HEINRICH HEINE.
Somewhatmore than twenty years have elapsed since Heine's death. Had he lived to the present time he would have been little past the age of eighty, and there are many of his contemporaries and associates who are still alive. Though an exceptionally isolated figure in the world of letters, he serves to connect us in a great measure with the heroic age of German literature; and not in point of time only, but by the nature of his work, which exhibits certain elements of the Goethe-and-Schiller period, combined with others of the school of "Young Germany," so called. This, at least, is the position always assigned him; and the following pages may not be uninteresting in showing to some extent, and by means of a few of the more striking points of his character and genius, how far he really occupies this place in literature.
How came Heinrich Heine to be a product of German soil at all? is the first question which naturally arises in regard to him—that "son of the Revolution," as he somewhere styles himself, who made France his adopted country for nearly half his life; with his ardent sympathy for French ideas; with his wonderful wit, which laid presumptuous claim to the mantleof Voltaire and Aristophanes; with such rapid and facile powers of expression for his thought as makes even Lowell, who greatly amuses himself at the expense of German composition in general, admit that "Heine can be airily light in German;" with his intense belief in the progressive spirit of his own time, and his intense hatred of its accompanying advance of utilitarianism and philistinism? Even the poet's laurel, the closest tie that bound him to his own people, he would have been willing to lay aside. "I do not know," he writes, "if I fairly deserve to have my grave adorned with the poet's laurel. Poetry, however much I loved her, was always but a sacred plaything to me, or a consecrated means to divine ends. I have never laid much stress on the poet's fame, and care little if my songs get praise or blame. But ye may lay a sword upon my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the War of Liberation for humanity." And yet, in spite of it all, by his culture, by his sentiment and by his real sympathies, Heine belonged to the land of his birth rather than to the land of his adoption.
But there is one circumstance which must be regarded at the very outset in treating of him—a circumstance of race, which colors more deeply than any other his intellectual as well as his worldly career, and leaves its mark on almost everything that comes from his hand: Heine was a Jew, possessing certain indelible characteristics of his race. This we must never forget, for Heine himself never forgot it. His Jewish origin was always a mingled source of bitterness and pride. His deification of the chosen people and the pitiless mockery which he bestows on them would be hard to reconcile in another. He gloried in what their past could show, but spared no words of ridicule and scorn for the days of their weakness and infirmity: he became unfaithful to their traditions, and was baptized a Christian in order to obtain a university degree; and yet he never escaped what he himself calls "the ineradicable Jew in him."
To be a Jew in Germany in the early part of the present century meant, if not actual physical persecution, a political and social one of the crudest kind for all whose intellectual and spiritual necessities carried them beyond the barriers imposed by legislation and by society. It is true that in Berlin there had gathered a brilliant circle of cultivated Israelites who had risen to the highest intellectual attainments; but they were excluded, as well as their less-enlightened brethren, from all national existence, and even from all the learned professions except that of medicine. They had formed, what was called a "Society for the Promotion of Culture and Progress among the Jews," in which Heine himself was at one time much interested, but after his baptism he seems to have mingled as little as possible with his own people.
Heine's conversion to Christianity—or rather his baptism, for the word "conversion" cannot be applied to the renunciation of one form of religious dogma and the adoption of another for purely material ends—has been the cause of more controversy than any other incident of his life, and has always been used as a main stronghold and point of attack by his enemies. There is not much defence to offer for the act, for Heine, in spite of a Voltairean scorn of dogma and creed, possessed a deep tinge of religious feeling, and that he felt keenly the humiliation of his position—to use no harsher term—can be seen by the following expression regarding it. "Is it not foolish?" he writes to a friend. "I am no sooner baptized than I am cried down as a Jew: I am now hated by Jew and Christian alike." And again, in speaking of another converted Jew who is engaged in preaching his newly-acquired doctrine: "If he does this from conviction, he is a fool: if he does it from hypocritical motives, he is worse. I shall not cease to love Gans, but I confess I had far rather have learned instead of this that he had stolen silver spoons. That you, dear Moser," he continues, "should think as Gans does I cannot believe, although assured. I should be very sorry if my own baptism should appear to you in any favorable light. I assure you if the lawspermitted the stealing of silver spoons I should not have been baptized." The jest has its pathos as well as its wit, for Heine's pecuniary prospects were always precarious, and the fatal baptism, which only brought upon him the pity and contempt of his friends and doubled the insults of his enemies, defeated its own ends and contributed nothing to his material needs.
