"Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kabler Höh',
Ihn schläfert; mit weisser Decke
Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er traumt von einer Palme,
Die fern im Morgenland
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand."
This latter poem in particular illustrates admirably the vague melting,
infinite yearning which Heine at first experienced as deeply as did any
of the Romanticists. There are not wanting, however, and especially
towards the end of the book, examples of his later manner, of that note
of rebellion which he was afterwards to strike with such inimitable
precision. Occasionally his wistful pessimism suddenly changes into
cynicism, and in reaction from his morbid sensitiveness he derives a
sardonic satisfaction from probing his own wounds as in the already
quoted "Wer zum erstenmale liebt," while in the mock-heroic _Donna
Clara_ and in the _Frieden_ we see that artistic use of the anti-climax
of which he was afterwards to acquire an even greater mastery. Even in
the comparatively early _Lyrisches Intermezzo_ we see him constantly
playing on that contrast between the Real and the Ideal, between Dream
Life and Waking Life, which formed so integral a part of his subsequent
life-outlook. Speaking generally, however, the _Book of Songs_ exhibits
the sentimental rather than the cynical side of Heine's mind. It
possesses moreover those qualities which remained in Heine throughout
his life, the light, airy touch, the intimate personal note, the
delicate lyric sweetness, and that concision which is found in poetry
with such extreme rarity.
Let us turn now to the _Reisebilder_. Its most dominant characteristics
are its inimitable swing and the absolute irresponsibility of its
transitions. The grave, the gay; the lively, the severe; the sublime,
the ridiculous; the reverent, the frivolous; the refined, the crude;
the poetic, the obscene, all jostle pell-mell against each other
in this most fascinating of literary kaleidoscopes. It is no mere
guide-book, this record of his wanderings in the Harz, in Norderney, in
England, and in Italy, but rather a description of those reflections
on men and things which were suggested by his various adventures. In
style the _Reisebilder_ marks a new epoch in German prose, or, as has
been said, showed for the first time since Lessing and Goethe that such
a thing as German prose really did exist. Heine was the first to show
convincingly that a Gallic grace and flexibility could be imparted into
the cumbrous and heavy-footed Teutonic language.
Psychologically the most interesting part of the _Reisebilder_ is the
fervent Napoleonic worship which, combined with his love of liberty and
revolt against reaction, largely contributed to mould his life. The
general tone, moreover, of political, sexual, and religious freedom
that characterises the latter part of the _Reisebilder_ rendered
Heine not a little obnoxious to official Germany, not only because of
the intrinsic heresy of the sentiments themselves, but of the joyous
rollicking insolence with which they were paraded.
It is small wonder, then, that the Paris July Revolution of 1830 made
the poet feel "as if he could set the whole ocean up to the very North
Pole on fire with the red-heat of enthusiasm and mad joy that worked in
him," and that in the spring of 1831 he migrated finally and definitely
from Germany to Paris.
This migration to Paris marks the turning-point in Heine's life. His
career in Germany had throughout been erratic, unsatisfactory, and
hampered by political restrictions. In Paris he settled down, felt
that now at last he was in a congenial element, and--found himself.
It was at Paris that he wrote his most brilliant prose and found
inspiration for his highest poetry, that he experienced his wildest
joys and his intensest sufferings. The first ten years of his sojourn
were probably the happiest in his life. His increased literary and
journalistic earnings helped to solve the financial problem, while
socially he was, as always, a pronounced success. He soon found his
way into the centre of the artistic set of the capital, and was on a
footing of intimacy with such writers as Lafayette, Balzac, Victor
Hugo, Georges Sand, Théophile Gautier, Michelet, Dumas, Gérard de
Nerval, Hector Berlioz, Ludwig Borne, Schlegel, and Humboldt. In
social life Heine's most characteristic feature was wit--a wit so
irrepressible as to burst forth impartially on practically all
occasions, and to resemble that of the Romans of the early Empire,
who preferred to lose their heads rather than their epigrams. Yet
in private life he was a devoted son and brother, an ideal husband.
