Heine seems, viewed superficially, the most baffling, elusive, and
inconsistent of all writers, the veritable Proteus of poetry. He has
so many shapes, that at the first blush it seems almost impossible to
grasp finally and definitely the one genuine Heine. What is really
this man who is now a gamin and now an angel, whose face seems almost
simultaneously to wear the sardonic grin of a Mephistopheles and the
wistful smile of a Christ, this flaunting Bohemian who has written
some of the tenderest love songs in literature, this cosmopolitan who
cherished the deepest feelings for his fatherland, this incarnate
paradox who almost at one and the same moment is swashbuckler and
martyr, French and German, Hebrew and Greek, revolutionary and
aristocrat, optimist and pessimist, idealist and mocker, believer and
infidel?
Yet it is even because of this surface inconsistency, this
psychological many-sidedness that Heine is a great poet and the one
who, mirroring in his own mind the complexity that he saw without, is
typically representative of the varied phases of the early nineteenth
century. Heine looks at life from every conceivable aspect: he sees
the gladness of life and rejoices therein; he sees the tears of life
and weeps; he sees the tragedy of life and cannot control his sobs; he
sees the farce of life and finds equal difficulty in controlling his
laughter. "Ah, dear reader," says Heine, "if you want to complain that
the poet is torn both ways, complain rather that the world is torn in
two. The poet's heart is the core of the world, and in this present
time it must of necessity be grievously rent. The great world-rift
clove right through my heart, and even thereby do I know that the great
gods have given me of their grace and preference and deemed me worthy
of the poet's martyrdom."
The first half of the nineteenth century, in fact, in which Heine
lived, is, like any transition period, disturbed, unsettled,
paradoxical. The most diverse tendencies boil and bubble together
in the crucible; the Revolution and the Reaction, Romanticism and
Hellenism, materialism and mysticism, democracy and aristocracy, poetry
and science, all ferment apace in the psychological Witches' Cauldron
of the age.
Heine simply represented the illusions and disillusions of this age, or
to put it with greater precision, he represented the clash and contrast
between these illusions and disillusions. To arrive then at a correct
appreciation of Heine it will be necessary to glance first at the main
currents of the contemporary events, the political movements of the
Revolution and the Reaction, and the literary movements of Romanticism
and Æstheticism.
All these currents flow either directly or indirectly from the French
Revolution. To the more sanguine and poetical minds of the time the
Revolution had manifested itself as a species of Armageddon, a gigantic
cataclysm, which, sweeping away all existing institutions with one
great shock, was to leave to mankind an untrammelled existence of
natural and idyllic perfection. These dreamers were destined to be
rudely disappointed. The Holy Alliance temporarily suppressed the
Revolution at Waterloo, and an efficient Reaction reigned both in
France and in Germany. A great religious revival set in in Prussia,
culminating in the Concordat with the Pope in 1821. The Press was
gagged by a rigid censorship, while the students at the universities
were subjected to the most rigorous police espionage. From the point of
view of the German idealists who hoped for liberty and progress, the
Revolution had ended in the most dismal of fiascos.
Parallel with the Revolution ran Romanticism, which eventually
merged in orthodoxy, or, to put it more accurately, in a mystical
Catholicism. The cardinal characteristic of Romanticism was the
revolt of the individual against the stereotyped prosaic life of the
classical eighteenth century. This revolt manifested itself in the
most untrammelled freedom of the ego, which either took to rioting in
an elaborate self-analysis, as did Hofmann and Jean Paul Richter, or
else simply abandoning ordinary life gave itself up to the cult of
the bizarre, the mystic, the mediæval, and the exotic, and fell in
love with the Infinite, or, to use the terminology of the school, the
Blue Flower. Though, however, Heine was in his poetic youth largely
influenced by the Romanticists (he was, in fact, dubbed by a Frenchman
with tolerable reason an "unfrocked Romantic"), the essence of his
maturer outlook on life is far from being romantic. The life-outlook of
the Romanticists consisted in a vague yearning for the ideal without
any reference to this earthly life; the life-outlook of Heine on the
other hand was made up largely of the almost brutal contrast between
the ideal and the real, between life as it was dreamed and life as it
actually was.
Another current of thought which it is necessary to mention, though
of course it exercised rather less influence on Heine than did
Romanticism, was the æsthetic neo-Hellenic movement represented by
Winckelmann, Lessing, and to a certain extent by Goethe.
Heine, however, though a lover of the beautiful, lacked almost entirely
the plastic genius and marble serenity of Hellas, and is, as will be
shown later, only a Greek in the exuberance of his _joie de vivre._
To summarise then the main tendencies of the age in which Heine was
born, we can see these four distinct currents--the glorious ideals of
the French Revolution, the official reaction against these ideals, the
cult of the bizarre and the infinite yearning of Romanticism, and the
Hellenism of the æsthetic movement. Let us now turn to the poet's life,
and examine the part played by environment, race, and parentage in
moulding his character.
Heine was born in Düsseldorf on December 1797, and not as is currently
supposed in 1799.