Heine's personal history is unusually obscure. An interesting and valuableLifeof him has been written by Herr Adolph Stroeltmann, but the author's materials are avowedly scanty, and the Heine memoirs, which have long been watched for with hungry eyes by the critics and biographers, are still withheld from publication by members of the family, with the prospect that they will never be given to the public. He was born at Düsseldorf on the Rhine December 13, 1799. "On my cradle," he writes, "fell the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning-glow of the nineteenth"—words not a little significant of the lifelong sense within him of the genius of a bygone age and the spirit of a coming one. His boyhood was passed during the time of Napoleon's supremacy in the Rhine provinces, and among other changes wrought under French jurisdiction was the establishment by imperial decree of certain state schools called "lyceums," at one of which Heine received the greater part of his school-education. The town was garrisoned by French troops, and here it was that the boy became acquainted with the old French drummer whom he afterward commemorates so charmingly in the sketch of his childhood known as the "Buch Le Grand." These early influences must certainly have been at the root of that passion for French ideas and French manners which characterized his later years, just as his boyish visions of the Great Emperor as he passed through Düsseldorf never quite lost their enchantment in after life, and long blinded him to the real meaning of Bonapartism.
Twice he saw Napoleon—once in 1811, and again in the following year—and his impressions are worth recording, especially as they are given in his most characteristic manner: "What were my feelings when I saw him with my own favored eyes!—himself, hosannah! the emperor! It was in the avenue of the court-garden at Düsseldorf. As I pushed my way among the gaping people I thought of his battles and his deeds; and yet I thought at the same time of the police regulations against riding through the avenue on pain of a five-thaler fine, and the emperor rode quietly through the avenue and no policeman stopped him. Never will his image vanish from my memory. I shall always see him high upon his steed, with those eternal eyes in his marble imperial face looking down with the calmness of Fate on the guards defiling by. He was sending them to Russia, and the old grenadiers looked up to him in such awful devotion, such deeply-conscious sympathy, such pride of death!—
Te, Cæsar, morituri salutant!
Sometimes a secret doubt creeps over me whether I have really seen him, whether we really were his associates; and then it seems to me as if his image, snatched from the meagre frame of the present, melts ever more proudly and more imperiously into the twilight of the past. His name already sounds like a voice from the ancient world, and as antique and heroic as the names of Alexander and Cæsar." Even to Heine, Napoleon was the representative of the great principles of the Revolution: moreover, he assumed at one time the rôle of liberator of the Jews by conferring on them civil and political rights, while in his armies positions of the highest distinction, dependent only on personal merit, awaited them. But this too ardent hero-worship did not last. "Take me not, dear reader, I pray, for an unconditional Bonapartist," he says sorrowfully on the battle-field of Marengo. "My homage does not touch the actions but the genius of the man, whether his name be Alexander or Cæsar or Napoleon. I did love him unconditionally until the Eighteenth Brumaire: then he betrayed liberty." And again,later: "It is true, it is a thousand times true, that Napoleon was an enemy of freedom, a crowned despot of selfishness:" "he could deal with men and personal interests, not with ideas; and that was his greatest fault and the reason of his fall." "At bottom he is nothing but a brilliant fact, the meaning of which is still half a secret."
Among Heine's home-influences during his childhood that of his mother stands most prominent for good, and he never speaks of her but with reverence and affection. Of the character of his father very little is known. Harry, as the boy was originally named, was destined for a business career, as his parents were unable to send him to the university, and he was placed for this purpose in a banker's office in Frankfort. The situation was exceedingly distasteful to him, and he left it at the end of two weeks. Another attempt was made to establish him in the banking-business at Hamburg under the charge of a millionaire uncle, one of Hamburg's most worthy and respectable citizens, who plays an important part in the earlier part of Heine's career. Here he remained about two years, but with little better result than before. His Hamburg life seems to have been a failure in almost every sense. He got into trouble with certain of his uncle's relations, fell in love with one of his cousins, who shortly after married a more successful rival, and chafed under the dreary monotony which a business life offered to his susceptible temperament; until finally his uncle, seeing that he was in every way unfitted for his occupation, determined to send him to the University of Bonn, under the condition that he should fit himself for the legal profession. Thus Heine was pledged, as it were, from the first to his conversion—a fact all the more remarkable as Solomon Heine, the uncle, was a sturdy adherent of the Jewish faith himself.