The correspondence which he maintained up to his death with his
sister Lotte and his mother show conclusively what stores of German
_Gemut_ he treasured in his heart. Particularly significant is the
fact that during the whole eight years in which he languished in his
mattress-grave he assiduously concealed from his mother the real state
of his health. Yet none the less "he could hate deeply and grimly
with an energy which I have never yet met in any other man, but only
because he could love with equal intensity," writes the poet's friend,
Meissner. Heine disapproved on principle of swallowing an injury; when
he was hit, he hit back. Not infrequently, as in his rather scandalous
attack on Börne, he would _riposte_ with somewhat superfluous
efficiency, though according to his own theories it must have been
after all only a mistake on the safe side.
"Yes," writes Heine, "one must forgive one's enemies, but not until
they have been hanged."
Heine's quarrel with Börne originally arose out of the abomination with
which Börne, who was Radical to the point of fanaticism, regarded the
somewhat poetic and elastic Liberalism of his fellow-Jew, and it is
instructive to enter into an examination of the depth and strength of
those views which supplied the real motive power which drove him from
Germany to France. There can be no doubt that Heine himself took his
Liberalism with perfect seriousness. "In truth I know not," he writes,
"if I merit that my coffin should be decorated with a laurel wreath.
However much I loved Poesy, she was ever to me only a holy toy or a
consecrated means for heavenly ends. It is rather a sword that they
should lay on my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation
War of Humanity." It should be observed, however, that this Liberal had
the most aristocratic contempt for the uncultured _δημος_,
as is shown by passages such as the following: "The horny hands of the
Socialists who will unpityingly break all the marble statues which are
so dear to my heart"; and, "If Democracy really triumphs, it is all up
with poetry."
Yet there can be no gainsaying that Heine's political orthodoxy was
perfectly unimpeachable on that anti-clericalism which has always been
one of the most cardinal points of Continental Liberalism.
He is rarely tired of tilting at Catholicism, and while he regarded
ascetic mediæval Catholicism as the vampire which sucked the blood
and light out of the hearts of men, he dubbed the modern Catholic
reactionaries in Germany "the Party of lies, the ruffians of
Despotism, the restorers of all the folly and abomination of the Past."
Yet, if his beliefs were too wide to admit of the narrowness of a
consistent partisanship, his enthusiasm was deep and sincere for the
joy, light, and liberty of a new era that was to sweep away all the
unhealthy and plaguy humours of that blind, delirious, and anæmic
mediævaldom, which, to use his own phrase, has spread over the
countries like an infectious disease, till Europe was but one huge
hospital. Politically, in fine, Heine is a brilliant freelance, who,
too proud to wear the uniform of party, none the less fought valiantly
for the army of Progress and Humanity, a forlorn outpost in the War of
Freedom.[1]
Heine's polemical modernity manifested itself most efficiently in
the _Deutschland_, which, together with its sequel, _The Romantic
School_, was issued as a counter-blast to Madame de Staël's work of the
same name. This history of the religion, literature, and philosophy
of Germany is the masterpiece of Heine's extant prose. An academic
philosophic treatise, of course, it neither is nor professes to be.
As a description half-serious, half-flippant, however, of the main
currents of modern and mediæval Germany by a writer who sees life from
the bird's-eye view of the combined poet, journalist, thinker, and man
of the world, it is unrivalled. It contains some of Heine's loftiest
and most sublime flights, some of his most brilliant and trenchant
epigrams.
Particularly happy is the comparison drawn between the furious
onslaughts made by the French Revolutionists under Robespierre and the
German philosophers under Kant on respectively the divine rights of
kings and the divine rights of God.
How delicious is the conclusion of the parallel between the two men:
"Each eminently represents the ideal middle-class type--Nature had
decreed that they should weigh out coffee and sugar, but Fate willed
that they should weigh out other things, and in the scales of the one
did she lay a King and in the scales of the other a God....
"And they both gave exact weight."
As, however, has been previously pointed out, Heine's chief
characteristic as a prose writer is that marvellous elasticity which
can rebound from the frivolous to the sublime with the most consummate
ease and celerity. Interspersed with the bright flash-light of the
epigrammatic pyrotechnics lie really great passages, and pieces in
particular like those on Luther and Goethe possess the clear golden
ring of the grand style.
Heine's political ideals were subjected to the inevitable
disillusionment. The Revolution of July, which he had fondly hoped
would complete the work of the great movement of 1793, merely resulted
in the anti-climax of the establishment of a bourgeois constitution
under a bourgeois monarch. He tended to become generally embittered.
