humor with "a laughing tear" in his escutcheon, always the poetic
anomaly, coquetting with his pain and scoffing it away. Young or old,
well or ill, we do not know him different.
And yet this poet too had a development, upon which at different times
different influences worked....
The first epoch in this course of development may be called the
"youthful"; the 'Travel Pictures' and the lyrics contained in it form
its brilliant conclusion. This is no storm-and-stress period in the way
that, as Schiller and Goethe passed through it, completed works first
issued under its clarifying influence. On the contrary, it is
characteristic of Heine that we have to thank this youthful epoch for
his best and most peculiarly national poems. The wantonness and the
sorrows of this youth, in their piquant mixture, created these songs
permeated by the breath of original talent, whose physiognomy, more than
all that follow later, bears the mark of the kind and manner peculiar to
Heine, and which for a long time exercised in our literature through a
countless host of imitators an almost epidemic effect. But these lyric
pearls, which in their purity and their crystalline polish are a lasting
adornment of his poet's crown, and belong to the lyric treasures of our
national literature, were also gathered in his first youthful epoch,
when he still dived down into the depths of life in the diving-bell of
romanticism.
Although Heinrich Heine asserted of himself that he belonged to the
"first men of the century," since he was born in the middle of New
Year's night, 1800, more exact investigation has nevertheless shown
that truth is here sacrificed to a witticism. Heine is still a child of
the eighteenth century, by whose most predominant thoughts his work too
is influenced, and with whose European coryphaeus, Voltaire, he has an
undeniable relationship. He was born, as Strodtmann proves, on the 13th
of December, 1799, in Duesseldorf, His father was a plain cloth-merchant;
his mother, of the family Von Geldern, the daughter of a physician of
repute. The opinion, however, that Heine was the fruit of a
Jewish-Christian marriage, is erroneous. The family Von Geldern belonged
to the orthodox Jewish confession. One of its early members, according
to family tradition, although he was a Jew, had received the patent of
nobility from one of the prince electors of Juelich-Kleve-Berg, on
account of a service accorded him. As, moreover, Schiller's and Goethe's
mothers worked upon their sons an appreciable educational influence, so
was this also the case with Heine's mother, who is described as a pupil
of Rousseau and an adorer of Goethe's elegies, and thus reached far out
beyond the measure of the bourgeois conditions in which she lived....
That which however worked upon his youthful spirit, upon his whole
poetical manner, was the French sovereignty in the Rhine-lands at the
time of his childhood and youth. The Grand Duchy of Berg, to which
Duesseldorf belonged, was ruled in the French manner; a manner which,
apart from the violent conscriptions, when compared with the Roman
imperial periwig style had great advantages, and in particular granted
to Jews complete equal rights with Christians, since the revolutionary
principle of equality had outlived the destruction of freedom. Thus the
Jews in Duesseldorf in their greater part were French sympathizers, and
Heine's father too was an ardent adherent of the new regime. This as a
matter of course could not remain without influence upon the son, so
much the less as he had French instruction at the lyceum. A vein of the
lively French blood is unmistakable in his works. It drew him later on
to Paris, where he made the martyr stations of his last years. And of
all recent German poets, Heinrich Heine is the best known in France,
better known even than our classic poets; for the French feel this vein
of related blood....
From his youth springs, too, Heine's enthusiasm for the great Napoleon,
which however he has never transmitted to the successors of the _idees
Napoleoniennes_. The thirteen-year-old pupil of the gymnasium saw the
Emperor in the year 1811, and then again in May 1812; and later on in
the 'Book Legrand' of the 'Travel Pictures' he strikes up the following
dithyrambic, which, as is always the case with Heine where the great
Caesar is concerned, tones forth pure and full, with genuine poetic
swing, without those dissonances in which his inmost feelings often
flow. "What feelings came over me," he exclaims, "when I saw him
himself, with my own highly favored eyes, him himself, Hosanna, the
Emperor! It was in the avenue of the Court garden in Duesseldorf. As I
pushed myself through the gaping people, I thought of his deeds and his
battles, and my heart beat the general march--and nevertheless, I
thought at the same time of the police regulation that no one under a
penalty of five thalers should ride through the middle of the avenue.
