signal attempt to apply freely the modern spirit was made in England by
two members of the aristocratic class, Byron and Shelley. Aristocracies
are, as such, naturally impenetrable by ideas; but their individual
members have a high courage and a turn for breaking bounds; and a man of
genius, who is the born child of the idea, happening to be born in the
aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from
freely developing it. But Byron and Shelley did not succeed in their
attempt freely to apply the modern spirit in English literature; they
could not succeed in it; the resistance to baffle them, the want of
intelligent sympathy to guide and uphold them, were too great. Their
literary creation, compared with the literary creation of Shakespeare
and Spenser, compared with the literary creation of Goethe and Heine, is
a failure. The best literary creation of that time in England proceeded
from men who did not make the same bold attempt as Byron and Shelley.
What, in fact, was the career of the chief English men of letters, their
contemporaries? The gravest of them, Wordsworth, retired (in Middle-Age
phrase) into a monastery. I mean, he plunged himself in the inward life,
he voluntarily cut himself off from the modern spirit. Coleridge took to
opium. Scott became the historiographer-royal of feudalism. Keats
passionately gave himself up to a sensuous genius, to his faculty for
interpreting nature; and he died of consumption at twenty-five.
Wordsworth, Scott, and Keats have left admirable works; far more solid
and complete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left. But
their works have this defect,--they do not belong to that which is the
main current of the literature of modern epochs, they do not apply
modern ideas to life; they constitute, therefore, _minor currents_, and
all other literary work of our day, however popular, which has the same
defect, also constitutes but a minor current. Byron and Shelley will
long be remembered, long after the inadequacy of their actual work is
clearly recognized, for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow
in the main stream of modern literature; their names will be greater
than their writings; _stat magni nominis umbra_.[156] Heine's literary
good fortune was superior to that of Byron and Shelley. His theatre of
operations was Germany, whose Philistinism does not consist in her want
of ideas, or in her inaccessibility to ideas, for she teems with them
and loves them, but, as I have said, in her feeble and hesitating
application of modern ideas to life. Heine's intense modernism, his
absolute freedom, his utter rejection of stock classicism and stock
romanticism, his bringing all things under the point of view of the
nineteenth century, were understood and laid to heart by Germany,
through virtue of her immense, tolerant intellectualism, much as there
was in all Heine said to affront and wound Germany. The wit and ardent
modern spirit of France Heine joined to the culture, the sentiment, the
thought of Germany. This is what makes him so remarkable: his wonderful
clearness, lightness, and freedom, united with such power of feeling,
and width of range. Is there anywhere keener wit than in his story of
the French abbé who was his tutor, and who wanted to get from him that
_la religion_ is French for _der Glaube_: "Six times did he ask me the
question: 'Henry, what is _der Glaube_ in French?' and six times, and
each time with a greater burst of tears, did I answer him--'It is _le
crédit_' And at the seventh time, his face purple with rage, the
infuriated questioner screamed out: 'It is _la religion_'; and a rain of
cuffs descended upon me, and all the other boys burst out laughing.
Since that day I have never been able to hear _la religion_ mentioned,
without feeling a tremor run through my back, and my cheeks grow red
with shame."[157] Or in that comment on the fate of Professor Saalfeld,
who had been addicted to writing furious pamphlets against Napoleon, and
who was a professor at Göttingen, a great seat, according to Heine, of
pedantry and Philistinism. "It is curious," says Heine, "the three
greatest adversaries of Napoleon have all of them ended miserably.
Castlereagh[158] cut his own throat; Louis the Eighteenth rotted upon
his throne; and Professor Saalfeld is still a professor at Göttingen."
[159] It is impossible to go beyond that.
What wit, again, in that saying which every one has heard: "The
Englishman loves liberty like his lawful wife, the Frenchman loves her
like his mistress, the German loves her like his old grandmother." But
the turn Heine gives to this incomparable saying is not so well known;
and it is by that turn he shows himself the born poet he is,--full of
delicacy and tenderness, of inexhaustible resource, infinitely new and
striking:--
"And yet, after all, no one can ever tell how things may turn out. The
grumpy Englishman, in an ill-temper with his wife, is capable of some
day putting a rope round her neck, and taking her to be sold at
Smithfield. The inconstant Frenchman may become unfaithful to his adored
mistress, and be seen fluttering about the Palais Royal after another.