Money matters, too, began to irritate him, and his health to give
him trouble, and though he found a devoted sick-nurse in Matilde
Crescenzia Mirat, a grisette whom he married in 1841, the lady with
whom "he quarrelled daily for six years in that life-long duel at
the termination of which only one of the combatants would be left
alive," yet none the less his condition began to deteriorate. "The
damp cold days and black long nights of his exile" oppressed him, and
he began to yearn for the old German soil. He gratified his _Heimweh_
by a flying and surreptitious visit to Germany that inspired the
well-known _Germany_ or a _Winter Tale_, which, together with the
somewhat similar _Atta Troll_, constitutes his most sustained poetic
achievement. These two poems are about as characteristic as anything
which he wrote. They represent admirably his wild classic Dionysiac
fantasy, his sudden dips from the most extravagant Romanticism to the
harsh, crude facts of reality, the marvellous swing and sweep of his
Aristophanic humour.
Very typical is the following satire on the intimate relation between
anthropo- and arctomorphism.
"Up above in star-pavilion,
On his golden throne of lordship,
Ruling worlds with sway majestic,
Sits a Polar bear colossal."
"Stainless, snow-white shines the glamour
Of his skin, his head is wreathed
With a diadem of diamonds,
Flashing light through all the heavens."
"Harmony rests in his visage,
And the silent deeds of thought,
Just a whit he bends his sceptre,
And the spheres they ring and sing."
The above quotation shows excellently the essentially poetic quality
by which Heine's wit is illumined. A satirist as keen and vivid as
Voltaire, he possesses all the logical aptness of the Frenchman without
his dryness. His chief characteristic, in fact, is the method by which
in his imaginative flights he combines the maximum of this logical
aptness with the maximum of humorous incongruity. No humorist dives
for his metaphors into stranger water or brings up from the deep more
bizarre and fantastic gems. A charming example of Heinean humour is
the following passage from one of his prefaces: "A pious Quaker once
sacrificed his whole fortune in buying up the most beautiful of the
mythological pictures of Giulio Romano in order to consign them to the
flames--verily he merits thereby to go to heaven and be whipped with
birches regularly every day."
One of the most cardinal traits of Heine's wit and humour is a
phenomenal freedom of tone and language, a freedom that is occasionally
not always in the most unimpeachable taste. Heine, in fact, is a
writer who admits the public gratis to his psychological toilette,
where he exposes with studied recklessness his most private thoughts.
This question cuts too deep into Heine's life-outlook to be lightly
passed over, and necessitates some examination. In the first place
even Heine's most enthusiastic admirer will admit that a great deal of
this licence is sheer gaminerie; Heine is the mischievous schoolboy
of literature who thoroughly revels in being naughty, grimacing by an
almost mechanical instinct, so soon as he catches a glimpse of the
sacred figures of religion and sex. Like Baudelaire, he loves, almost
indeed as a matter of conscientious principle, to make the hairs of
the philistines stand on end. His one excuse, however, is that even
when he causes the hairs of the philistines almost to spring from their
roots, as indeed he does not infrequently, he conducts the operation
with so light a touch, so exquisite a grace, that the offence is almost
redeemed. Let him speak in his own defence, in the lines from the great
Jewish poem, "Jehudah Halevy":
"As in Life so too in poetry
Grace is aye Man's highest Good;
Who has grace, he never sinneth
Not in verse nor e'en in prose."
"And by God's grace such a poet
Genius we do entitle,
King supreme and uncontrolled
In the great desmesne of thought."
Not unnaturally his coarseness grew apace with the virulence of his
disease, and he himself explains his cause to his friend "La Mouche":
"Vois-tu c'est la faute de la mort qui arrive à grands pas, et quand
je la sens ainsi tout près de moi comme à present j'ai besoin de me
cramponner la vie ne fût ce par une poutre pourrie." This final phase
in fact was simply a reaction against his fate, and is not altogether
without analogy to that same psychological principle which dictated
much of the crude buffoonery of Swift and Carlyle by way of an heroic
protest against their own helplessness.
Far more important, however, is the fact that this particular trait
of Heine is profoundly symbolic of his outlook on life, especially
where an obscene jest marks the climax of a genuinely poetical flight.
