VI YOUNG GERMANY (continued 4)

"Sie haben dir übel mitgespielt, Die Herren vom hohen Rathe."[10]

The heart-felt sadness, the bitter humour, that find expression in familiar, disparaging comment, heighten the impression of human grandeur, of solemn horror, much as this same impression is intensified when Hamlet, hearing his father's ghost under ground, calls: "Well said, old mole! Canst work i' the earth so fast?" In the flash of Heine's wit the reader sees Jesus, not now as the Prince of Peace, but as the man who scourged the desecrators of the Temple and sent fire upon earth.

The Winter 's Tale is, taken as a whole, a characteristic example of Heine's artistic procedure. All the twenty-seven divisions of the long poem are constructed on the same plan. They begin close to earth, materially, with reminiscences of travel, vulgar realistic impressions; then the writer, without warning, by unnoticeable transitions, rises to the height of passion, to powerful pathos, wild contempt, glowing admiration, destructive or constructive enthusiasm, divine madness that, as it were, rolls thunderbolt on thunderbolt; and then all sinks back once more into the grey dulness of everyday events and situations.

Heine arrives at Cologne, sups on an omelet and ham, drinks a bottle of Rhenish wine, and then saunters out into the streets. He calls the town's past days to mind: here the priests had free play, here men and books were burned at the stake; here stupidity and malice wantoned like dogs on the open street. Suddenly in the moonlight the Cathedral, the great spiritual Bastille, appears to his sight and arouses his wrath. As he saunters along, he catches sight of a figure behind him which it seems to him he ought to know. And now we glide into a perfectly new world, the world of vision. The figure follows him as if it were his shadow, stopping when he stops. He has often noticed it beside him before, when he sat late at night at his desk. Under its cloak it holds, and always has held, something that glitters strangely and that resembles an axe, an executioner's axe. This figure is the poet's lictor, who follows his master, instead of preceding him as the Roman lictor did.

In the succeeding divisions Barbarossa reveals himself in the same visionary style, coming and going twice.

Heine is an epoch-maker, not only in German lyric poetry, but in poetry in general. He introduced a new style, the combination of sentiment and humour in lyric poetry, and a new idea, the introduction of prose into poetry, either by way of foil or by way of parody. His position as epoch-maker is due to his historic position, to his having lived at the period when Romantic perversion of reality was giving way to pessimistic realism; this explains the fusion of the two elements which we find in his writings.

Hence, too, it comes that the most characteristic domain in the province of his art is the domain of chiaroscuro, a chiaroscuro akin to Rembrandt's.

To make the central objects stand out from the shadow or half-darkness in which they are concealed; to make light, natural light, produce a ghostly, supernatural effect by conjuring it forth from a sea of dark shadow-waves, bringing it flickering or flaring out of half-darkness; to make darkness penetrable, half-darkness transparent—this is Rembrandt's art.

Heine's, which is closely related, consists in gradually, imperceptibly, conjuring forth out of the world of reality, and back into it again, a perfectly modern, fantastic dreamworld.

At times the vision is in a full blaze of light, and the reality hidden in black darkness; but presently the vision fades, and the reality gradually emerges into the light.

XV

HEINE AND GOETHE

It has already been mentioned that Heine, when a student in Bonn, conceived an enthusiastic admiration for the founder of the Romantic school. A. W. Schlegel's personality was as attractive to him as his teaching. In Schlegel, Heine admired the man who had guided German poetry from artificiality to truth. He was dazzled, too, by the fashionable professor's aristocratic bearing, his knowledge of the world, his acquaintance with the good society and famous people of the day.

He was also touched by the kindly interest which Schlegel showed in himself and his first literary efforts. It was to Schlegel that he was indebted for his early initiation into the secrets of metrical art, and for something more valuable still, confidence in his own powers and his future.

In Heine's first prose article, that on Romanticism, written in 1820, he expresses his gratitude and makes his Romantic confession of faith in the same breath. He protests against the idea of Romanticism being "a mixture of Spanish enamel, Scotch mists, and Italian jingle"; no, Romantic poetry ought not to be obscure and vague; its images may be as plastic in contour as those of classic poetry. "Hence it is," he writes, "that our two greatest Romanticists, Goethe and A. W. Schlegel, are at the same time our greatest plastic artists." And he names Goethe's Faust and Schlegel's Rome in the same breath, as models of plastic outline, concluding pathetically: "O, that those who love to call themselves Schlegelians would lay this to heart!" This passage should be noted by those whose only knowledge of Heine's connection with Schlegel is derived from the low attack on the latter's private life in Die Romantische Schule. It was to A. W. Schlegel, moreover, that Heine addressed his three first sonnets. In the earliest he thanks him for his personal kindness, and declares his own great indebtedness to him; in the second he extols him for the service which he has rendered to German poetry by banishing that caricature in hoop and patches which in his day figured as the Muse; in the third he praises him for his introduction of English, Spanish, early German, Italian, and Indian poetry into modern German literature. The tone is enthusiastic:

"Der schlimmste Wurm: des Zweifels Dolchgedanken, Das schlimmste Gift: an eigner Kraft verzagen, Das wollt' mir fast des Lebens Mark zernagen; Ich war ein Reis, dem seine Stützen sanken. Da mochtest du das arme Reis beklagen, An deinem güt'gen Wort lässt du es ranken, Und dir, mein hoher Meister, soll ich's danken, Wird einst das schwache Reislein Blüthen tragen," &c.[1]

It is under this first Romantic influence that Heine writes his earliest, purely Romantic poems in archaistic style, verses like:

"Die du bist so schön und rein, Wunnevolles Magedein, Deinem Dienste ganz allein Möcht' ich wohl mein Leben weihn. Deine süssen Aeugelein Glänzen mild wie Mondenschein, Helle Rosenlichter streun Deine rothen Wängelein."

This reminds us forcibly of Tieck's earliest verses, those introduced into his tales. In the one little poem from which these stanzas are taken, we come upon Wunne, Magedein, Aeugelein, Wängelein, Mündchen, weiland, a whole string of diminutives and archaisms.

Heine's next model was a genial, true poet, who died in 1827, at the early age of thirty-one—Wilhelm Müller, the author of the Müllerlieder, particularly well known from Schubert's musical setting, and of the Griechenlieder, which were equally admired in their day. A son of Wilhelm Müller's is the well-known German-English philologist, Max Müller, whose novel, Deutsche Liebe, the story of the tender love of a young German savant for a sickly, bedridden princess, is said to be based on events in his father's life.

On the 7th of June 1826, Heine writes to Müller: "I am magnanimous enough to confess frankly that the resemblance of my little Intermezzo metre [the one most frequently employed by Heine] to your usual metre is not purely accidental; the secret of its cadence was in all probability learned from your verses." He goes on to explain that he had early felt the influence of the German popular ballad and song, and that at Bonn, Schlegel had initiated him into the art of verses; "but," he adds, "it is in your verse that I seem for the first time to have found the clear ring, the true simplicity, which I have always aimed at. How clear, how simple your poems are, and they are one and all popular poems. In mine only the form is popular; the ideas are those of conventional society."

It was from Müller that Heine first learned how to evolve new popular forms out of the old. To behold as it were with our own eyes the birth and growth of Heine's style, we only need to set certain of his verses alongside of Müller's.

Müller writes:

"Wir sassen so traulich beisammen Im kühlen Erlendach, Wir schauten so traulich zusammen Hinab in den rieselnden Bach."

And Heine:

"Wir sassen am Fischerhause Und schauten nach der See, Die Abendnebel kamen Und stiegen in die Höh'."

How closely this last stanza resembles such a stanza of Müller's as:

"Die Abendnebel sinken Hernieder kalt und schwer, Und Todesengel schweben In ihren Dampf umher."[2]

These are the introductory lines of a long, beautiful poem called Hirtenbiwouak in der römischen Campagna, the most important part of which is the shepherd's song of longing for his sweetheart. How much Heine must have learned from such a verse as that which describes the young girl:

"Darunter sitzt ein Mädchen, Die Spindel in der Hand, Und spinnt und sinnt und schauet Herab in's eb'ne Land."

We do not find Wilhelm Müller marring the impression of his idyll by any sudden revulsion of mood; there is nothing of the devil in him; the gentle andante is maintained to the end of the piece. But it is not in this that the principal difference between his style and Heine's lies; for Heine at times retains his tranquil mood throughout a whole poem. The essential difference is the extraordinary condensation of Heine's style, as compared with Müller's. He gives in one verse, at most two, what the other requires ten to express.