And the Emperor rode quietly through the middle of the avenue; no
policeman opposed him. Behind him, his suite rode proudly on snorting
horses and loaded with gold and jewels, the trumpets sounded, and the
people shouted with a thousand voices, 'Long live the Emperor!'" To this
enthusiasm for Napoleon, Heine not long afterward gave a poetic setting
in the ballad 'The Two Grenadiers.'...
The Napoleonic remembrances of his youth, which retained that unfading
freshness and enthusiasm that are wont to belong to all youthful
remembrances, were of vital influence upon Heine's later position in
literature; they formed a balance over against the romantic tendency,
and hindered him from being drawn into it. Precisely in that epoch when
the beautiful patriotism of the Wars of Liberation went over into the
weaker feeling of the time of the restoration, and romanticism, grown
over-devout, in part abandoned itself to externals, in part became a
centre of reactionary efforts, Heine let this Napoleonic lightning play
on the sultry heavens of literature, in the most daring opposition to
the ruling disposition of the time and a school of poetry from which he
himself had proceeded; while he declared war upon its followers. However
greatly he imperiled his reputation as a German patriot through these
hosannas offered to the hereditary enemy, just as little was it to be
construed amiss that the remembrance of historical achievements, and of
those principles of the Revolution which even the Napoleonic despotism
must represent, were a salutary ventilation in the miasmic atmosphere of
the continually decreasing circle which at that time described German
literature. In the prose of Heine, which like Beranger glorified Caesar,
slumbered the first germs of the political lyric, which led again out of
the moonlit magic realm of romanticism into the sunny day of history.
A hopeless youthful love for a charming Hamburg maiden was the Muse of
the Heine lyric, whose escutcheon has for a symbol "the laughing tear."
With the simplicity of Herodotus the poet himself relates the fact, the
experience, in the well-known poem with the final strophe:--
"It is an ancient story,
But still 'tis ever new:
To whomsoe'er it happens
His heart is broken too."
We comprehend from biographical facts the inner genesis of the Heine
lyric. Heine was in the position of Werther, but a Werther was for the
nineteenth century an anomaly; a lyric of this sort in yellow nankeen
breeches would have travestied itself. The content of the range of
thought, the circle of world-shaping efforts, had so expanded itself
since the French Revolution that a complete dissolution into sentimental
extravagance had become an impossibility. The justification of the
sentiment was not to be denied; but it must not be regarded as the
highest, as the life-determining element. It needed a rectification
which should again rescue the freedom of the spirit. Humor alone could
accomplish Munchausen's feat, and draw itself by its own hair out of the
morass. Heine expressed his feelings with genuine warmth; he formed them
into drawn pictures and visions; but then he placed himself on the
defensive against them. He is the modern Werther, who instead of loading
his pistol with a ball, loads it with humor. Artistic harmony suffered
under this triumph of spiritual freedom; but that which appeared in his
imitators as voluntary quibbling came from Heine of inner necessity. The
subject of his first songs is the necessary expression of a struggle
between feeling and spirit, between the often visionary dream life of a
sentiment and self-consciousness, soaring free out over the world, which
adjudged absorption in a single feeling as one-sided and unjustified.
Later on, to be sure, these subjects of youthful inspiration became in
Heine himself a satiric-humoristic manner, which regarded as a model
worked much evil in literature. In addition to personal necessity
through one's own experience, there was for a genius such as Heine's
also a literary necessity, which lay in the development of our
literature in that epoch. It was the Indian Summer of romanticism, whose
cobwebs at this time flew over the stubble of our poetry. The vigorous
onset of the lyricists of the Wars of Liberation had again grown lame;
people reveled in the album sentiments of Tiedge and Mahlmann; the
spectres of Amadeus Hoffmann and the lovely high-born maidens of knight
Fouque were regarded then as the noblest creations of German fantasy.