_But the German will never quite abandon his old grandmother_; he will
always keep for her a nook by the chimney-corner, where she can tell her
fairy stories to the listening children."[160]
Is it possible to touch more delicately and happily both the weakness
and the strength of Germany; pedantic, simple, enslaved, free,
ridiculous, admirable Germany?
And Heine's verse,--his _Lieder?_ Oh, the comfort, after dealing with
French people of genius, irresistibly impelled to try and express
themselves in verse, launching out into a deep which destiny has sown
with so many rocks for them,--the comfort of coming to a man of genius,
who finds in verse his freest and most perfect expression, whose voyage
over the deep of poetry destiny makes smooth! After the rhythm, to us,
at any rate, with the German paste in our composition, so deeply
unsatisfying, of--
"Ah! que me dites-vous, et qne vous dit mon âme?
Que dit le ciel a l'aube et la flamme à la flamme?"
what a blessing to arrive at rhythms like--
"Take, oh, take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn--"[161]
or--
"Siehst sehr sterbeblässlich aus,
Doch getrost! du bist zu Haus--"[162]
in which one's soul can take pleasure! The magic of Heine's poetical
form is incomparable; he chiefly uses a form of old German popular
poetry, a ballad-form which has more rapidity and grace than any
ballad-form of ours; he employs this form with the most exquisite
lightness and ease, and yet it has at the same time the inborn fulness,
pathos, and old-world charm of all true forms of popular poetry. Thus in
Heine's poetry, too, one perpetually blends the impression of French
modernism and clearness, with that of German sentiment and fulness; and
to give this blended impression is, as I have said, Heine's great
characteristic. To feel it, one must read him; he gives it in his form
as well as in his contents, and by translation I can only reproduce it
so far as his contents give it. But even the contents of many of his
poems are capable of giving a certain sense of it. Here, for instance,
is a poem in which he makes his profession of faith to an innocent
beautiful soul, a sort of Gretchen, the child of some simple mining
people having their hut among the pines at the foot of the Hartz
Mountains, who reproaches him with not holding the old articles of the
Christian creed:--
"Ah, my child, while I was yet a little boy, while I yet sate upon my
mother's knee, I believed in God the Father, who rules up there in
Heaven, good and great;
"Who created the beautiful earth, and the beautiful men and women
thereon; who ordained for sun, moon, and stars their courses.
"When I got bigger, my child, I comprehended yet a great deal more than
this, and comprehended, and grew intelligent; and I believe on the Son
also;
"On the beloved Son, who loved us, and revealed love to us; and, for his
reward, as always happens, was crucified by the people.
"Now, when I am grown up, have read much, have travelled much, my heart
swells within me, and with my whole heart I believe on the Holy Ghost.
"The greatest miracles were of his working, and still greater miracles
doth he even now work; he burst in sunder the oppressor's stronghold,
and he burst in sunder the bondsman's yoke.
"He heals old death-wounds, and renews the old right; all mankind are
one race of noble equals before him.
"He chases away the evil clouds and the dark cobwebs of the brain, which
have spoilt love and joy for us, which day and night have loured on us.
"A thousand knights, well harnessed, has the Holy Ghost chosen out to
fulfil his will, and he has put courage into their souls.
"Their good swords flash, their bright banners wave; what, thou wouldst
give much, my child, to look upon such gallant knights?
"Well, on me, my child, look! kiss me, and look boldly upon me! one of
those knights of the Holy Ghost am I."[163]
One has only to turn over the pages of his _Romancero_,[164]--a
collection of poems written in the first years of his illness, with his
whole power and charm still in them, and not, like his latest poems of
all, painfully touched by the air of his _Matrazzen-gruft_, his
"mattress-grave,"--to see Heine's width of range; the most varied
figures succeed one another,--Rhampsinitus,[165] Edith with the Swan
Neck,[166] Charles the First, Marie Antoinette, King David, a heroine of
_Mabille_, Melisanda of Tripoli,[167] Richard Coeur de Lion, Pedro the
Cruel[168], Firdusi[169], Cortes, Dr. Döllinger[170];--but never does
Heine attempt to be _hubsch objectiv_, "beautifully objective," to
become in spirit an old Egyptian, or an old Hebrew, or a Middle-Age
knight, or a Spanish adventurer, or an English royalist; he always
remains Heinrich Heine, a son of the nineteenth century. To give a
notion of his tone, I will quote a few stanzas at the end of the
_Spanish Atridæ_[171] in which he describes, in the character of a
visitor at the court of Henry of Transtamare[172] at Segovia, Henry's
treatment of the children of his brother, Pedro the Cruel. Don Diego
Albuquerque, his neighbor, strolls after dinner through the castle with
him:--
"In the cloister-passage, which leads to the kennels where are kept the
king's hounds, that with their growling and yelping let you know a long
way off where they are,
"There I saw, built into the wall, and with a strong iron grating for
its outer face, a cell like a cage.