The novelty in his lyric style is its unparalleled condensation. The poems are all epitomes. They present us with a spiced, fragrant essence of passion, experience, bitterness, mockery, wit, emotion, and fancy; an essence of poetry and prose in combination. Psychologists talk of a condensation of thought;[3] in comparison with the pupil's thought, the master's is condensed. In the history of all mechanism, increasing condensation is to be observed. Once there were only church clocks; now people carry clocks in their pockets. That is to say, the mechanism which once required for its wheels and springs the space provided by a church clock, now finds room enough in a watch. In like manner, many an old tragedy does not contain more thoughts or more feeling than a Heine poem of two or three verses.

Heine's short stanza has, then, two advantages over Wilhelm Müllers—more passion, and much greater condensation of style.

In his favourite short iambic metre, Heine is influenced by Wilhelm Müller, in his trochees he resembles another Romantic, far more Romantic poet, Clemens Brentano. In Heine's Romancero there are some curious correspondences with Brentano's Romanzen vom Rosenkranze ("Romances of the Rosary"). These latter were written before Romancero, but as they were not published till 1853, Heine cannot possibly have been influenced by them.

In the second of the Rosary Romances we read of the hero, Cosmo, that:

"Aus dem Wasserspiegel mahnt Ihn des Alters ernste Bote: Du wirst bald die Schuld bezahlen, Spricht des Hauptes Silberlocke."[4]

In Heine's posthumous poem Bimini, one of the divisions begins:

"Einsam auf dem Strand von Cuba, Vor dem stillen Wasserspiegel, Steht ein Mensch und er betrachtet In der Flut sein Konterfei. Eben nicht mit sonderlichem Wohlgefallen scheint der Greis In dem Wasser zu betrachten Sein bekümmert Spiegelbildniss."[5]

Metre, situation, idea are identical in the two passages.

There is also a certain resemblance between the tale of a mystery-book in the Ninth Romance of the Rosary and the story of the beautiful casket in Heine's poem of Jehuda ben Halevy.[6] Only that Brentano's story of the passing of the mystery-book from hand to hand, through many ages, merely opens up to us a Romantic wonder-world, whereas Heine's tale of the wanderings of the casket is at the same time a jest at the vicissitudes of life: the pearls first belong to Smerdis, who gives them to Atossa, then to the great Alexander, who gives them to Thais, then in course of time to Cleopatra, to a Moorish sultan, to the regalia of Castille, and to the Baroness Solomon Rothschild, in a compliment to whom the life-history of the casket terminates.

It is quite certain that Heine is indebted to Clemens Brentano for the subject of what in Germany is the best known and most sung of all his songs, the song of Lorelei, "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten."

As far back as 1802 Brentano had published, in his Godwi, a ballad entitled "Lorelei." It is not the story of a siren, but of a young girl of Bacharach on the Rhine, who was so beautiful that all men fell in love with her. She was accused of witchcraft. But the bishop, who ought to have condemned her to be burned, fell in love with her himself. She desires to die, for the one man she loves will have nothing to say to her and has gone away; so, on her way to the convent to which the bishop is sending her, she climbs a high cliff, Lurelei (Ley means slate-rock), and in despairing longing for her beloved, throws herself into the Rhine.

This ballad suggested to a writer called Nikolaus Vogt the fabrication of a Rhine legend, which he published in 1811, passing it off as an old one. In it Lorelei, on her way to the convent, sees the man of her heart sail past her on the Rhine, and throws herself from the cliff in grief at having failed to win him. Three of her adorers follow her to a watery grave. Hence a rock in that neighbourhood is known by the name of the Dreiritterstein (Rock of the Three Knights). The last incident was perhaps suggested by the ending of Brentano's poem:

"Wer hat dies' Lied gesungen? Ein Schiffer auf dem Rhein. Und immer hat geklungen Vom hohen Felsenstein: Lore Lay! Lore Lay! Lore Lay! Als wären es unser Drei."[7]

From this fabricated legend a certain Count Loeben, in 1821, took the theme for a poem, Lorelei,[8] in which the young girl who drowns herself is transformed into a mermaid, whose singing lures into the depths those who are sailing past:

"Da wo der Mondschein blitzet Um's hohe Felsgestein, Das Zauberfräulein sitzet Und schauet auf den Rhein. Es schauet herüber, hinüber, Es schauet hinab, hinauf, Die Schifflein ziehen vorüber, Lieb' Knabe, sieh nicht auf! Sie singt dir hold am Ohre, Sie blickt dich thöricht an, Sie ist die schöne Lore, Sie hat dir's angethan," &c.[9]

Now take Heine's world-famed poem, first a students' song, then a popular song, melting and thrilling with the tender harmony of melody and words. The direct imitation is unmistakable. The theme is the same, the metre is the same, even some of the rhymes are the same: "blitzet—sitzet;" instead of "an—gethan, Kahn—gethan." But what a difference! Feeling has been added. First the personal starting-point, the inexplicable melancholy of the narrator and his inability to banish the old legend from his thoughts, then the instantaneous, clear, definite picture of the landscape:

"Die Luft ist kühl, und es dunkelt, Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein, Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt Im Abendsonnenschein. Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet Dort oben wunderbar, Ihr gold'nes Geschmeide blitzet, Sie kämmt ihr goldenes Haar."[10]

And something more has been added—that element of dæmonic passion which the earlier manipulators of the theme were unable to communicate to it. Heine here represents an elemental luring power, akin to that delineated with simpler means and more powerful effect by Goethe in Der Fischer. But Goethe, in conformity with his nature, describes a tranquil, enchanting ensnarement; Heine, in conformity with his, an instantaneous, irresistible, maddening bewitchment.

A still more profound insight into Heine's art, in the making, and into the manner in which his fancy deals with a theme, is perhaps to be gained by observing how he makes use of a subject which offers itself to him in prose.

In Henri Beyle's book, De l'amour, he evidently found the three following anecdotes, translated from the Arabic. 1. Sahid ben Agba one day asked an Arab: "Of what tribe art thou?" "Of that tribe," answered the Arabian, "in which men die when they love." "Then thou art of the tribe of Asra?" "Yea, verily, by the Lord of Kaaba!" "Whence comes it that ye love thus?" "Our women are beautiful, and our young men chaste." 2. A man once asked Arua ben Hezam of the tribe of Asra: "Is it true that ye love with a tenderness surpassing that of all other men?" "It is true," answered Arua. "Thirty young men of my tribe have I seen carried off by death, whose only sickness was that of love." 3. An Arab of the tribe Beni-Fazarat said one day to an Arab of the tribe Beni-Asra: "Ye think that to die of love is a sweet and noble death; whereas it is nought but weakness and foolishness." "Thou would'st not speak so," answered the other, "had'st thou seen the great dark, long-lashed eyes of our veiled women, seen their teeth gleam between their brown lips when they smile."

Here we have the origin of Heine's famous Der Asra: "Täglich ging die wunderschöne." He first paints the place for us—the garden with the fountain whose white waters flash; then he shows us the slave, standing there every day when the sultan's daughter comes to walk, paler every day; then he tells how the princess one evening closely questions the slave: "I would know thy name, thy race, thy family...":

"Und der Sklave sprach: 'ich heisse Mohamet, ich bin aus Yemen Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra, Welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.'"[11]

Heine, as we see, has disdained all explanations. We enjoy the marvellous conciseness of these monumental words, this power as it were of hewing out the speech in stone. But what, on closer investigation, is the spiritual substance of the poem? Not much more than a laconic combination of the words love and death. It is the same combination that is to be found in all Heine's youthful poems, in the shape of love and suffering, love and poison, love and suicide—in Alfred de Musset, too, there is the same stereotyped coupling of l'amour and la mort.

Here, as in general with Heine, the expression is epigrammatic, therefore quite simple.

We have now sufficient material before us to give us a certain insight into the formation of Heine's poetic style. It will be interesting to study it finished and fully developed.

We may start from the last-mentioned poem with its epigrammatic point. It is characteristic of Heine that neither here nor elsewhere does he deeply concern himself with the true inwardness of a feeling; he only, as a rule, points and sharpens the expression of it. This is the case even with the feeling of love, which he has treated more frequently than any other. And it is characteristic of his want of the power to put himself in another's place, that it has only been possible for him to give expression to masculine love; he has never put a passionate utterance of feeling into the mouth of a woman.