The next five years were passed, with certain intervals, at the universities of Bonn, Göttingen and Berlin, and the elder Heine must have watched with some natural concern the career of his wilful protégé, who pursued anything but the course of study marked out for him, and turned his attention mainly to Oriental and mediæval literature, history, philology and other congenial pursuits, quite to the detriment of his professional studies. It was during the years of his university life that he appeared before the world as an author. His first volume of poems was published in 1821, soon followed by the two tragedies ofRatcliffeandAlmanzor—deservedly the least popular of all his works—and the first volume of theReisebilder. Never were the writings of an unknown author greeted with a speedier recognition, and he stepped at once into the full sunshine of his fame. Nevertheless, fame alone without its more substantial benefits could not free him from a pecuniary dependence on his uncle which was often as humiliating as it was indispensable. "Had the stupid boy learned anything," replied the latter once when congratulated upon his distinguished nephew, "he would not need to write books;" and these words betray an abundant source for those wearisome and ceaseless misunderstandings between uncle and nephew which only ceased with the former's death, and indicate perhaps one reason for the unhappy temper of the young author's genius.
There is but one theme in nearly all the early poems of Heine, and more particularly in those of theLyrisches Intermezzo. The sorrows of an unhappy love are sung with a passion and a fervor such as one finds only in the higher forms of poetry. He adopted for his verse the old mediæval ballad-metre, preserving in a wonderful degree the limpid simplicity of the original, and infusing into it, as into all that comes from his pen, the modern sentiment and spirit. He calls upon all external Nature to share his sufferings, and invests every natural object with an intense personal interest which belongs only to that people whose egoism has outlived centuries of obliterating influences. The following songs, although they are very familiar ones, illustrate particularly well the characteristics just mentioned. I give them in the original, as they suffer unusually by translation:
Und wüssten's die Blumen die kleinen,Wie tief verwundet mein Herz,Sie würden mit mir weinen,Zu heilen meinen Schmerz.Und wüssten's die Nachtigallen,Wie ich so traurig und krank,Sie hiessen fröhlich erschallenErquickenden Gesang.Und wüssten sie meine Wehe,Die goldenen Sternelein,Sie kämen aus ihrer Höhe,Und sprächen Trost mir ein.Die alle können's nicht wissen,Nur eine kennt mein Schmerz:Sie hat ja selbst zerrissen,Zerrissen mir das Herz.Or—Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass,O sprich, mein Lieb, warum?Warum sind denn im grünen GrasDie blauen Veilchen so stumm?Warum singt denn mit so kläglichem LautDie Lerche in der Luft?Warum steigt denn aus dem BalsamkrautHervor ein Leichenduft?Warum scheint denn die Sonn' auf die AuSo kalt und verdriesslich herab?Warum ist denn die Erde so grauUnd öde wie ein Grab?Warum bin ich selbst so krank und so trüb,Mein liebes Liebchen? Sprich!O sprich, mein herzallerliebstes Lieb,Warum verliessest du mich?
Und wüssten's die Blumen die kleinen,Wie tief verwundet mein Herz,Sie würden mit mir weinen,Zu heilen meinen Schmerz.Und wüssten's die Nachtigallen,Wie ich so traurig und krank,Sie hiessen fröhlich erschallenErquickenden Gesang.Und wüssten sie meine Wehe,Die goldenen Sternelein,Sie kämen aus ihrer Höhe,Und sprächen Trost mir ein.Die alle können's nicht wissen,Nur eine kennt mein Schmerz:Sie hat ja selbst zerrissen,Zerrissen mir das Herz.Or—Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass,O sprich, mein Lieb, warum?Warum sind denn im grünen GrasDie blauen Veilchen so stumm?Warum singt denn mit so kläglichem LautDie Lerche in der Luft?Warum steigt denn aus dem BalsamkrautHervor ein Leichenduft?Warum scheint denn die Sonn' auf die AuSo kalt und verdriesslich herab?Warum ist denn die Erde so grauUnd öde wie ein Grab?Warum bin ich selbst so krank und so trüb,Mein liebes Liebchen? Sprich!O sprich, mein herzallerliebstes Lieb,Warum verliessest du mich?