Less chosen spirits, that is to say, the entire great reading public of
the German nation, which ever felt toward its immortals a certain
aversion, refreshed itself with the lukewarm water of the poetry of
Clauren, from out of which, instead of the Venus Anadyomene, appear a
Mimili and other maiden forms, pretty, but drawn with a stuffed-out
plasticism. On the stage reigned the "fate tragedies" upon whose lyre
the strings were wont to break even in the first scene, and whose ghosts
slipped silently over all the German boards. In a word, spirits
controlled the poetry of the time more than spirit.
Heine however was a genuine knight of the spirit, and even if he
conjured up his lyric spectres, he demanded no serious belief in
them--they were dissolving pictures of mist; and if he followed his
overflowing feelings, the mawkish sentiments of romanticism occurred to
him and disgusted him with the extravagant expression of his love pain,
and he mocked himself, the time, and the literature,--dissolved the
sweet accords in glaring dissonances, so that they should not be in tune
with the sentimental street songs of the poets of the day. In these
outer and inner reasons lie the justification and the success of the
lyric poetry of Heine. It designates an act of self-consciousness of the
German spirit, which courageously lifts itself up out of idle love
complainings and fantastic dream life, and at the same time mocks them
both. An original talent like Heine's was needed to give to the derided
sentiment such a transporting magic, to the derision itself such an
Attic grace, that the sphinx of his poetry, with the beautiful face and
the rending claws, always produced the impression of a work of art. The
signification in literary history of these songs of Heine is not to be
underestimated. They indicate the dissolution of romanticism, and with
them begins the era of modern German poetry.
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,'
by William H. Carpenter
JOHN GOWER
(1325?-1408)
[Illustration: JOHN GOWER]
Since Caxton, the first printer of 'Confessio Amantis' (The Confession
of a Lover), described Gower as a "squyer borne in Walys in the tyme of
Kyng Richard the second," there has been a diversity of opinion about
his birthplace, and he has been classed variously with prosperous Gowers
until of late, when the county assigned to him is Kent. His birth-year
is placed approximately at 1325. We know nothing of his early life and
education. It has been guessed that he went to Oxford, and afterwards
traveled in the troubled kingdom of France. Such a course might have
been followed by a man of his estate. He had means, for English property
records (in this instance the rolls of Chancery, the parchment
foundation of English society) still preserve deeds of his holdings in
Kent and Essex and elsewhere.
His life lay along with that of Chaucer's, in the time when Edward III.
and his son the Black Prince were carrying war into France, and the
English Parliament were taking pay in plain speaking for what they
granted in supplies, and wresting at the same time promises of reform
from the royal hand. But Gower and Chaucer were not only contemporaries:
they were of like pursuit, tastes, and residence; they were friends; and
when Chaucer under Richard II., the grandson and successor of Edward,
went to France upon the mission of which Froissart speaks, he named John
Gower as one of his two attorneys while he should be away. Notice of
Gower's marriage to Agnes Groundolf late in life--in 1397--is still
preserved. Three years after this he became blind,--it was the year
1400, in which Chaucer died,--and in 1408 he died.
"The infirm poet," says Morley, "spent the evening of his
life at St. Mary Overies [St. Mary-over-the-River], in
retirement from all worldly affairs except pious and liberal
support of the advancing building works in the priory, and in
the church now known as St. Saviour's [Southwark], to which
he bequeathed his body. His will, made not long before death,
bequeathed his soul to God, his body to be buried in St.
Mary Overies. The poet bequeathed also 13_s._ 4_d._ to each
of the four parish churches of Southwark for ornaments and
lights, besides 6_s._ 8_d._ for prayers to each of their
curates. It is not less characteristic that he left also
40_s._ for prayers to the master of St. Thomas's Hospital,
and, still for prayers, 6_s._ 8_d._ to each of its priests,
3_s._ 4_d._ to each Sister in the hospital, twenty pence to
each nurse of the infirm there, and to each of the infirm
twelve pence. There were similar bequests to St. Thomas
Elsing Spital, a priory and hospital that stood where now
stands Sion College. St. Thomas Elsing Spital, founded in
1329 by William Elsing, was especially commended to the
sympathies of the blind old poet, as it consisted of a
college for a warden, four priests, and two clerks, who had
care of one hundred old, blind, and poor persons of both
sexes, preference being given to blind, paralytic, and
disabled priests. Like legacies were bequeathed also to
Bedlam-without-Bishopsgate, and to St. Mary's Hospital,
Westminster. Also there were bequests of ten shillings to
each of the leper-nurses. Two robes (one of white silk, the
other of blue baudekin,--a costly stuff with web of gold and
woof of silk), also a new dish and chalice, and a new missal,
were bequeathed to the perpetual service of the altar of the
chapel of St. John the Baptist, in which his body was to be
buried. To the prior and convent he left a great book, a
'Martyrology,' which had been composed and written for them
at his expense. To his wife Agnes he left a hundred pounds,
three cups, one coverlet, two salt-cellars, and a dozen
silver spoons; also all his beds and chests, with the
furnishings of hall, pantry, and kitchen; also a chalice and
robe for the altar of the chapel of their house; and she was
to have for life all rents due to him from his manors of
Southwell (in Nottingham) and Moulton (in Suffolk)."