Nothing would have been more impossible for Heine than to write such a poem as Goethe's famous:

"Freudvoll und leidvoll, Gedankenvoll sein, Langen und bangen In schwebender Pein, Himmelhoch jauchzend, Zum Tode betrübt, Glücklich allein Ist die Seele die liebt."[12]

For this is the living delineation of a woman's heart, this is the very inner life of love, its pulsation, its oscillation between bliss and woe. The epigrammatic quality of Heine's style alone would make such an unfolding of the emotional life impossible. And there is the same concentration when he narrates an event. It is a condensation without parallel in poetry; he produces his effect by making the briefest possible statement or suggestion. As an example of this take the lines:

"Es war ein alter König, Sein Herz war schwer, sein Haupt war grau; Der arme, alte König Er nahm eine junge Frau. Es war ein schöner Page, Blond war sein Haupt, leicht war sein Sinn, Er trug die seid'ne Schleppe Der jungen Königin."[13]

Observe the telling effect of the inversion: "Blond war sein Haupt;" it is as if the verse began to rejoice and dance. Then comes the end:

"Kennst du das alte Liedchen? Es klingt so süss, es klingt so trüb; Sie mussten beide sterben, Sie hatten sich viel zu lieb."[14]

This is admirable. But we are not told the story; we only suspect it as we suspect the story of the slave and the sultan's daughter. And here again love is coupled with death.

A certain emptiness in Heine's conception of love strikes us here again. This love has no real substance, no spiritual significance. It was not till shortly before he lay down upon his death-bed that Heine began to describe a love that has real inward substance. The love of the Buch der Lieder is for the most part wrath excited by coldness or faithlessness, an unfruitful thing, that awakens no sympathy. The later of the love-poems are frequently sensual or frivolous, and the more exaggerated the expression, the less are we affected by the value of the feeling:

"Mein Herz ist wie die Sonne, So flammend anzuseh'n. Und in ein Meer von Liebe Versinkt es gross und schön."[15]

There is too much self-observation and too much boastfulness in this youthful rodomontade. And it is the same with:

"Ich hab' dich geliebet und liebe dich noch, Und fiele die Welt zusammen, Aus ihren Trummern stiegen doch Hervor meiner Liebe Flammen."[16]

Admitting that this is probably so expressed for the sake of artistic effect, we must also admit that the style is a good, perfectly modern style. We can see it all with the mind's eye. The heart sinks like the sun into a sea. From the ruins of the world rise the flames of love. And still more powerful and much more picturesque is the scene in which the name of Agnes is written on the vault of heaven. What is wanting is substance in the feeling. Think, for the sake of comparison, of those profoundly human lines of Goethe's:

"Kanntest jeden Zug in meinem Wesen, Spähtest, wo die reinste Nerve klingt, Konntest mich mit einem Blicke lesen, Den so schwer ein sterblich Aug' durchdringt."[17]

—or of the following, which complete the impression:

"Tropftest Mässigung dem heissen Blute, Richtetest den wilden, wirren Lauf, Und in deinen Engelsarmen ruhte Die zerstörte Brust sich wieder auf."[18]

This is the expression of the healthiest, fullest, mutual sympathy, of love's gratitude, of perfect understanding. For such feeling Heine did not find expression until, with the shadow of death upon him, he loved la Mouche, the guardian angel of his death-bed. Until then it is never the healthy, tranquillising, happy element in love that he concerns himself with. It is in another domain that he is master. The modern poet, he reproduces passionate desire with a Correggio-like blending of colours and tones that is more effective than Goethe's antique limpidity. With Goethe desire is Greek or Italian. Think, for instance, of the poem of the orange:

"Ich trete zu dem Baume Und sage: Pomeranze! Du reife Pomeranze; Du süsse Pomeranze! Ich schüttle, fühl', ich schüttle, O fall in meinen Schoos!"[19]

Then compare the feeling, the glow, the fragrance, the exuberance of such a poem of desire as Heine's wonderful: Die Lotosblume ängstigt sich vor der Sonne Pracht ("The lotus-flower is fearful of the sun's resplendent beam").

It is very characteristic of the two poets that (as has already been noted), whenever the representation of love-longing glides into a delineation of foreign lands, Goethe prefers to paint Italy, Heine Hindostan. In Mignon's song of longing, without a superlative or a diminutive, with a power like that of a God, Goethe summons before our eyes the picture of the classic land where the citrons bloom. There is a power in it all, a force in each distinguishing trait, that Heine does not attain to. But compare this with the bewitching sweetness of Heine's Auf Flügeln des Gesanges ("Oh, I would bear thee, my love, my bride, afar on the wings of song"), the dreamy longing, the charm and the mystery of the perspective that opens out to us:

"Es hüpfen herbei und lauschen Die frommen, klugen Gazelln, Und in der Ferne rauschen Des heiligen Stromes Welln."[20]

This is an immortal stanza. Goethe, even when he gives the reins to longing, is always, like his own goldsmith of Ephesus, the great, wise heathen, who makes images of the gods; in Heine's visionary brain there was that particle of divine frenzy without which it had been impossible for the Düsseldorf merchant's son to understand and reproduce the fatalistic, self-effacing dreaminess of ancient India.

Heine's peculiarities of style stand out even more sharply against the background of Goethe's, when we compare the way in which the two give expression to what is not exactly desire, but the pure longing of love.

Think of the following lines, which Goethe puts into Mignon's mouth:

"Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was ich leide, Allein und abgetrennt von aller Freude, Seh' ich an's Firmament nach jener Seite. Ach, der mich liebt und kennt, ist in der Weite.— Es schwindelt mir, es brennt mein Eingeweide. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was ich leide."[21]

This is the master in the fulness of his power. Much art has been expended in the representation of the wearing monotony of longing—the five doubly rhyming lines, the languishing metre—interrupted by the audacious, realistic expression: "Es schwindelt mir, es brennt mein Eingeweide." Now compare with this, one of Heine's most perfect expressions of pure love-longing, and we shall see what the plastic fancy and the perfected laconicism of style which we traced in course of development have succeeded in producing for time and eternity:

"Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam Im Norden auf kahler Höh'. Ihn schläfert: mit weisser Decke Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee. Er träumt von einer Palme, Die fern im Morgenland Einsam und schweigend trauert Auf brennender Felsenwand."[22]

This is hardly rhymed. The only real rhyme is the very commonplace Land and Wand. The pine dreams in the snow, the palm grieves dumbly in the burning heat—that is all. It is not seen, it is fancied or invented, hence it cannot be painted (though I did once see a painting of it in a German exhibition, an idiotically absurd, double picture); but it is, nevertheless, an unforgettable, an immortal poem. And the reason is that the symbol is so marvellously effective in its simplicity—these two clear outlines instinct with feeling, which express the impossibility of overcoming the obstacle which prevents the union of two who really belong to each other.

If Goethe's strength lies in the expression of healthy feelings, comparatively simple and uncomplicated, Heine's lies in the expression of complex modern feeling, of feelings whose unsound state is the result of painful experiences. Goethe could never have written the following lines, with their jarring contrasts and enigmatical meaning:

"Wenn ich in deine Augen seh' So schwindet all mein Leid und Weh: . . . . . . . . . . . Doch wenn du sprichst: ich liebe dich! So muss ich weinen bitterlich."[23]

Why must he weep? I have heard the naïve answer: Because she is lying. Alas! it is not such a simple matter as that. He has heard these words from other lips, lips which have now ceased to utter words of love; he knows how long such a passion as a rule lasts, and the sound of her voice startles him out of his forgetfulness—he doubts the durability of her feeling or the durability of his own. It is very interesting to note the way in which Heine had wrestled with these words. Originally the last line was: "Dann wein' ich still und bitterlich." Then the word "bitterlich" was altered to "freudiglich," which changed the original tenor of the poem, and finally the line received its present form.[24]

Heine was not happy enough and not great enough to attain to reconciliation with existence. It was not possible, apart from all else, that the man who was so long an exile, so long sick to death, should look upon life with the same eyes as the man who was thoroughly sound and healthy, in affluent circumstances, honoured by the great majority, the friend of his sovereign. Hence the expressions of revolt, of bitterness, and of cynicism so frequently to be found in Heine are exceedingly rare in Goethe. Goethe, as a rule, puts them into the mouth of his Mephistopheles. Heine, who was destitute of the dramatic faculty, is himself responsible for every outburst, because he always speaks in his own name. Goethe's bitterest utterances, moreover, are not contained in his works. It is only in the Paralipomena to Faust, for instance, that we find this passage:

"Nach kurzem Lärm legt Fama sich zur Ruh, Vergessen wird der Held so wie der Lotterbube, Der grösste König schliesst die Augen zu, Und jeder Hund bepisst gleich seine Grube."[25]

Heine dwells upon the ideas which Goethe only calls up to banish again. Goethe, too, can be blasphemous. He wrote that poem which is so frequently quoted, so seldom understood: Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass ("He that with tears did never eat his bread"). It is a bitter, passionate appeal against the ordering of the world. But its bitterness is a bitterness that is choked with tears, not the wild and desperate bitterness of Heine's splendid Fragen ("Questions") or the poem Lass die heiligen Parabeln ("Holy parable discarding"), in which occur the lines:

"Warum schleppt sich blutend, elend, Unter Kreuzlast der Gerechte, Während glücklich als ein Sieger Trabt auf hohem Ross der Schlechte? Also fragen wir beständig, Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler, Aber ist das eine Antwort?"[26]

The expression is here, as usual with Heine, on a lower plane, more terrestrial, more boldly outspoken, yet by no means unworthy of the subject.