"Two human figures sate therein, two young boys; chained by the leg,
they crouched in the dirty straw.
"Hardly twelve years old seemed the one, the other not much older; their
faces fair and noble, but pale and wan with sickness.
"They were all in rags, almost naked; and their lean bodies showed
wounds, the marks of ill-usage; both of them shivered with fever.
"They looked up at me out of the depth of their misery; 'Who,' I cried
in horror to Don Diego, 'are these pictures of wretchedness?'
"Don Diego seemed embarrassed; he looked round to see that no one was
listening; then he gave a deep sigh; and at last, putting on the easy
tone of a man of the world, he said:--
"'These are a pair of king's sons, who were early left orphans; the name
of their father was King Pedro, the name of their mother, Maria de
Padilla.
"'After the great battle of Navarette, when Henry of Transtamare had
relieved his brother, King Pedro, of the troublesome burden of the
crown,
"'And likewise of that still more troublesome burden, which is called
life, then Don Henry's victorious magnanimity had to deal with his
brother's children.
"'He has adopted them, as an uncle should; and he has given them free
quarters in his own castle.
"'The room which he has assigned to them is certainly rather small, but
then it is cool in summer, and not intolerably cold in winter.
"'Their fare is rye-bread, which tastes as sweet as if the goddess Ceres
had baked it express for her beloved Proserpine.
"'Not unfrequently, too, he sends a scullion to them with
garbanzos,[173]and then the young gentlemen know that it is Sunday in
Spain.
"'But it is not Sunday every day, and garbanzos do not come every day;
and the master of the hounds gives them the treat of his whip.
"'For the master of the hounds, who has under his superintendence the
kennels and the pack, and the nephews' cage also,
"'Is the unfortunate husband of that lemon-faced woman with the white
ruff, whom we remarked to-day at dinner.
"'And she scolds so sharp, that often her husband snatches his whip, and
rushes down here, and gives it to the dogs and to the poor little boys.
"'But his majesty has expressed his disapproval of such proceedings, and
has given orders that for the future his nephews are to be treated
differently from the dogs.
"'He has determined no longer to entrust the disciplining of his nephews
to a mercenary stranger, but to carry it out with his own hands.'
"Don Diego stopped abruptly; for the seneschal of the castle joined us,
and politely expressed his hope that we had dined to our satisfaction."
Observe how the irony of the whole of that, finishing with the grim
innuendo of the last stanza but one, is at once truly masterly and truly
modern.
No account of Heine is complete which does not notice the Jewish element
in him. His race he treated with the same freedom with which he treated
everything else, but he derived a great force from it, and no one knew
this better than he himself. He has excellently pointed out how in the
sixteenth century there was a double renascence,--a Hellenic renascence
and a Hebrew renascence--and how both have been great powers ever since.
He himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judæa;
both these spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all
poetry and all art,--the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by
sublimity. By his perfection of literary form, by his love of clearness,
by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek; by his intensity, by his
untamableness, by his "longing which cannot be uttered,"[174] he is
Hebrew. Yet what Hebrew ever treated the things of the Hebrews like
this?--"There lives at Hamburg, in a one-roomed lodging in the Baker's
Broad Walk, a man whose name is Moses Lump; all the week he goes about
in wind and rain, with his pack on his back, to earn his few shillings;
but when on Friday evening he comes home, he finds the candlestick with
seven candles lighted, and the table covered with a fair white cloth,
and he puts away from him his pack and his cares, and he sits down to
table with his squinting wife and yet more squinting daughter, and eats
fish with them, fish which has been dressed in beautiful white garlic
sauce, sings therewith the grandest psalms of King David, rejoices with
his whole heart over the deliverance of the children of Israel out of
Egypt, rejoices, too, that all the wicked ones who have done the
children of Israel hurt, have ended by taking themselves off; that King
Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, Antiochus, Titus, and all such people,
are well dead, while he, Moses Lump, is yet alive, and eating fish with
wife and daughter; and I can tell you, Doctor, the fish is delicate and
the man is happy, he has no call to torment himself about culture, he
sits contented in his religion and in his green bedgown, like Diogenes
in his tub, he contemplates with satisfaction his candles, which he on
no account will snuff for himself; and I can tell you, if the candles
burn a little dim, and the snuffers-woman, whose business it is to snuff
them, is not at hand, and Rothschild the Great were at that moment to
come in, with all his brokers, bill discounters, agents, and chief
clerks, with whom he conquers the world, and Rothschild were to say:
'Moses Lump, ask of me what favor you will, and it shall be granted
you';--Doctor, I am convinced, Moses Lump would quietly answer: 'Snuff
me those candles!' and Rothschild the Great would exclaim with
admiration: 'If I were not Rothschild, I would be Moses Lump.'"[175]
There Heine shows us his own people by its comic side; in the poem of
the _Princess Sabbath_[176] he shows it to us by a more serious side.