Und wüssten's die Blumen die kleinen,Wie tief verwundet mein Herz,Sie würden mit mir weinen,Zu heilen meinen Schmerz.
Und wüssten's die Nachtigallen,Wie ich so traurig und krank,Sie hiessen fröhlich erschallenErquickenden Gesang.
Und wüssten sie meine Wehe,Die goldenen Sternelein,Sie kämen aus ihrer Höhe,Und sprächen Trost mir ein.
Die alle können's nicht wissen,Nur eine kennt mein Schmerz:Sie hat ja selbst zerrissen,Zerrissen mir das Herz.
Or—
Or—
Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass,O sprich, mein Lieb, warum?Warum sind denn im grünen GrasDie blauen Veilchen so stumm?
Warum singt denn mit so kläglichem LautDie Lerche in der Luft?Warum steigt denn aus dem BalsamkrautHervor ein Leichenduft?
Warum scheint denn die Sonn' auf die AuSo kalt und verdriesslich herab?Warum ist denn die Erde so grauUnd öde wie ein Grab?
Warum bin ich selbst so krank und so trüb,Mein liebes Liebchen? Sprich!O sprich, mein herzallerliebstes Lieb,Warum verliessest du mich?
Heine could never write in any of the classic metres, and an amusing anecdote is related by Maximilian Heine, the younger brother of the poet, of an attempt once made by the latter at hexameter verse. This brother, Max, was at the time in one of the upper classes of the Gymnasium, and, pluming himself greatly on his own proficiency in the composition of hexameters, urged the young poet to try his skill in the same direction. Heine complied, and came in due time to read to his brother the result of his efforts. Hardly had he reached the third line when Max broke forth impatiently: "For Heaven's sake, dear brother, this hexameter has but five feet!" and he pompously scanned the verse. When convinced of his error Heinrich petulantly tore the paper into bits, exclaiming, "Shoemaker, stick to your last!" and nothing more was heard about hexameters until two days later, when Max was awakened early one morning to find his brother at his bedside. "Ah, dear Max," he began with a piteous air, "what a fearful night have I passed! Only think! Directly after midnight, just as I had gone to sleep, I felt a mountain's weight upon me: the unhappy hexameter had come limping on five feet to my bedside, demanding of me, in terrible tones and with the most fearful threats, its sixth foot. Shylock could not have insisted more obstinately upon his pound of flesh. It appealed to its primeval classic right, and left me with the most frightful menaces, only on condition that I never again in my whole life would meddle with a hexameter."
The time of Heine's entrance in the field of literature was no unfavorable one for an individual genius like his own. The so-called Classic and Romantic schools of Germany had each in its own direction reached the ultimate limits of its development. Schiller was dead, Goethe was at work upon the second part ofFaustand theWestöstliche Divan, while such of the Romantic writers as were left had penetrated far into the realms of mediæval mysticism to bring to the light only wild and distorted forms of imagery and the most extravagant creations of morbid fancy. In Heine, who could sing of love and moonlight and nightingales with the best of them, they thought they had found a new champion to revive their now declining glory, little dreaming that ten years later, in his famous essay on the Romantic school, he was destined to deal their cause its deathblow and disperse for ever the lingering mists and spectres of German Romanticism. Nevertheless, all Heine's earlier writings, prose as well as verse, show very clearly the influence of the school. "I am tired of this guerrilla warfare," he writes in 1830, "and long for rest. What an irony of fate, that I, who would rest so gladly on the pillow of a quiet, contemplative inner life—that I should be destined to scourge my poor fellow-countrymen from their comfortable existence and stir them into activity—I, who like best to watch the passing clouds, to invent (erklügeln) metrical magic, to hearken to the secrets of the spirits of the elements and absorb myself in thewonder-world of old tales,—I must edit political annals, preach the topics of the time, stir up the passions!" A little later comes the news of the Revolution in Paris, and all these vague romantic longings have vanished into air, melted away by the beams of the July sun.