Outbursts of satiety and weariness of life are not infrequent with him. We do not need to search long among his poems to find expressions of the mood of having done for good and all with principle, with endeavour. Nothing of this kind is to be found in Goethe. His Vanitas vanitatum, the song Ich hab' meine Sache auf Nichts gestellt ("My trust in nothing now is placed") has, very significantly, become a convivial drinking song. In other words, there is no real, bitter earnest about Goethe's desperation; therefore it soon changes into jovial recklessness. Goethe has not Heine's overpowering feeling of the misery of life, and in so far he is really less Christian.

If it is instructive to compare the two poets' lyric expression of fatalistic indifference, it is equally so to compare their expression of the feeling of aspiration, of manly resolve. In this case we may take the song Feiger Gedanken ("Cowardly Thoughts") from Claudine von Villa Bella, as characteristic of Goethe; it might serve as a motto for his conduct throughout life. One can hardly imagine a more vigorous expression of manly determination than that of the lines: "Allen Gewalten zum Trutz sich erhalten," &c. (A bold front shown, to powers of earth and heaven).

Compare with this Heine's poem, An die Jungen ("To the Young"). The impetuous rush of the rhythm and the picturesque quadruple rhyme would alone suffice to make this a splendid, fascinating composition. The first verse, with its allusion to the golden apples which Hippomenes dropped in front of Atalanta, is a whole poem in itself:

"Lass dich nicht kirren, lass dich nicht wirren Durch goldne Aepfel in deinem Lauf. Die Schwerter klirren, die Pfeile schwirren, Doch halten sie nicht den Helden auf."[27]

From the picture and example of the hero, who will not be stopped in his career, we pass to that of Alexander. What is wanted is determination and boldness:

"Ein kühnes Beginnen ist halbes Gewinnen, Ein Alexander erbeutet die Welt, Kein langes Besinnen! Die Königinnen Erwarten schon kniend den Sieger im Zelt. Wir wagen und werben! besteigen als Erben Des alten Darius' Bett und Thron. O süsses Verderben! o blühender Sterben! Berauschter Triumphtod zu Babylon!"[28]

Upon victory follows the homage of the queens, then sweet perdition, seductive ruin, death in the intoxication of triumph—what Sardanapalian sentiment in this appeal to youth, this exhortation to relentless determination! The fight here is for honour, and for women as the spoil of battle, not that struggle for the combatant's own individual freedom, of which Goethe writes so simply:

"Nimmer sich beugen, Kräftig sich zeigen, Rufet die Arme Der Götter herbei."[29]

Goethe's feeling is purer and fuller, the music of his language is simpler; with Heine the melody is, as it were, gorgeously orchestrated. In Goethe's case there is nothing for the eye, not a single picture. It is characteristic that his idea is the grander, Heine's the more modern, more complex, just as Heine's metrical expression is more sensuously insinuating, produced by an art which devotes more attention to detail.

Now take a picturesque, descriptive subject—the Three Kings of the East, as they are called to mind at the Feast of the Epiphany. It is treated in a broad, lively, popular, genuinely naïve manner in Goethe's Epiphanias: "Die heil'gen drei König' mit ihrem Stern" (The Three Kings of the East with their Star). The three kings, the white, the brown, and the black, are described as they appeared when they went about, dressed up, from house to house in the country; and the poem ends:

"Die heil'gen drei König' sind wohlgesinnt, Sie suchen die Mutter und das Kind, Der Joseph fromm sitzt auch dabei, Der Ochs und Esel liegen auf Streu."[30]

Heine does not view the legend in a more religious light than Goethe, but he settles his features into a more serious expression, speaks more concisely, draws with a sharper outline, obtains a totally different effect. Goethe rouses and cheers his readers by his broad and merry artlessness; Heine's words bore their way into men's minds and leave their sting there. He seems to aim at producing the same effect as that of an old Florentine painting:

"Die heil'gen drei König' aus Morgenland, Sie frugen in jedem Städtchen: Wo geht der Weg nach Bethlehem, Ihr lieben Buben und Mädchen? Die Jungen und Alten, sie wussten es nicht, Die Könige zogen weiter, Sie folgten einem goldenen Stern, Der leuchtete lieblich und heiter. Der Stern blieb steh'n über Josephs Haus, Da sind sie hineingegangen, Das Oechslein brüllte, das Kindlein schrie, Die heil'gen drei Könige sangen."[31]

There is a certain amount of waggery in this. What a concert! But also, what painting! The fewest words possible—not a stroke, not a touch too much, and the most telling, prompt effect.

Let us now, in conclusion, think of one of those abstract figures which occur in all lyric poetry—more or less carefully wrought-out personifications of an idea such as peace, happiness, unhappiness—and in this domain also compare Heine with Goethe. Here again it will be observed that Goethe has the fuller note, Heine the firmer outline.

Goethe wrote these lines to peace:

"Der du von dem Himmel bist, Alles Leid und Schmerzen stillest, Den, der doppelt elend ist, Doppelt mit Erquickung füllest, Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde! Was soll all der Schmerz, die Lust? Süsser Friede! Komm, ach komm in meine Brust!"[32]

There is no picture here, no real personification. There is a crescendo movement through the first six lines, which culminates in the outburst: "Süsser Friede!"—though we could not feel quite certain that this outburst was coming.

Now take Heine's personifications of fortune and misfortune, as contained in the following verses:

"Das Glück ist eine leichte Dirne Und weilt nicht gern am selben Ort, Sie streicht das Haar dir von der Stirne Und küsst dich rasch und flattert fort. Frau Unglück hat im Gegentheile Dich liebefest an's Herz gedrückt, Sie sagt, sie habe keine Eile, Setzt sich zu dir an's Bett und strickt."[33]

Seldom have two ideas been transformed into two living forms with so few strokes; and there is nothing much finer in all modern myth-creation than the last two lines, between which are to be read the record of profound and terrible experience.

Heine, as we have seen, makes his earliest appearance in the Romantic school, and learns his trade from A. W. Schlegel, who imparts to him his own correct taste. In the earliest period of his development he is addicted to Romantic ghost stories and Romantic archaisms. Then, in the matter of metre, he begins to study and imitate Wilhelm Müller; in his most famous poem he borrows from Clemens Brentano. He soon forms his own style, the distinguishing feature of which is extreme condensation of thought, feeling, and imagery. Heine makes everything present and living, introduces even into tranquil themes a nervous, at times dæmonic, passion, not infrequently exaggerates until he becomes grotesque, occasionally exchanges the light of day for the glaring brightness of electric light—a kind of un-naturalness which is nevertheless to be found in nature. His most effective poetic quality is pregnant brevity.

By reason of the blend of wit and imagination in his nature, he is inclined to produce his effects by contrasts, to seek for striking disharmonies and incongruities; he has a special fancy for the effect produced by letting a commonplace, vulgar reality imperceptibly make way for a poetic vision, or allowing such a vision to fade and evaporate and give place to all too familiar reality.

His style is essentially modern—everything graphic, everything perspicuous. What is it that constitutes a great writer? The possession of the power to call forth mental visions or moods, visions by means of moods or moods by means of visions. It was especially the latter faculty that Heine cultivated in himself; he never fails in the matter of clear outline and picturesque effect.