The Princess Sabbath, "the _tranquil Princess_, pearl and flower of all
beauty, fair as the Queen of Sheba, Solomon's bosom friend, that blue
stocking from Ethiopia, who wanted to shine by her _esprit_, and with
her wise riddles made herself in the long run a bore" (with Heine the
sarcastic turn is never far off), this princess has for her betrothed a
prince whom sorcery has transformed into an animal of lower race, the
Prince Israel.
"A dog with the desires of a dog, he wallows all the week long in the
filth and refuse of life, amidst the jeers of the boys in the street.
"But every Friday evening, at the twilight hour, suddenly the magic
passes off, and the dog becomes once more a human being.
"A man with the feelings of a man, with head and heart raised aloft, in
festal garb, in almost clean garb he enters the halls of his Father.
"Hail, beloved halls of my royal Father! Ye tents of Jacob, I kiss with
my lips your holy door-posts!"
Still more he shows us this serious side in his beautiful poem on Jehuda
ben Halevy,[176] a poet belonging to "the great golden age of the
Arabian, Old-Spanish, Jewish school of poets," a contemporary of the
troubadours:--
"He, too,--the hero whom we sing,--Jehuda ben Halevy, too, had his
lady-love; but she was of a special sort.
"She was no Laura,[177] whose eyes, mortal stars, in the cathedral on
Good Friday kindled that world-renowned flame.
"She was no chatelaine, who in the blooming glory of her youth presided
at tourneys, and awarded the victor's crown.
"No casuistess in the Gay Science was she, no lady _doctrinaire_, who
delivered her oracles in the judgment-chamber of a Court of Love.[178]
"She, whom the Rabbi loved, was a woe-begone poor darling, a mourning
picture of desolation ... and her name was Jerusalem."
Jehuda ben Halevy, like the Crusaders, makes his pilgrimage to
Jerusalem; and there, amid the ruins, sings a song of Sion which has
become famous among his people:--
"That lay of pearled tears is the wide-famed Lament, which is sung in
all the scattered tents of Jacob throughout the world.
"On the ninth day of the month which is called Ab, on the anniversary of
Jerusalem's destruction by Titus Vespasianus.
"Yes, that is the song of Sion, which Jehuda ben Halevy sang with his
dying breath amid the holy ruins of Jerusalem.
"Barefoot, and in penitential weeds, he sat there upon the fragment of a
fallen column; down to his breast fell,
"Like a gray forest, his hair; and cast a weird shadow on the face which
looked out through it,--his troubled pale face, with the spiritual
eyes.
"So he sat and sang, like unto a seer out of the foretime to look upon;
Jeremiah, the Ancient, seemed to have risen out of his grave.
"But a bold Saracen came riding that way, aloft on his barb, lolling in
his saddle, and brandishing a naked javelin;
"Into the breast of the poor singer he plunged his deadly shaft, and
shot away like a winged shadow.
"Quietly flowed the Rabbi's life-blood, quietly he sang his song to an
end; and his last dying sigh was Jerusalem!"
But, most of all, Heine shows us this side in a strange poem describing
a public dispute, before King Pedro and his Court, between a Jewish and
a Christian champion, on the merits of their respective faiths. In the
strain of the Jew all the fierceness of the old Hebrew genius, all its
rigid defiant Monotheism, appear:--
"Our God has not died like a poor innocent lamb for mankind; he is no
gushing philanthropist, no declaimer.