His wife was one of his executors. The will is still preserved at
Lambeth Palace.
Gower's tomb and monument may also still be seen at St. Saviour's, where
the description Berthelet gave of them in 1532 is, aside from the
deadening of the paintings, true:--"Somewhat after the olde ffashion he
lyeth ryght sumptuously buryed, with a garland on his head, in token
that he in his lyfe dayes flouryshed freshely in literature and
science." The head of his stone effigy lies upon three volumes
representing Gower's three great works; the hair falls in long curls;
the robe is closely buttoned to the feet, which rest upon a lion, and
the neck is encircled with a collar, from which a chain held a small
swan, the badge of Henry IV. "Besyde on the wall where as he lyeth,"
continues Berthelet, "there be peynted three virgins, with crownes on
theyr heades; one of the which is written _Charitie_, and she holdeth
this devise in her hande:--
'En toy qui fitz de Dieu le Pere
Sauve soit que gist souz cest piere.'
(In thee, who art Son of God the Father,
Be he saved who lieth under this stone.)
"The second is wrytten _Mercye_, which holdeth in her hande this
devise:--
'O bone Jesu fait ta mercy
Al alme dont le corps gist icy.'
(O good Jesus, grant thy mercy
To the soul whose body lies here.)
"The thyrde of them is wrytten _Pity_, which holdeth in her hand this
devise:--
'Pur ta pite, Jesu regarde,
Et met cest alme en sauve garde.'"
(For thy pity, Jesus, see;
And take this soul in thy safe guard.)
The monument was repaired in 1615, 1764, and 1830.
The three works which pillow the head of the effigy indicate Gower's
'Speculum Meditantis' (The Looking-Glass of One Meditating), which the
poet wrote in French; the 'Vox Clamantis' (The Voice of One Crying), in
Latin; and the 'Confessio Amantis,' in English. It should be remembered
in noting this mixture of tongues, that in Gower's early life the
English had no national speech. The court, Parliament, nobles, and the
courts of law used French; the Church held its service in Latin; while
the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon blood clung to the language of their
fathers, which they had modified by additions from the Norman tongue. It
was not until 1362 that Parliament was opened by a speech in English.
"There is," says Dr. Pauli, "no better illustration of the singular
transition to the English language than a short enumeration and
description of Gower's writings." Of the 'Speculum Meditantis,' a
treatise in ten books on the duties of married life, no copy is known to
exist. The 'Vox Clamantis' was the voice of the poet, singing in Latin
elegiac of the terrible evils which led to the rise of the commons and
their march to London under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw in 1381. It is
doubtless a true picture of the excesses and miseries of the day. The
remedy, the poet says, is in reform--right living and love of England.
Simony in the prelates, avarice and drunkenness in the libidinous
priests, wealth and luxury in the mendicant orders, miscarrying of
justice in the courts, enrichment of individuals by excessive
taxes,--these are the subjects of the voice crying in the wilderness.