At his zenith he can no longer be compared with his teachers and contemporaries. To gauge the power and versatility of his style it was necessary to compare it with the greatest style of the age—with Goethe's. In the process he often, as we have seen, comes far short, but it not so very seldom happens that he establishes his right to almost equal admiration. It is, however, enough for him that it is possible, and now and again necessary, to compare him with Goethe.

A style is the expression of a personality and a weapon in the warfare of literature. Goethe's style, with all its greatness, is not sufficiently complex to grapple with modern ideas. But Heine's, that weapon which in its best days was as finely tempered as those old Spanish blades which could be bent like osiers, but which no armour could snap, was better suited than any other to cope with modern life in its hardness and ugliness, its charm, its restlessness, and its wealth of glaring contrasts. It also possessed in the highest degree the power of working upon the nerves of modern readers, who have more inclination for spiced dishes and heating beverages than for plain food and pure wine.

XVI

HEINE

There can be little doubt that nothing has been more injurious to Heine's general reputation than his indiscreet loquacity on sexual subjects. Whole groups of his poems are in ill repute on this account; those, for instance, which compose the collection Verschiedene (Various), most of which have been unjustly condemned, although there are certainly some which are anything but sublime in their theme or refined in their treatment of it. In Der Gott und die Bajadere ("The God and the Bayadere") Goethe had shown how even a very equivocal subject can be ennobled by sublimity of style. And even when, as in the Venetian epigrams, he treats of Bayaderes who are certainly not purified by love, and dwells upon the poet's relations with them, the antique metre in itself produces the effect of distance, and we are not offended by any objectionable word. These few epigrams, too, lie almost buried in the mass of Goethe's writings. Moreover, in reading them, we feel that he is the man whom nature created in order that she might learn from him what she is like in her entirety.

With Heine, communicativeness on the subject of his relations with the other sex occupies too important a place, and is not always in good taste. It gains him ten readers for one whom it alienates, but it sometimes happens that the one thus lost was worth more than the ten gained.

And yet this frankness is, in a manner, his strength. It need not have been so personal, but it is quite indispensable in one who desires to compass not only the tragic, but also the comic hemisphere. And in this quality, and in his many shameless personal attacks, he resembles the greatest comic poet of all times.

Towards the end of his Winter's Tale, immediately after the wanton passage in which he smells out the future of Germany by putting his head down the opening of Charlemagne's night-throne, he declares that the noblest of the Graces have tuned the strings of his lyre, and that this lyre is the same which was sounded in days gone by, by his father, "the late Aristophanes, the favourite of the Muses," He adds that in his last chapter he has attempted to imitate The Birds, "the best of father's dramas."

He thus, we observe, prided himself on artistic descent from the greatest comic poet of ancient Greece.

For a moment we are taken aback. Other German poets, such as Platen and Prutz, have imitated the form of the Aristophanic comedy, its trimeters, choruses, parabases, the whole of that irregular and yet regular form of art built up by the Greek comic school; but Heine never even made an attempt to master this poetical form, or any other. It is characteristic of him that, persevering and conscientious as he was in ensuring the telling precision of the single metrical or prose expression (I never saw a manuscript with so many corrections as that of his Atta Troll, in the Royal Library of Berlin), it was impossible for him to submit to the artistic restriction of any of the great poetic forms. It tallies with this, that in his longer works the plan of the whole is quite vague, but every single line has been gone through again and again.

There is probably no exaggeration in saying that he never, in his capacity as an artist, set himself a task and carried it out.

Once only he attempted to write a long, connected prose work, a romance or novel. Whether, as some maintain, the greater part of the manuscript was destroyed by a fire, or whether, as I for one believe, the work was never completed, the fact remains that all we have of it is a fragment. And even this fragment, Der Rabbi von Bacharach, is, when carefully examined, nothing but a very much antedated transcription of Heine's own private experiences.

Nor did he ever attempt a severely connected metrical composition. His only long poems, Atta Troll and Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), are irregular, whimsical fantasies, soap-bubbles rocked upon cobweb tissue of the brain, only connected by a uniformity of tone and design.

The idea of translating or adapting Aristophanes would never have occurred to Heine. He was not like Goethe, who, in spite of his enormous original productivity, condescended to translate and adapt for his countrymen (Diderot, Benvenuto Cellini, Voltaire). When Goethe made acquaintance with Aristophanes, he was enchanted with him, and it is Goethe, not Heine, who undertakes to transplant The Birds on to German soil; but it is characteristic that in his hands the play undergoes a metamorphosis, is transformed from a political into a literary satire. In Goethe's play the two discontented politicians have become literary adventurers; in the owl (as proved by a letter from Jacobi to Heine) he satirises Klopstock, in the parrot, young Cramer. It was in the epilogue to this adaptation that Goethe bestowed on Aristophanes the immortal appellation, "der ungezogene Liebling der Grazien" (the froward favourite of the Graces), which suits Heine so well.

Heine was too lazy ever to have studied, translated, adapted, or imitated an ancient classic poet, but, supposing him to have done so, he would never, like Goethe or Platen, have made pure literary comedies of the Aristophanic plays; it was the grand political satire that attracted him.

It is probable that Heine is the wittiest man that ever lived, or at least the wittiest man of modern times. Voltaire is, undoubtedly, looked upon as a sort of personification of wit; but his wit is sensible and dry, not poetic and imaginative like Heine's.

Platen, the proud and stiff, acted unwisely when he wrote the work in which he satirises Heine, Der romantische Oedipus, in the outward form and style of the Aristophanic comedy, for he had nothing in common with Aristophanes but fine versification and coarse language. Heine, on the contrary, had all the chief qualities of Aristophanes combined—wit, wanton wildness, imagination, lyric sweetness, shamelessness, and grace. Without grace and wit, shamelessness is undoubtedly a base and repellent quality. But in this combination with noble qualities it is uncommon. The Aristophanic poet must not, cannot have the pride which shrinks from amusing the coarse minded, who only understand a man when they meet him in the mire. He dares not shrink from debasing himself to a certain point, in order to gain a wider field of vantage.

It is useless for an author to attempt, as Platen did, to impress his readers before all else with the idea of his high-mindedness, and to inspire them with respect for his person; it is useless for him to proclaim that he intends "to crush his antagonists with genuine wit." It is not possible to appear at one and the same time in the character of a refined gentleman and an Aristophanic poet. A man is a failure in the latter rôle if he sets more value on the esteem of others than on the triumph of art. The compensation in the case of the true Aristophanic poet is, that his poetry has a compass unattainable by the dignified poets (a Schiller or a Hugo); it reflects the whole of human life, from its highest functions to its lowest.

Though there are so few formal points of contact between Heine's lyric-satiric poems and the great fantastic comedies of Aristophanes, it is nevertheless probable that since the days of ancient Greece there has been no wit so nearly akin to the wit of Aristophanes as Heinrich Heine's.

This assertion is not based upon any misconception of the extraordinary dissimilarity in the character of their life-work. The Aristophanic comedy with its grand and exact technical structure is the expression of the artistic culture of a whole nation, a monument that commemorates the religious festivals of which it was the outcome. Aristophanes built upon a foundation laid, a substructure prepared, by a whole line of distinguished predecessors, whose style was similar, whose talent was akin to his, and to whose labours he succeeded, in much the same manner as Shakespeare did to the work of his predecessors; hence the Aristophanic comedy as a form of art is to a much greater extent a collective production than Heine's stanza is. Quite apart from our knowledge of the fact that Eupolis and Kratinos accused Aristophanes of making inadmissible use of the ideas of his predecessors, we can see for ourselves, from one of his own comedies, The Knights, that plays with titles like the Birds, the Wasps, the Frogs had already been produced by the comic poet Magnes; the chorus disguised as reptiles, insects, birds, was thus not a thing invented by Aristophanes, it was an inheritance. It is only because we are not acquainted with the Greek poet's predecessors that his life's work appears to us to be a purely individual production, the type of grand fantastic comedy, in comparison with whose exuberance of life almost all modern comedy seems spiritless and weak.

His world is the topsy-turvy world. When, in the Peace, Trygaios saddles a stinking carrion-beetle and on it, as his Pegasus, mounts through the clouds to the dwellings of the Gods, or when he drags Peace up by a fathom-long rope from the deep well into which she has been thrown by War, these proceedings are represented as if there were nothing in the least unusual or impossible about them; no explanation is offered; and we are compelled to believe in them. When, in The Birds, we hear two silly fellows, who are posing as philosophers, disclose their crazy plans for building a city in the clouds, it all sounds very mad, and when we see the Birds receive these men with reverence, we do not conceive any higher opinion of their intelligence, we are only struck by the comicality of the birds being so stupid as to put their trust in them. But when we hear that the city is actually built, that fortune has attended the enterprise and that it has been crowned with success, we feel that the world set before us here is not our own everyday world, but one with whose laws things are compatible which are contrary to the laws of ours.