These tendencies may have first roused the determined hostility with which the followers of Goethe greeted the new poet and indignantly repelled the claims of his friends for his succession to Goethe's lyric muse. There was, at all events no love lost between the great Goethe himself and his younger contemporary. Goethe simply ignored Heine, and the latter, though he could not reciprocate in this way, did not spare his mighty rival certain home-thrusts on his most vulnerable side. He made a pilgrimage to Weimar in 1824 on his return from the famous Harz journey, but he is exceedingly reticent on the subject, and the following humorous account from theRomantische Schuleis almost the only one to be had of the visit. "His form," he writes, "was harmonious, clear, joyous, nobly-proportioned, and Greek art could be studied in him as in an antique: his eyes were at rest like those of a god. It is generally the distinguishing mark of the gods that their gaze is steadfast, and their eyes do not wander in uncertainty hither and thither. Napoleon's eyes had this peculiarity also, and therefore I am convinced that he was a god. Goethe's eyes were as divine in his advanced age as in his youth. Time had covered his head with snow, but it could not bend it. He bore it ever proud and high, and when he reached forth his hand, it was as if he would prescribe to the stars their course in the heavens. There are those who profess to have observed the cold lines of egotism about his mouth, but these lines belong also to the immortal gods, and above all to the Father of the gods, the great Jupiter, with whom I have already compared Goethe. In truth, when I visited him in Weimar and stood before him, I glanced involuntarily aside to see if the eagle and the thunderbolts were at hand. I came very near addressing him in Greek, but when I noticed that he understood German I told him in German that the plums on the road between Weimar and Jena tasted very good. I had pondered in so many long winter nights over all the lofty and profound things I should say to Goethe if I should ever see him, and when at last I saw him I told him that the Saxon plums tasted very good; and Goethe smiled with the same lips that had once kissed the fair Leda, Europa, Danäe, Semele, and so many other princesses or even ordinary nymphs."—"My soul is shaken," he cries elsewhere, "and my eye burns, and that is an unfavorable condition for a writer, who should control his material and remain beautifully objective (hübsch objektiv bleiben soll), as the Art School requires and as Goethe has done. He has become eighty years old by it," he adds with incomparable irony, "and minister, and well-to-do (wohlhabend). Poor German people! this is thy greatest man!" To all this there is a keenly personal edge, but the real gulf between the two lies deeper than wounded vanity on the one side and possible jealousy on the other, and is as wide and impassable as Heine's own distinction between the Hellenic and the Judaic views of life. Heine, vitally absorbed in all the questions that the present brought, and in the very heat and stress of its conflicts, watched the "Great Pagan" in the fulness of his years crystallizing his life's experience in beautiful and polished, but ever more and more lifeless, forms of verse, striving toward pure Hellenism, as Goethe's followers called his imitation of classic forms, withdrawn from all the social and political problems of the day far into the realms of scientific research; and he cried out impatiently about coldness, indifference to the true interests of mankind—compared Goethe's creations to the Greek statues in the Louvre, with no humanity in them, but only divinity and stone. But Goethe, with his theory of color, with his botany, anatomy, osteology and the rest, had caught a spark from what was to be the genius of a future generation, and this Heine was not prophet enough to see.
The time, we have said, was favorable for Heine's entrance into literature: it was anything but favorable for the rôle which he began almost at once to play—that of political and social agitator. The political atmosphere of Germany during the years that preceded the July Revolution was stifling in the extreme. The famous War of Liberation had freed the people from the grasp of Napoleon, but seemed only to have increased the weight of home despotism: the press was subjected to searching government investigation, and as a result all political opinions were suppressed in the daily journals, which in lieu of politics supplied little else but theatrical and musical gossip. This was no condition of things for Heine, who could never move in prescribed paths in any direction, and who had to submit to seeing his work scarred and mutilated by the red pencil of the censorship; and he began to look toward France as a land of refuge in case of accident, as it were, until finally, after the July Revolution, the Rhine became a Jordan and Paris a New Jerusalem to his longing eyes, and he emigrated thither, to the land of freedom and "good cheer," to return but once again to his native country. There is no real evidence of his exile being a compulsory one, but under such circumstances his life at home must have been at best a precarious one. According to his own delightfully humorous account, he had learned from an old councillor at Berlin who had passed many years at the fortress of Spandau how unpleasant it was to wear chains in winter. "'If they had only warmed our chains for us a little they would not have made such an unpleasant impression: they ought, too, to have had the forethought to have them perfumed with essence of roses and laurel, as they do in this country.' I asked my councillor if he often had oysters at Spandau. He said, 'No: Spandau was too far from the sea. Meat,' he said, 'was quite rare there too, and there was no other kind of fowl than the flies which fell into the soup.' And so, as I really needed recreation, and Spandau was too far from the sea for oysters, and the Spandau fowl-broth did not tempt me especially, and the Prussian chains were very cold in winter and quite detrimental to my health, I resolved to journey to Paris, and there, in the fatherland of champagne and the Marseillaise, to drink the one and to hear the other sung."