"Our God is not love, caressing is not his line; but he is a God of
thunder, and he is a God of revenge.
"The lightnings of his wrath strike inexorably every sinner, and the
sins of the fathers are often visited upon their remote posterity.
"Our God, he is alive, and in his hall of heaven he goes on existing
away, throughout all the eternities.
"Our God, too, is a God in robust health, no myth, pale and thin as
sacrificial wafers, or as shadows by Cocytus.
"Our God is strong. In his hand he upholds sun, moon, and stars; thrones
break, nations reel to and fro, when he knits his forehead.
"Our God loves music, the voice of the harp and the song of feasting;
but the sound of church-bells he hates, as he hates the grunting of
pigs."[179]
Nor must Heine's sweetest note be unheard,--his plaintive note, his note
of melancholy. Here is a strain which came from him as he lay, in the
winter night, on his "mattress-grave" at Paris, and let his thoughts
wander home to Germany, "the great child, entertaining herself with her
Christmas-tree." "Thou tookest,"--he cries to the German exile,--
"Thou tookest thy flight towards sunshine and happiness; naked and poor
returnest thou back. German truth, German shirts,--one gets them worn to
tatters in foreign parts.
"Deadly pale are thy looks, but take comfort, thou art at home! one lies
warm in German earth, warm as by the old pleasant fireside.
"Many a one, alas, became crippled, and could get home no more!
longingly he stretches out his arms; God have mercy upon him!"[180]
God have mercy upon him! for what remain of the days of the years of his
life are few and evil. "Can it be that I still actually exist? My body
is so shrunk that there is hardly anything of me left but my voice, and
my bed makes me think of the melodious grave of the enchanter Merlin,
which is in the forest of Broceliand in Brittany, under high oaks whose
tops shine like green flames to heaven. Ah, I envy thee those trees,
brother Merlin, and their fresh waving! for over my mattress-grave here
in Paris no green leaves rustle; and early and late I hear nothing but
the rattle of carriages, hammering, scolding, and the jingle of the
piano. A grave without rest, death without the privileges of the
departed, who have no longer any need to spend money, or to write
letters, or to compose books What a melancholy situation!"[181]
He died, and has left a blemished name; with his crying faults,--his
intemperate susceptibility, his unscrupulousness in passion, his
inconceivable attacks on his enemies, his still more inconceivable
attacks on his friends, his want of generosity, his sensuality, his
incessant mocking,--how could it be otherwise? Not only was he not one
of Mr. Carlyle's "respectable" people, he was profoundly
_dis_respectable; and not even the merit of not being a Philistine can
make up for a man's being that. To his intellectual deliverance there
was an addition of something else wanting, and that something else was
something immense: the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral
deliverance. Goethe says that he was deficient in _love_; to me his
weakness seems to be not so much a deficiency in love as a deficiency in
self-respect, in true dignity of character. But on this negative side of
one's criticism of a man of great genius, I for my part, when I have
once clearly marked that this negative side is and must be there, have
no pleasure in dwelling. I prefer to say of Heine something positive. He
is not an adequate interpreter of the modern world. He is only a
brilliant soldier in the Liberation War of humanity. But, such as he is,
he is (and posterity too, I am quite sure, will say this), in the
European poetry of that quarter of a century which follows the death of
Goethe, incomparably the most important figure.
What a spendthrift, one is tempted to cry, is Nature! With what
prodigality, in the march of generations, she employs human power,
content to gather almost always little result from it, sometimes none!
Look at Byron, that Byron whom the present generation of Englishmen are
forgetting; Byron, the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary
power, I cannot but think, which has appeared in our literature since
Shakespeare. And what became of this wonderful production of nature? He
shattered himself, he inevitably shattered himself to pieces against the
huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable precipice of British
Philistinism. But Byron, it may be said, was eminent only by his genius,
only by his inborn force and fire; he had not the intellectual equipment
of a supreme modern poet; except for his genius he was an ordinary
nineteenth-century English gentleman, with little culture and with no
ideas. Well, then, look at Heine. Heine had all the culture of Germany;
in his head fermented all the ideas of modern Europe. And what have we
got from Heine? A half-result, for want of moral balance, and of
nobleness of soul and character. That is what I say; there is so much
power, so many seem able to run well, so many give promise of running
well;--so few reach the goal, so few are chosen. _Many are called, few
chosen._
MARCUS AURELIUS[182]