This new world is purely fantastic, in so far as it is antagonistic to the laws of probability and of nature. It is a world in which madness triumphs, and the poet pretends that this is as it should be. Not till the spectator begins to wonder where this topsy-turvy world can be, where such things happen, where political effrontery on such a gigantic scale, far from being confounded and put to shame, wins confidence and is rewarded—not till then is he led back to reality, to the recognition in this world of his own world, his own home, Athens.

Three of the Aristophanic comedies in our possession, The Birds, The Frogs, and Peace, do not pass, or pass only in part, on earth; they are meteoric or underground dramas. And it is in these only that Gods are represented, and then merely that they may be rated, ridiculed, or beaten. In the world of reality they do not reveal themselves; for it is only in the world of fancy that they are believed in.

Heine, the modern poet, dares not ask his readers to follow him into the same sort of supernatural world; and yet he cannot dispense with the supernatural; hence that constantly recurring use and abuse of dreams, for which hardly any parallel is to be found among other modern poets. Within the frame-work, as it were, of the dream, he dares to be extraordinary, to be Aristophanic.

As has been already remarked, he resembles Aristophanes in the depth of his shamelessness and in the height of his lyric flight.

Allusions to difficulties of digestion and the like, play a less important part in Heine's writings than in those of Aristophanes, who, however, we must remember, himself declared that he despised this kind of comicality. According to him its only recommendation was that it provoked the laughter of the least cultured part of the public. But such things are frequently referred to by Heine too, at times in the plainest of terms (notably in his attack on Platen), and with him, almost as often as with Aristophanes, we have to be on our guard against certain noisome insects.

Heine of course cannot allow himself the same freedom of speech in sexual matters as the old Greek did, but to make up for this, he never hesitates to make an allusion that will atone for any want of outspokenness. And now and then there is almost no circumlocution; what as a general rule is indicated by a smile or a grimace is shouted to all and sundry with a loud guffaw, as, for instance, at the conclusion of Deutschland, and in such poems as Der Ungläubige ("The Unbeliever").

And yet again, as with Aristophanes, so with Heine; from this constant insistence upon that in man which reminds us of his dwelling-place during the earliest stages of his development, he rises to the purest, most delicate lyric utterance. He, who so thoroughly comprehends the material origin of all living things, in one of his poems derives them all from the song of the nightingale:

"Im Anfang war die Nachtigall Und sang ihr Lied: Zükükt! Zukükt!"[1]

We cannot but be reminded of the beautiful lines in The Birds:

"Gentlest and dearest, thou dost sing Consorting still with mine thy lay, Lov'd partner of my wild-wood way, Thou'rt come, thou'rt come; all hail! all hail! I see thee now, sweet nightingale." (CARY)

Heine, like Aristophanes, makes merry at the expense of the Gods. His satire is naturally more cautious than the old Greek's; the modern world does not stand jesting on this subject as well as the ancient world did. In the works of Heine, who wrote under the censorship of the police and of modern society, we have no counterpart to the scene in The Frogs, where Dionysus, the god of comedy, who has shown himself both boastful and cowardly, gets one thrashing after another, and at last appeals to his own priest, who occupied a place of honour among the spectators, to help him in his extremity. And yet there is not very much, from playful banter to broad jocularity and the most biting sarcasm, that Heine does not allow himself. Hyacinth's valuation of the various religions (in the Reisebilder) is well known. He will have nothing to say to Catholicism, which, with its pealing of bells, its incense fumes, and its "Melancholik," is no religion for a citizen of Hamburg; he tests Protestantism by buying lottery tickets with the numbers which he finds on the hymn-board in a Lutheran church; and he disposes of Judaism in the well-known words: "It is not a religion at all, but a misfortune." In the amusing and audacious verses entitled Disputation, a rabbi and a Capucin monk defend their respective dogmas; each, in offensive terms, boasts of the happiness conferred by his doctrine; the royal bride who is to decide the dispute declares herself incapable of doing so, as the only thing she has noted is that they both stink. In a passage in his book on Börne, Heine's mockery of religion becomes almost dramatic. He tells how, when he was living on the island of Heligoland, he was often drawn into arguments with a Prussian Councillor of Justice on the subject of the Trinity. During one of these discussions, the thinness of the flooring permitted them to hear distinctly what was being said in the room below, where a phlegmatic Dutchman was instructing their hostess how to distinguish between cod, haberdine, and stock-fish—which are in reality one and the same fish, but with three names, denoting three different degrees of saltness.

As far as earthly potentates are concerned, Heine's comic assaults are not less audacious, not less fantastic than those of Aristophanes. Aristophanes showed courage in his attacks on Kleon and Theramenes; he occasionally chanced to defend the good cause; but as a rule it was the bad cause he upheld, for he made himself the spokesman of an indefensible conservatism, and of unjust personal animosities. Heine was less frequently unjust or mean, and he was never conservative. But he recalls Aristophanes to us by his aristocratic propensities, by the grim character of his personal attacks (those on Meyerbeer, for instance), and also by the form of these attacks, for example the amusing way in which he turns to account well-known, pathetic passages from other poets.

He made witty attacks on Frederick William IV., in Deutschland, where Hammonia warns Heine himself against "the king of Thule," and in the poem Der neue Alexander; and he wrote a whole series of satirical poems on King Ludwig of Bavaria and his doings. This latter king, whom Heine in past days had extolled, was flattered as a Mæcenas by a whole band of contemporary artists and poets. In the Lobgesänge auf König Lüdewig, Heine falls foul of all his weaknesses, his gallery of beauty in the Munich palace, his bad verses, his annoyance when several of the famous men of science and artists whom he patronised allowed themselves to be persuaded to leave Bavaria and settle in Prussia. On the subject of the gallery of beauty we have:

"Er liebt die Kunst, und die schönsten Frau'n, Die lässt er porträtiren, Er geht in diesem gemalten Serail Als Kunst-Eunuch spazieren."[2]

When writing of the migration to Prussia of the various men of note, Heine seizes the opportunity to give a side-hit at his old scape-goat, Massmann:

"Der Schelling und der Cornelius, Sie mögen von dannen wandern. Dem einen erlosch im Kopf die Vernunft, Die Phantasie dem Andern. Doch dass man aus meiner Krone stahl Die beste Perle, dass man Mir meinen Turnkunstmeister geraubt, Das Menschenjuwel, den Massmann, Das hat mich gebeugt, das hat mich geknickt, Das hat mir die Seele zerschmettert, Mir fehlt jetzt der Mann, der in seiner Kunst Den höchsten Pfahl erklettert...."[3]

Of King Ludwig's essays in poetry he writes:

"Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet, Und singt er, so stürzt Apollo Vor ihm auf die Knie und bittet und fleht: Halt ein! ich werde sonst toll, o!"[4]

Still wittier is the parody of King Ludwig's poetical style, in the inscription above the resting-place of Atta Troll in the Bavarian Walhalla:

"Atta Troll, Tendenzbär, sittlich— Religiös; als Gatte brünstig; Durch Verfuhrtsein von dem Zeitgeist Waldursprünglich Sansculotte; Sehr schlecht tanzend, doch Gesinnung Tragend in der zott'gen Hochbrust Manchmal auch gestunken habend; Kein Talent, doch ein Charakter!"[5]

The harshness and the strained participial construction both remind us of the style of the royal effusions which any visitor to Munich may study for himself below the frescoes on the walls of the arcades.

This is merely personal satire of crowned heads; but Heine's satire, like that of Aristophanes, is frequently directed against existing political, social, and literary conditions, and it is then that he is obliged to call the dream to his aid. With its help he descends into the depth of the earth, or mounts to a fantastic world above the clouds.