Few particulars of Heine's Parisian life are known, notwithstanding that during its earlier period he reached the zenith of his fame and popularity, and lived, according to his own statement, like a god—a life to end, alas! only too soon. He set himself during these years to the task of bringing about a mutual understanding between the French and the German people, and with this end in view he wrote his famous essays on theRomantic SchoolandReligion and Philosophy in Germany, and sent to the AugsburgAllgemeine Zeitungthose letters on the politics and art of the day which give one of the most brilliant and vivid pictures in existence of Paris under the "Citizen" monarchy. Well for Heine if those bright Parisian days had lasted! He was overtaken only too soon by a fate as terrible as any that martyr was ever called upon to endure. His nervous organization had always been an exceedingly sensitive one, and he had long suffered from severe and frequent headaches. During the latter part of his life in Paris his health gradually declined, until in 1848 he received his deathblow in a stroke of paralysis which left him almost blind, crippled and helpless, and subject to frequent attacks of intense physical agony—a blow which did not kill him, however, for eight years. His patience—nay, his heroism—through all his lingering torture was the testimony of every one who was a witness of his sufferings; and, what was more wonderful, he retained the powers of his mind in undiminished vigor to the very end. He died in February, 1856, poor as he had almost always lived, and almost in obscurity, for the world had withdrawn from the spectacle of so much suffering, and only a few friends remained to him to the last.
Such a death is terribly sad, but its heroism has all the pathos and nobility of real tragedy, and atones in more than full measure for a life that was not alwaysheroic. Can it atone as well for a literary name that was not wholly untarnished? Nothing can quite justify certain literary sins which Heine at times committed, but when such offences are noted down it is best to let them go. Heine's life was certainly one of unremitting warfare—one long record of personal attacks on his enemies, of broils with his critics, of unblushing license of speech, of undaunted adherence to the ideas for which he lived and wrote—one long cry of protest against the outward conditions of life and society as he found them, which rings in those strange minor tones of feeling that are the keynote of his genius, rising sometimes to an almost childish petulance, and sinking again into chords of the truest pathos. Where is his place and what was his achievement it is very hard to say. He was one of those figures which arise here and there in the history of literature—of men intensely penetrated with the spirit of the age in which they live, who are alike bitterly impatient of its follies and its conservatism. They cannot see far into the future, they cannot always estimate the past: their genius is not universal, but it has always something of the vitality of present interest about it, and is subject in no common degree to the errors of contemporary judgment. Byron was another such figure, and, though his genius had almost nothing in common with Heine's, the ideas for which they fought were very nearly the same—ideas which were the outgrowth of the Revolution, by which they sought to stem the tide of reactionary feeling that set in so strongly from every direction, in religion and politics as well as in literature, during the early part of our own century. Their method of fighting, too, was the same, for they both used their own persons as weapons in their cause; but where Byron's egotism becomes dreary and oppressive, Heine's awakens that vivid feeling of interest which comes usually with personal intercourse alone. He uses himself, along with and as a part of his material, in such a way that his very egotism lends to his writings the greater part of their force and originality, and becomes one of the most potent instruments of his irony and wit.
Heine chose for himself the sword of the soldier rather than the poet's laurel, but he chose to fight alone, and the nineteenth century is not the age nor its society the field for single-handed combat. That he seems to have felt this himself, one of his latest poems from theRomancerowill show. I give it in Lord Houghton's admirable translation: it is called
ENFANT PERDU.
In Freedom's war of "Thirty Years" and moreA lonely outpost have I held in vain,With no triumphant hope or prize in store,Without a thought to see my home again.I watched both day and night: I could not sleepLike my well-tented comrades far behind,Though near enough to let their snoring keepA friend awake if e'er to doze inclined.And thus, when solitude my spirits shook,Or fear—for all but fools know fear sometimes—To rouse myself and them I piped, and tookA gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes.Yes, there I stood, my musket always ready,And when some sneaking rascal showed his headMy eye was vigilant, my aim was steady,And gave his brains an extra dose of lead.But war and justice have far different laws,And worthless acts are often done right well:The rascals' shots were better than their cause,And I was hit—and hit again, and fell!That outpost is abandoned: while the oneLies in the dust, the rest in troops depart.Unconquered, I have done what could be done,With sword unbroken and with broken heart.
