von der Rosen. The
man whose only business it was to amuse thee, to cater for thy mirth
in times of prosperity, makes his way into thy prison in time of need.
Here, under my cloak, I bring thee thy strong sceptre and thy beautiful
crown--dost thou not recognise me, my Emperor? ... Thou liest in
fetters now, but in the end thy rightful cause will prevail; the day of
deliverance is at hand, a new time is beginning, my Emperor, the night
is over; look out and see the ruddy dawn."
If we beware of attaching too much importance to single expressions, to
the wanton or arrogant outbursts scattered here and there throughout
his works, we shall perceive that the feeling which finds classic
expression in the words just quoted was very strong in Heine's breast.
Neither his party standpoint, nor the admiration of things foreign
which it entailed, affected a very sincere, deep love of his native
land, which made exile in many ways a punishment to him. But he had
not the kind of patriotism which he somewhere ascribes to the average
German, the kind that narrows the heart, makes it shrink like leather
in the cold. His was the patriotism that warms the heart and widens it
until it is able to embrace the whole realm of civilization.[4] How
could he help loving Germany! As he himself has said, and as we all
must say each of his own country: "The truth is--Germany is ourselves."
His whole nature and character were determined by his German birth and
upbringing. The second half of his life being spent in an exile that
was partly voluntary, partly compulsory--in so far a homeless man, that
his works were prohibited throughout the German Confederation--the
German language became to him a true, a grander, a real fatherland. He
himself called the German tongue the most sacred of all possessions,
the unsilenceable call to liberty, a new fatherland for him whom
stupidity or malice has banished from the land of his birth.
[1] He bows the knee to Bonaparte, the hero, yet d'Enghien's death-cry
arouses his wrath: the poet observes from a higher watch-tower than the
battlements of party.
[2] What! not a party man! Is not strong party feeling the mother of
all victory? How can a poet calumniate the word in which lies the germ
of all the noblest deeds? Speak out like a man: Are you for or against
us? Is your watchword slavery or freedom? The Gods themselves descended
from Olympus and fought on the battlements of party.
[3] _Letter from Paris_, Dec. 15, 1831.
[4] Heine: _Werke_, vi. 51. _Cf_. xiv. 45, and xiii. 16.
XIX
IMMERMANN
All who are familiar with Heine's works or letters are aware of the
warm friendship and brotherhood in arms that united him in his youth to
Karl Immermann. He proposed to Immermann to insert some of his epigrams
in the _Reisebilder_, and as a matter of fact there are several pages
of them in the book between the divisions _Norderney_ and _Das Buch Le
Grand_. They satirise various literary personages and events of the
day. The attacks on those writers who imitated Oriental forms of poetry
incensed Platen, and induced him to write his dramatic satire, _Der
romantische Oedipus_, which in its turn called forth Heine's well-known
satire.
It was very curious that Platen, in his irritation, should with one
blow stamp as Romanticists the two men who, each in his own way, did
so much (more than Platen himself) to unswathe from the wrappings of
Romanticism a new spirit, a new art--the spirit, the art of modern
poetry.
Karl Immermann (born in 1796) was three years older than Heine. He was
the son of a correct, austere Government official in Magdeburg, and was
himself a man of strong character and solid culture, early imbued with
that old Prussian spirit of which there was not a trace in Heine. They
were contrasts in almost everything.
Immermann fought in the battle of Waterloo as a volunteer, entered
Paris with the army, afterwards retired with the rank of an officer,
and studied law at the University of Halle. His strong feeling of
justice led him into disputes with the powerful students' union,
Teutonia, which had usurped a kind of moral authority over all the
students, and enforced its principles, especially that of purity of
life, in a domineering, brutal fashion. For several years he continued
to oppose the practices of the Union, and more than once during this
time was obliged to invoke the power of the law to protect him from the
insults and persecution to which he was subjected by his antagonists.
The consequence of this was that he was hated by the great majority as
an informer--the more so as the political reactionaries took advantage
of this opposition to the traditional malpractices of the students'
unions, to attack, and, where it was possible, suppress the unions, a
proceeding for which Immermann was in no way responsible. From this
time onwards he stood alone. Much in his character, much of its dryness
and peculiarity, had its origin in this isolation, which also favoured
the development of pride and self-esteem.
[Illustration: IMMERMANN]