Gower's greatest work, however, is the 'Confessio Amantis.' In form it
is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, who is a priest of
Venus. In substance it is a setting-forth, with moralizings which are at
times touching and elevated, of one hundred and twelve different
stories, from sources so different as the Bible, Ovid, Josephus, the
'Gesta Romanorum,' Valerius Maximus, Statius, Boccaccio, etc. Thirty
thousand eight-syllabled rhymed lines make up the work. There are
different versions. The first was dedicated to Richard II., and the
second to his successor, Henry of Lancaster. Besides these large works,
a number of French ballades, and also English and Latin short poems, are
preserved. "They have real and intrinsic merit," says Todd: "they are
tender, pathetic, and poetical, and place our old poet Gower in a more
advantageous point of view than that in which he has heretofore been
usually seen."
Estimates of Gower's writings are various; but even his most hostile
judges admit the pertinence of the epithet with which Chaucer hails him
in his dedication of 'Troilus and Creseide':--
"O morall Gower, this booke I direct
To thee and to the philosophicall Strode,
To vouchsafe there need is to correct
Of your benignities and zeales good."
Then Skelton the laureate, in his long song upon the death of Philip
Sparrow (which recalls the exquisite gem of Catullus in a like
threnody), takes occasion to say:--
"Gower's englysshe is olde,
And of no value is tolde;
His matter is worth gold,
And worthy to be enrold."
And again:--
Gower that first garnished our English rude."
Old Puttenham also bears this testimony:--"But of them all [the English
poets] particularly this is myne opinion, that Chaucer, with Gower,
Lidgate, and Harding, for their antiquitie ought to have the first
place."
Taine dismisses him with little more than a fillip, and Lowell, while
discoursing appreciatively on Chaucer, says:--
"Gower has positively raised tediousness to the precision of
science; he has made dullness an heirloom for the students of
our literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen
levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind; as
your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his
rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day
clock, and reminding you of Wordsworth's
'Once more the ass did lengthen out
The hard dry seesaw of his horrible bray,'
you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this
indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair mediaeval
legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly
unnatural length, of a coffin."
Yet hear Morley:--
"To this day we hear among our living countrymen, as was to
be heard in Gower's time and long before, the voice passing
from man to man, that in spite of admixture with the thousand
defects incident to human character, sustains the keynote of
our literature, and speaks from the soul of our history the
secret of our national success. It is the voice that
expresses the persistent instinct of the English mind to find
out what is unjust among us and undo it, to find out duty to
be done and do it, as God's bidding.... In his own Old
English or Anglo-Saxon way he tries to put his soul into his
work. Thus in the 'Vox Clamantis' we have heard him asking
that the soul of his book, not its form, be looked to; and
speaking the truest English in such sentences as that 'the
eye is blind and the ear deaf, that convey nothing down to
the heart's depth; and the heart that does not utter what it
knows is as a live coal under ashes. If I know little, there
may be another whom that little will help.... But to the man
who believes in God, no power is unattainable if he but
rightly feels his work; he ever has enough, whom God
increases.' This is the old spirit of Caedmon and of Bede; in
which are laid, while the earth lasts, the strong foundations
of our literature. It was the strength of such a temper in
him that made Gower strong. 'God knows,' he says again, 'my
wish is to be useful; that is the prayer that directs my
labor.' And while he thus touches the root of his country's
philosophy, the form of his prayer--that what he has written
may be what he would wish it to be--is still a thoroughly
sound definition of good English writing. His prayer is that
there may be no word of untruth, and that 'each word may
answer to the thing it speaks of, pleasantly and fitly; that
he may flatter in it no one, and seek in it no praise above
the praise of God.'"
The part of Gower's writing here brought before the reader is the
quaintly told and charming story of Petronella, from 'Liber Primus' of
the 'Confessio.' It may be evidence that all the malediction upon the
poet above quoted is not deserved.
The 'Confessio Amantis' has been edited and collated with the best
manuscripts by Dr. Reinhold Pauli (1857). The 'Vox Clamantis' was
printed for the first time in 1850, under the editorship of H. O. Coxe
and for the Roxburghe Club. The 'Balades and Other Poems' are also
included in the publication of the Roxburghe Club. Other sources of
information regarding Gower are 'Illustrations of the Lives and Writings
of Gower and Chaucer' by Henry J. Todd (1810); Henry Morley's reviews in
'English Writers'; and various short articles.
PETRONELLA
From the 'Confessio Amantis'