In Freedom's war of "Thirty Years" and moreA lonely outpost have I held in vain,With no triumphant hope or prize in store,Without a thought to see my home again.I watched both day and night: I could not sleepLike my well-tented comrades far behind,Though near enough to let their snoring keepA friend awake if e'er to doze inclined.And thus, when solitude my spirits shook,Or fear—for all but fools know fear sometimes—To rouse myself and them I piped, and tookA gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes.Yes, there I stood, my musket always ready,And when some sneaking rascal showed his headMy eye was vigilant, my aim was steady,And gave his brains an extra dose of lead.But war and justice have far different laws,And worthless acts are often done right well:The rascals' shots were better than their cause,And I was hit—and hit again, and fell!That outpost is abandoned: while the oneLies in the dust, the rest in troops depart.Unconquered, I have done what could be done,With sword unbroken and with broken heart.
In Freedom's war of "Thirty Years" and moreA lonely outpost have I held in vain,With no triumphant hope or prize in store,Without a thought to see my home again.
I watched both day and night: I could not sleepLike my well-tented comrades far behind,Though near enough to let their snoring keepA friend awake if e'er to doze inclined.
And thus, when solitude my spirits shook,Or fear—for all but fools know fear sometimes—To rouse myself and them I piped, and tookA gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes.
Yes, there I stood, my musket always ready,And when some sneaking rascal showed his headMy eye was vigilant, my aim was steady,And gave his brains an extra dose of lead.
But war and justice have far different laws,And worthless acts are often done right well:The rascals' shots were better than their cause,And I was hit—and hit again, and fell!
That outpost is abandoned: while the oneLies in the dust, the rest in troops depart.Unconquered, I have done what could be done,With sword unbroken and with broken heart.
This little poem represents rather pathetically, and in a certain sense the limitations of Heine's genius; for it is impossible not to feel that his genius never found its highest expression—that confined within a narrower channel its force would have been irresistible where now it is only brilliantly dispersive. It seems as if literature in its proper sense had lost something by Heine's personal enlistment in all the conflicts of his day—as if the man of ideas had tried to approach too closely and too curiously to the realities of life, and had only succeeded in bringing into glaring prominence the irreconcilable nature of the forces at work in the world and in ourselves; and never was reconcilement less possible between the real and the ideal than at the time of which we speak. This is the meaning of theWeltschmerzand themaladie du siècleof which we hear so much, and everything seemed to conspire to render Heine its chief representative.
But a negative judgment is not enough for a final estimate of Heinrich Heine. Much of his service to literature and to mankind was of a very positive character. As a man of letters he created a prose style unequalled in clearness and brilliancy by anything previously known in German literature—Goethe's prose is ponderous in comparison—and its influence will be felt long after certain of its mannerisms have passed into oblivion. His wit is destined to immortality by reason of the serious purpose that underlies it. It has a spontaneity which no wit exercised merely for its own ends can ever have. Those who call Heine frivolous and a mocker, simply because he can jest at serious things, can only know him very superficially or else must be ignorant of the real part which humor has to play in the world. Perhaps there never was a writer who shook himself so free of all conventionalities of style. His very mannerisms—and his writings abound in them—have a spontaneity about them, and only become affectations in the innumerable imitations which cluster around all his literary productions. This is his service to literature: his service to posterity was as great. He did some goodly service in the "War of Liberation of humanity," if in no other way, by setting the example of a man who could speak unflinchingly for principles at a time when such utterance was not easy.
It will not be possible to follow up these general statements with any further examination of Heine's life or his writings. It has been the present purpose to indicate only in the broadest outlines the scope and general character of the man and his work, and leave to the reader to prove the truth of what has been said by his own investigation. There is no single literary figure that is better worth the task of study than Heine, and to sum up briefly what this article has been mainly designed to show, we must pronounce him if not one of the greatest, at least one of the most original, figures in all literature.
A. Parker.