The Catholic Rhineland, in which Düsseldorf is situated, rebelled more
than almost any other district in Germany against the despotism of the
Prussian bureaucracy; it possessed an almost southern _joie de vivre_,
and only naturally exhibited a distinct inclination to the Catholicism
of the Romanticists, all of which characteristics in a greater or less
degree are to be found in Heine.
Further, Heine was a Jew, possessing, in consequence, an hereditary
tendency to gravitate to the extreme left wing both of thought and of
politics, while the inborn _Judenschmerz_ in his heart was aggravated
by the anti-Semitic reaction which followed the benevolent tolerance of
Napoleon.
The poet's father, Samson Heine, was an easy-going, æsthetic nonentity
in moderate circumstances, who does not appear to have exercised any
serious influence on the child's development. This was accomplished by
the mother, _née_ von Geldern, a cultured and strong-minded woman, and
a Voltairean by belief, who did her best to foster and stimulate her
son's youthful intelligence. The favourite authors of the young Heine
were Cervantes, Sterne, and Swift. Of contemporaries, the two men who
exercised any real influence were the Emperor Napoleon, and Byron, "the
kingly man" and the aristocratic revolutionary. Napoleon in particular
was the god of his boyish adoration. This Napoleonic enthusiasm was
largely fostered by Heine's friendship with a grenadier drummer of the
French army named Le Grand, while it reached its climax when he beheld
with his own eyes the beatific vision of the Emperor himself riding on
his beautiful white palfrey through the Hofgarten Allee at Düsseldorf,
in splendid defiance of the police regulations, which forbade such
riding under a penalty of five thalers.
This worship of the Emperor, moreover, resulted in the wonderful poem
called "The Grenadiers," written at the age of eighteen. The swing and
power of the poem have made it classic, especially the great final
stanza beginning:
"Denn reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab."
Heine received his early education at a Jesuit monastery. The first
event of any moment in his life, however, is his calf-love for Josepha,
or Sefchen, the executioner's daughter, a weird fantastic beauty of
fifteen, with large dark eyes and blood-red hair. Josepha was the
inspiration of the juvenile _Dream Pictures_ incorporated subsequently
in the _Book of Songs_, and exhibiting a genuine power and an even more
genuine promise.
In 1816 Heine was sent into the office of Solomon Heine, his
millionaire uncle of Hamburg.
He seems to have been singularly destitute of the financial genius of
his race, and the business career proved from the outset a fiasco. The
real key, however, to the three years spent in Hamburg is supplied not
by Money, but by Love. Having served his apprenticeship in Düsseldorf
with his calf-attachment to the executioner's daughter, Heine proceeded
straightway to a _grande passion_ for his uncle's pretty daughter
Amalie. His love was not reciprocated, and in 1821 the beauteous Amalie
married a wealthy landowner of Königsberg. This Amalie incident was one
of the most important in Heine's life, and is largely responsible for
his early cynicism. He was disillusioned with a vengeance, and could
now with his own eyes inspect the flimsy material of which "Love's
Young Dream" is wove. Though, however, a great personal blow, this
abortive passion is also to be regarded as an invaluable æsthetic
asset. The poet of necessity is bound to write of his own personal
impressions and experiences; and it is obvious that the intenser are
these experiences, the more vital will be his poetry. If Heine's love
for Amalie was the accursed flame that seared his soul, it was also the
sacred fire that kindled his inspiration, and it is to Amalie that we
owe not only a great part of the _Book of Songs_, but also much which
is characteristic of Heine's subsequent life-outlook.
In 1819, probably because Heine had given convincing proofs of his
business inefficiency, it was decided that he should go to Bonn to
study law. He neglected his studies, and it was not long before he fell
foul of the authorities, owing to his anticipation in the proceedings
of the Burschenschaften or student political unions.
In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen. At Göttingen his career was
brief but thrilling, and he was rusticated after a few months on
account of a proposed duel with an impertinent _junker_.
Transferring his quarters to Berlin, he now spent by far the most
enjoyable period of his university career. The intellectual atmosphere
of Berlin was quicker and less pedantic than that of Göttingen, and he
plunged into his studies with considerable energy.
In 1821 Heine published the first volume of his poems, containing the
_Dream Pictures_, some miscellaneous juvenile poems, and the _Lyrisches
Intermezzo,_ which was inspired by the banker's, in the same way that
the _Dream Pictures_ had been inspired by the executioner's, daughter.
The book was an immediate success, how great may be gauged by the
numerous parodies and imitations which it almost instantaneously
evoked. It was at this period that he wrote the two romantic tragedies
of _Ratcliff_ and _Almansor_. Both failures and devoid of much merit,
they served none the less useful purpose of advertising his fame.
In 1823 we see an echo of his passion for Amalie in his love for his
younger cousin Therese, who seems in many respects to have been a
replica of her elder sister. Therese, however, refused to be anything
more than a cousin to him, and his heart was still further embittered
as is shown by the poem:
"Wer zum erstenmale liebt
Sei's auch glücklos ist ein Gott
Aber wer zum zweitenmale
Glücklos liebt, er ist ein Narr
Ich, ein solcher Narr, ich liebe
Wieder ohne Gegenliebe;
Sonne, Mond und Sterne lachen
Und ich lache mit und sterbe."