This, as already mentioned, happens more especially in Deutschland. Observe with what care and skill Heine prepares for the fantastic description of Barbarossa's subterranean dwelling-place in the Kyffhäuser. First he introduces the refrain of an old legendary ballad: "Sonne, du klagende Flamme!" (Sun, thou accusing flame!) with a sketch of the legend which tells how the sun acted as the accuser of the murderer of a young maiden; then he describes the good old nurse who sang this ballad and told many an entrancing tale—the tale of the princess disguised as a goose-herd, the tale of the emperor who lived deep down in the earth below the mountain; this second he relates at length—and presently all else is forgotten; we see Barbarossa with his mail-clad followers, we hear him call them to horse, to arms, to battle, to avenge the wrong which the murderers have done to the golden-haired Germania. Then we return to the mood of the nursery ballad, and to its refrain: "Sonne! du klagende Flamme!" now chanted with enthusiasm and rejoicing. There is an Aristophanic verve in this poetic description of the old arsenal, the empty suits of armour, the faded flags, the sleeping soldiers, and then the sudden revulsion, the appeal to awakening power, the supplication that the Middle Ages may return again, as being infinitely preferable to the sanctimonious Prussia of the day, with her mixture of Gothic folly and modern falsehood. The two following cantos, which contain a further description of the interior of the mountain, and conversations with Barbarossa, take the form of an account of a dream which the poet had while travelling at night in the stage-coach.

The anti-Prussian rhapsody in the inn at Minden is prepared for in the same manner. Heine wants to summon forth the Prussian eagle, and to pluck him and shoot him. If Aristophanes had had the same designs, he would have introduced the eagle without more ado. Heine goes to work in his roundabout way. In the act of falling asleep he dreams that the red bed-curtain tassel above his head turns into an eagle with feathers and claws, which threatens to tear the liver out of his breast, and which he taunts with bitter hatred.

In a few single instances Heine's artistic procedure is bolder, more like that of the great Greek. One of these is the splendid harangue to the wolves at night in the Teutoburgerwald. At midnight the traveller hears them howling round his carriage, which has lost a wheel. He comes out and makes a speech to the savage brutes:

"Mitwölfe, ich bin glücklich, heut' In eurer Mitte zu weilen, Wo so viel' edle Gemüther mir Mit Liebe entgegen heulen."[6]

And the speech is a humorous imitation of those which great men are in the habit of making on such occasions: This is an hour which to him will be ever memorable. They lie who say that he has joined the dogs; the idea of becoming court-councillor to the lambs has never even occurred to him. From time to time he has dressed himself in a sheepskin, but only for the sake of the warmth; he is and always will be a wolf.

In the scene between the poet and the strapping woman with the mural crown who represents Hamburg, we have, as Heine himself informs us, a direct imitation of the wedding of Peithetaerus and Basileia in The Birds. It is wanton and boyishly frolicsome; its licentiousness is really more offensive than that of similar passages in Aristophanes, who never appears in his own plays except in defence of himself as a poet. Heine does not go the same length as Aristophanes, but he is more personal.

In Atta Troll the parallel between the two poets is still more obvious. Here Heine's imagination has freer play, because the hero is not a man, but a bear. There is fine fancy in the passage where the bear, after his flight, is described dancing for his cubs in the moonlight. There is inimitable humour in his declamation against the rights of man, and in his boast of the more ancient rights of bears, which recalls the charming parabasis in The Birds, in which it is established that the bird world is the oldest: Everything proceeds from the original egg, the egg of Night, Love first of all, and the birds are children of Love. Atta Troll's pride in the animal world is most amusing, especially so because Heine manages to insinuate into the bear's utterances sarcastic hits at persons whom he himself wishes to depreciate—Freiligrath, for instance, whose popular but foolish poem, Löwenritt, and infelicitous Mohrenkönig had roused his mirthful derision:

"Giebt es nicht gelehrte Hunde? Und auch Pferde, welche rechnen? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schreiben Esel nicht Kritiken? Spielen Affen nicht Komödie? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Singen nicht die Nachtigallen? Ist der Freiligrath kein Dichter? Wer besäng' den Löwen besser? Als sein Landsmann, das Kamel?"[7]

A good deal of what the bear says, sounds like satire on foolish communistic democracy. He holds forth volubly against property—bears are born without pockets, but men have pockets and stuff them; and discourses eagerly on equality:

"Strenge Gleichheit! Jeder Esel Sei befugt zum höchsten Staatsamt, Und der Löwe soll dagegen Mit dem Sack zur Mühle traben."[8]

But on the whole it is harmless, stingless satire, fantastical banter alike of the clerical party and communists, misanthropes and revolutionists, cosmopolitans and patriots—for the bear speaks like them all in turn. A very wonderful passage is Atta Troll's sermon against atheism and its development from his deism, the passage beginning:

"Hüte dich vor Menschendenkart, Sie verdirbt dir Leib und Seele; Unter allen Menschen giebt es Keinen ordentlichen Menschen."[9]

There is a gay profundity in the warning against Feuerbach and Bauer, and there is wit, as brilliant as Voltaire's, but richer, and warmer, in the description of the creative deity:

"Droben in dem Sternenzelte, Auf dem gold'nen Herrscherstuhle, Weltregierend, majestätisch, Sitzt ein kolossaler Eisbär " &c.[10]

What humour there is in the description of the bear-saints who dance before his throne!

The bear gives us something of the phraseology of all the different parties in turn, but it is the bigoted Teuton that he chiefly favours; it is he who is most severely satirised. The sleek bear-damsels remind us of a German pastor's daughters; the youngest cub turns somersaults exactly like Massmann, and is, like him, the product of home education, has never been able to learn Greek or Latin, or any language but his mother-tongue.

By strange, fantastic detours Heine invariably brings his reader back to the realities of his native land.

Aristophanic, in this respect, is the passage in which, when it rains, the cry is heard: "Six-and-thirty kings for an umbrella!" and again, when shelter is reached: "Six-and-thirty kings for a warm dressing-gown!"

And absolutely Aristophanic is the suppressed passage, in which the bird Hut-Hut tells how Solomon and Balkis ask each other riddles in the realm of shades, riddles like:

"Wer ist wohl der grösste Lump Unter allen deutschen Lumpen; Die in allen sechs und dreissig Deutschen Bundesstaaten leben?"[11]

Balkis, to whom the question is put, sends secret messengers to make inquiry in every country and state in Germany, but each time she informs Solomon of the discovery of a specially contemptible wretch, he answers:

"Kind! es giebt noch einen grösser'n!" (Child! there is a worse one still!)

And it is explained to us as a peculiarity of Germany, that as often as we imagine we have discovered her most despicable character, one still more despicable makes his appearance. There is no progress so certain as the progress in general contemptibility. It was only yesterday that X. appeared to be the sorriest knave, to-day he is not to be named in comparison with N. N. Heine must have felt that he had plentiful stores of invention to draw upon, else he would hardly, in his final revision of the poem, have rejected this means of satirising his opponents, one by one, in the most amusing manner.

In purely literary satire, too, Heine's methods have a distinct resemblance to those of Aristophanes. An example of this is the hit in Atta Troll at the Swabian school of poets—the cat in the witch's cottage, which is a bewitched Swabian poet, who will turn into a man again when a pure maiden can read Gustav Pfizer's poems on New Year's eve without falling asleep. Another example is the satire in the same poem on the following rather ridiculous lines of Freiligrath's Der Mohrenfürst (The Moorish Prince) with their far-fetched simile:

"Aus dem schimmernd weissen Zelte hervor Tritt der schlachtgerüstete fürstliche Mohr; So tritt aus schimmernder Wolken Thor Der Mond, der verfinsterte, dunkle, hervor."[12]

It is a poem about a negro king, who is taken prisoner, brought to Europe, and made to play the drum outside a circus; while doing so he thinks of his former greatness, and beats his drum to pieces. The idea of the black man at the opening of the tent resembling the moon appearing through the clouds is undoubtedly comical.

In Atta Troll the red tongue hangs out of the bear's black jaws as the moon shows herself through white clouds. And towards the end of the poem Heine tells us how, in the Jardin des Plantes, he makes acquaintance with a negro caretaker, who confides to him that he is Freiligrath's negro king, that he has married a white Alsatian cook, whose feet remind him of the feet of the elephants in his native land, and whose French sounds to him like the negro tongue. She feeds him so well that he has developed a little round black stomach, which shows itself through the opening of his shirt like a black moon, appearing from behind white clouds.

And there is something especially Aristophanic in the recklessly brutal satire upon Platen in the second part of the Reisebilder. Certain amusing artifices in their literary warfare are common to the Greek and the German comic poet. In The Frogs, in the contest between Æschylus and Euripides (a poet whom Aristophanes hates), Æschylus tacks a refrain, equivalent to "spoiled his verse," to everything that Euripides recites. In the Reisebilder Heine revenges himself by making Hyacinth alternately tack the words von vorn (from the front) and von hinten (from behind) to the end of Platen's lines, thereby maliciously perverting their meaning.