Circumstance turned him into a cynic, who saw frequently in Liberty but
the uprising of a squalid proletariate, who heard in the "sweet lies
of the nightingale, the flatterer of spring," merely the "harbingers
of the decay of its queenliness," and who beheld in love but a mere
illusion of the senses that vanishes so soon as the beloved one utters
a syllable. Held fast in the grip of the great World-paradox, Heine
is forced to look at life as a glaring phantasmagoria of blacks and
whites, in which the sublime and the ridiculous, the pathetic and the
grotesque, the refined and the crude, dance along hand in hand till
they become so confused that it is impossible for the observer to
distinguish the individual partners, and he is reduced to describing,
in pairs, the giddy, whirling couples that make up the fantastic medley.
This incessant antithesis makes Heine one of the most complete of
modern writers.
The poet's world is composed of two hemispheres: one is the abode of
the beautiful, the grand, the tragic; the other of the ugly, the petty,
the comic. Most poets confine their efforts to only a small portion
of one of these hemispheres. Heine, however, is the Atlas of poetry,
who supports both of the half-spheres of the world, and who, by way of
proving how easily his burden sits upon him, suddenly turns juggler,
and after showing his audience one side of the magic globe, will, _hey
presto_! whisk the whole world round, and before they know where they
are smilingly confront them with the other.
In 1848 the spinal affection from which he suffered became so acute
that Heine was compelled to take to that mattress-grave where,
paralytic and half-blind and racked intermittently by the most
agonising spasms, he dragged out the eight most ghastly years of his
life. At first the death-chamber was one of the favourite rendezvous
of fashionable Paris, but as the novelty wore off, his circle of
friends grew narrower and narrower, until eventually a visit from
Berlioz seemed only the crowning proof of the musician's inveterate
eccentricity.
Heine, however, rose manfully to the occasion, and did all that
he could under the circumstances. Always a passionate lover of
the paradoxical, he now began to appreciate with an intense and
unprecedented relish the infinite humour of the great Life-farce, one
of the most effective scenes of which was even now being enacted in the
person of the poet of _joie de vivre_, who, enduring all the agonies of
the damned, lay dying in La Rue d'Amsterdam to the quick music of the
piano on the story underneath, while only a few feet away shone all the
glow and glitter of Parisian life.
The chief occupation and solace of the dying man was the writing of his
Memoirs, the great _Apologia pro vitâ suâ_ which was to square his
accounts with the world, and win for him the future as his own.
Yet at times the greatness of his sufferings would soften his heart.
He would find in the Bible the magic book which had power to dispel
his earthly torments; the "_Heimweh_ for heaven" would fall upon him,
and again would he know his God. It would seem, however, that Heine's
death-bed reconversion is simply to be regarded as one of the numerous
instances of the Prince of Darkness exhibiting monastic proclivities
under the stress of severe physical _malaise_. For eight years Heine
lay a-dying, and with the skeleton of Death assiduously serving the
few bitter crumbs that yet remained of his feast of life, he was, as a
simple matter of pathology, almost bound to believe once more, even if
he had been the most hardened infidel in existence. Heine, however, was
no cynical atheist. The current religions, it is true, he considered
pretty poetry, but bad logic, yet none the less he was genuinely imbued
with the ethical idea.
"I am too proud," he writes, "to be influenced by greed for the
heavenly wages of virtue or by fear of hellish torments. I strive after
the good because it is beautiful and attracts me irresistibly, and I
abominate the bad because it is hateful and repugnant to me."
What, in fact, served Heine in the stead of a theology was his fervid
enthusiasm for Progress and Humanity. His real religion was the
religion of Freedom, the religion of the poor people, the new creed
of which Jean Rousseau was the John the Baptist and Voltaire the
chief apostle; Heine's Madonna was the red goddess of Revolution, who
exacted from her worshippers innumerable hecatombs of human victims;
the Man-god whom he revered as the Saviour of Society was Napoleon,
the Son of the Revolution, the drastic reorganiser of the world, who,
unappreciated by the pharisees and reactionaries of his time, and
finding his Golgotha on the "martyr-cliffs of St. Helena," endured for
more than five years all the agonies of a moral crucifixion; while to
complete our version of the Heinesque theology, his _Heilige Geist_
was the Holy Spirit of the Human Intellect which he says "is seen in
its greatest glory in Light and Laughter," and the Revelation which
inspired him most deeply was, to use once more his own phrase, "the
sacred mystic Revelation that we name poesy."