In 1824 he decided to prosecute his studies for his doctorial degree
with greater seriousness, and leaving behind him the distractions
of the capital, went back once more to the more staid and prosaic
Göttingen.
Heine intended not merely to take a degree for the sake of ornament,
but also to practise seriously as a lawyer. How serious were these
intentions may be seen from the fact that he went to the length of
paying in advance the heavy entrance fee which the legal profession
then exacted from Jews, and became baptized "as a Protestant and a
Lutheran to boot" on June 28, 1825.
Heine's conversion has frequently been criticised with superfluous
harshness. Let him, however, explain his position for himself:
"At that time I myself was still a god, and none of the
positive religions had more value for me than another; I
could only wear their uniforms as a matter of courtesy,
on the same principle that the Emperor of Russia dresses
himself up as an officer of the Prussian Guard when he
honours his imperial cousin with a visit to Potsdam."
After all, his apostasy brought with it its own punishment, not only
in its deep-felt shame, but in the fact that he eventually threw up
law for literature, and thus rendered so great a sacrifice of racial
loyalty and his own self-respect consummately futile. After selling
his birthright he found that he had absolutely no use for the mess of
pottage which he had purchased.
In the summer of 1825, Heine, having just succeeded in passing his
degree, proceeded to the little island of Norderney, off the coast of
Holland, to recuperate. Living ardently the simple life and indulging
to the full his passion for the sea, he now wrote not only the second
part of the _Reisebilder,_ entitled _Norderney_, but the far greater
_Nordsee Cyklus,_ which in its irregular swinging metre expresses with
such marvellous efficiency the whole roar and grandeur of the ocean.
Speaking generally, of course, Heine was too subjective to be a real
nature poet. No writer, it is true, fills up so freely and with so
fantastic an elegance the blank cheques of nightingales and violets,
lilies and roses, stars and moonshine, yet none the less these rather
served to grace his measure than as his real flame. His one genuine
love was the sea. With the sea he felt a deep psychological affinity.
The sea was the symbol of his own infinite restlessness, of his own
divine discontent, and mirrored in the sea's ever-changing waters he
beheld the incessant smiles and storms of his own soul.
"I love the sea, even as my own soul," he writes. "Often
do I fancy that the sea is in truth my very soul; and
as in the sea there are hidden water-plants that only
swim up to the surface at the moment of their bloom and
sink down again at the moment of their decay, even so
do wondrous flower-pictures swim up out of the depths
of my soul, spread their light and fragrance, and again
vanish."
In 1826 Heine published the _Heimkehr_, the _Nordsee Cyklus_, the airy
and sparkling _Harzreise_, and the first part of the _Reisebilder_.
From Norderney Heine moved to Hamburg, avowedly to practise, though
it does not appear that he took his profession with much seriousness.
At any rate, until 1831, when he migrated to Paris, his career is
excessively erratic. At one moment he is paying a flying visit to
England, "the land of roast beef and Yorkshire plum-pudding, where
the machines behave like men and the men like machines"; at another
he is on the staff of the _Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen_ and the
_Morgenblatt_ of Munich; he is now in Hamburg, now in Frankfurt, and
now in Italy, where his sojourn inspired the racy and brilliant _Italy_
and _Baths of Lucca_, both of which works obtained the gratuitous and
well-merited state advertisement of prohibition, and achieved a most
undeniable _succès de scandale_.
The departure to Paris marks an entirely new epoch in Heine's life, and
offers a convenient stopping-place at which to give some account of his
early poetry and prose, as exemplified in the _Book of Songs_, which
was published in 1827, and the _Reisebilder_, the last part of which,
the _Baths of Lucca_, was published in 1831.
Though neither the _Book of Songs_ nor the _Reisebilder_ is as great
or as characteristic as the _Romanzero_ and _Poetische Nachlese_ on
the one hand, or the _Salon_ on the other, they are yet by far the
most popular of his works and contain some of his most delightful
writing. One of the first traits that strikes us in the _Book of
Songs_ is the Romantic tendency to bizarre and exotic themes. In the
_Junge Leiden_ and _Lyrisches Intermezzo_ in particular we move in a
ghostly atmosphere of apparitions, sea-maidens, skeletons, and midnight
churchyards. Another interesting characteristic of these poems is his
deep love of the East, a love which is to be probably ascribed more to
the general eastward gravitation of the Romantic school than to the
poet's Oriental blood. This tendency is responsible for two of the most
charming poems in the book, the exquisite lyric starting:
"Auf Flügeln des Gesanges
Herzliebchen trag ich dich fort
Fort nach den Fluren des Ganges
Dort weiss ich den schönsten Ort."
"Dort liegt ein rotblühender Garten
Im stillen Mondenschein;
Die Lotosblumen erwarten
Ihr trautes Schwesterlein."