It is interesting to trace the influence of these last ghastly years
on Heine's writings. His almost complete physical prostration brought
with it its own compensation in the shape of a marvellous psychic
exaltation, and the _Romanzero_ and the _Poetische Nachlese_ contain
some of his greatest and most moving poems. Nowhere do we see more
clearly his most characteristic excellences, his delicacy, his power of
antithesis, his concision.
It is Heine's compression, in fact, which is one of the most pronounced
features of his poetic style. The whole quintessence of joy and pain,
of love and sorrow, is frequently distilled into one short poem. This
Heinesque condensation is a variant of the same theory that can be
traced in the old Impressionist school of painters which is concerned
with the outline and the proper light and shading of the outline to the
exclusion of minor details, and in the journalistic cult of the "story"
in which the ideal aimed at is "the point, the whole point, and nothing
but the point." Heine, in fact, is unique among the poets for narrating
a tale with the minimum of space and the maximum of effect, for
narrating it in such a way that each line serves to heighten the level
of intensity, till at length the edifice is crowned by the climax. This
feature of his style is well illustrated by the end of the frequently
quoted poem, "The Asra," in the _Romanzero_:
"And the slave spake, I am called
Mohammed, I am from Yemen,
And my stock is from those Asras,
_They who die whene'er they love_."
Though, moreover, he protested to the last against his fate, his tone
in the _Romanzero_ and the earlier _Poetische Nachlese_ is more mellow
than in his earlier writings. His cry from the heart is not the cry
of defiance but rather of the pathetic wistfulness of impotence. Yet
before the candle of his life became extinguished it leapt up in one
final flicker, the most marvellous of all. A characteristic caprice
of fate made him acquainted during the last months of his life with
his one true soul-affinity, the charming woman who is known under the
pseudonym of Camille Selden or La Mouche.
Is it then to be wondered at that when the rich feast of a perfect
love, for which he had craved Tantalus-like all his life, was offered
to him almost at the very minute that his lips were being sealed
by the cold kiss of death, the whole soul of the man should leap
up in indignant protest, and that such poems as "Lass die heiligen
Parabolen," and the even more wonderful series of stanzas with the
refrain, "O schöne Welt du bist abscheulich," should exhibit the cold
insolent shrug of the man convinced of the righteousness of his plea
that of all the places in the universe this human earth "where the just
man drags himself along beneath the blood-stained burden of his cross,
while the wicked man rides in triumph on his high steed," is the most
iniquitous?
Heine died at four o'clock in the morning of February 17, 1856. He was
buried by his own directions in Montmartre, "in order to avoid being
disturbed by the crowd and bustle of Père Lachaise."
His writings form an incessant stream of paradoxes, but his life is the
greatest paradox of all. The prophet of the new religion of liberty, he
was repudiated by his country, and his happiest days were spent in the
land of exile; throughout his life he sought for love, to live years
of the most healthy prosaic domesticity with his mistress, and to find
his one true romance on his death-bed; he imagined that he was a great
political force, but it is rather as a poet that he survives; as a poet
his chief theme was the Joy and Light of Life, and he drew his truest
inspiration from the darkest depths of his agony; even as a great
writer he has been chiefly known by the comparatively inferior _Book
of Songs_ and _Reisebilder,_ while his masterpiece, the _Memoirs_, the
great highly barbed Parthian arrow shot from the grave to transfix his
enemies for all eternity, lay mouldering for many years amid the dusty
archives of the Vienna Library.
His message, too, the core and kernel of his philosophy, is again
a paradox. To the sphinx-like riddle with which every thinker is
confronted, "Is Life poetry or prose, tragedy or farce?" Heine made
answer that the pathos and poetry of life were contained in the fact
that life was so essentially grim and unpoetical, and that the real
tragedy of the world lay in the ghastly farce of it all.
[Footnote 1: _Cf._ the poem "Enfant perdu," beginning "Verlorner Posten
in dem Freiheits Kriege."]