The Aristophanic comedy resembles the majestic frescoes that cover the interior of some great dome; to compare Heine's comic writings with those of Aristophanes, is to compare pictures carefully painted on the easel with such frescoes. In the Greek comedies there is the light and space of the Sistine Chapel; in them, as in the frescoes of Michael Angelo, everything is large, sweeping, strong; the creation of a mind that sets recognised rules at defiance by the vehemence of its lyric emotion, the audacity of its fore-shortening, and the force of its allegory. Only that Michael Angelo's world is solemnly, wildly tragic, whereas the world of Aristophanes is dithyrambic, a world of caricatures set in a framework of Greek social conditions.

Compared with Aristophanes, Heine is a private, stay-at-home citizen. Aristophanes holds forth to an audience of thousands in the broad daylight of the theatre; Heine communes with his public sitting alone in his room. But the scenes that depict themselves simply on the retina of his eye, are aglow with more ardent, passionate life than those which Aristophanes embodied on the stage. And his aims are not the purely local aims of the Greek poet. When he is at his best, he appeals to millions who are not of his nationality, appeals, indeed, to the elect among all who can read. His lyric poetry is more personal, more intense, more nervous than that of any Greek; his satire is dedicated to the cause of general ideas, which did not exist for Aristophanes. He is not less witty than his Greek forerunner, and he always fought for political progress and personal liberty, whereas the enemy of Euripides and Socrates most frequently fought for a past that was gone beyond recall, a past to which he himself most certainly did not belong.

XVII

HEINE

Heine's prose is not on the same level with his verse. In his most famous prose book, the Reisebilder, he shows himself to be a pupil of Sterne; in later works, where he has attained to greater independence, he is always witty and lively, but seldom properly qualified to treat the subjects of his choice. Whether he is writing on German philosophy for French readers, or on French art for Germans, he does it in equally dilettante fashion. Judged as journalism, his writing was always excellent, but he is too strong, too great a man to be classified as a journalist.

Too much has been made of Heine's superficiality by the pedants among his detractors. He was not a hard worker, but he was by no means idle, and he possessed a fund of solid and varied knowledge. Still, it is only as a poet that he is great; most of his prose writings treat of the passing topics of the day; and his fame has been actually injured by the publication of his letters, which, as a rule, present him to us in an unfavourable light, namely entirely taken up with his own interests. Pecuniary difficulties are a tiresome subject, even when they happen to be the pecuniary difficulties of a genius.

Heine, as every one knows, did not live to be an old man. He was carried off in the prime of his mental powers by a terrible disease.

He had always been delicate and suffering; in his youth he was plagued by severe headaches, and was obliged to be so moderate in the matter of drink that his friends used laughingly to declare that he contented himself with smelling a bottle of Rhenish wine which he kept in his room. His nervous system was undermined while he was still a young man, but it is certain that this was to a much less extent the result of excesses than is generally believed, for Heine is a real fanfaron des vices, given to perpetual boasting of his own depravity. He was attacked by the disease which is so frequently the fate of those who have lived lives of unbroken mental productivity. An affection of the spine, with paralysis first of the eyelids and in course of time of almost the whole body, consigned him to that "mattress-grave" in Paris, where he lay for nearly eight years.

His life, which can neither be called a great nor a happy one, falls of itself into two distinctly defined parts—the life in Germany till the Revolution of July, and the life in Paris from 1831 till his death in 1856. It was a life led without calculation, but not without instinctive perception of the direction in which possibilities of development for his talent lay; it is hardly probable that Heine would have attained to his great cosmopolitan fame, or even that he would have become so eminent a satiric poet, if he had lived in his native country all his life.

His youthful years in Germany are passed under the oppression of the reaction—his Reisebilder won popularity as an expression of the general political dissatisfaction—but he soon makes up his mind that it is useless to meddle with politics. The Revolution of July puts new life into everything; Heine goes off to Paris, settles there, and is kept there by the embargo placed upon his works in all the states of the German Confederation. The Guizot Government secretly give him the small pension which enables him to live in comparative comfort. His acceptance of this laid him open to accusations, which, though they were not altogether groundless, were in many points quite unjustifiable. It must be borne in mind that Heine did not understand the art of making money; and even if he had, it would have been of little use to him. Many thousands of pounds must have been made by the sale of his books, but he himself made over the most profitable of them all, the Buch der Lieder, to Campe in payment of an old debt of 50 Louis d'ors, and was all his life long dependent on the unwilling assistance of his rich uncle. If he, and if the little Parisian grisette whom he married, had had more idea of economy, it might have been unnecessary for him to accept Government support. The fact of his accepting it no doubt occasionally prevented him from criticising the French ministry freely in German newspapers, but it had no other bad result, and least of all did it induce him to write anything he did not mean.

From French soil he waged uninterrupted, unremitting intellectual warfare with the European reaction. In this respect he may be called Byron's great successor. Only a few years after the sword of sarcasm, wielded in the cause of liberty, had slipped from the hands of the dying Byron, it was seized by Heine, who wielded it for a whole generation with equal skill and power. Yet for the eight last years it was a mortally wounded man who fought.

At no time did he write truer, more incisive, more brilliant verse than when he lay nailed to the low, broad bed of torture in Paris. And never, so far as we know, has a great productive mind borne superhuman sufferings with more undaunted courage and endurance. The power of the soul over the body has seldom displayed itself so unmistakably. To bear such agonies as his in close-lipped silence would have been admirable; but to create, to bubble over with sparkling, whimsical jest and mockery, to let his spirit wander the world round in charming and profound reverie, while he himself lay crippled, almost lifeless, on his couch—this was great.

He lay there shrunk to a skeleton, with his eyes closed, his hands almost powerless, his noble features painfully emaciated; the white, perfectly formed hands were nearly transparent; at times, when he spoke, a Mephistophelian smile passed over the suffering, martyr-like face. At last, as in the case of Tithonus of old, all that really remained of the man was his voice; but it was a voice of many notes, of many whimsies, many jests.

He continued to be mentally active. It was as if the driving-wheel went on turning without steam, as if the lamp went on burning without oil.

It is not true that he reverted to a connection with any church; but the suffering man clung to a kind of piety and faith in God which was a legacy from the days of his youth. At this faith he himself sometimes smiled. We have such a smile in the words with which on the last day of his life he tried to pacify an excited acquaintance: Dieu me pardonnera—c'est son métier.

It is a touching proof of his strength of mind and of his filial affection that during his whole long illness he took the greatest care that all knowledge of his sufferings should be kept from his old mother in Hamburg; to the last he wrote her cheerful, amusing letters, and he caused any passages that might have awakened her suspicions to be taken out of the copies of his works that were sent to her.

Another pleasant impression of his spiritual condition is conveyed by the circumstance that he, the most wanton-tongued of men and poets on the subject of love, changed during his illness into the tenderest and most spiritual exponent of that passion. The last year of his life was, as is well known, sweetened by the admiration and devotion of the young and beautiful woman who, though German born, made her appearance as a French authoress under the pseudonym of Camille Selden.[1]

She was then about twenty-eight, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and so charming, gentle, and attractive, that she won Heine's heart the first time she visited him. Soon he could not live without her; he was miserable if a few days passed without his seeing her, though he was often in such pain that he was obliged to request her to delay her visit.

It is in the poems and letters to her, published after Heine's death, that we find that fervency, depth, and fulness of passion which we feel to be wanting in the rest of his love poetry.

He calls her his spiritually affianced bride, whose life is bound up with his by the will of fate. United, they would have known what happiness is; separated, they are doomed to misery:

"Ich weiss es jetzt. Bei Gott! du bist es, Die ich geliebt. Wie bitter ist es, Wenn im Momente des Erkennens Die Stunde schlägt des ew'gen Trennens! Der Willkomm ist zu gleicher Zeit Ein Lebewohl!"[2]

Half laughing, half weeping, he bemoans the compulsory platonic affection of two lovers, to whom an embrace is an impossibility:

"Worte! Worte! keine Thaten! Niemals Fleisch, geliebte Puppe, Immer Geist und keinen Braten, Keine Knödel in der Suppe!"[3]

When, at a rare time, she keeps him waiting, he is frantic with impatience:

"Lass mich mit glüh'nden Zangen kneipen, Lass grausam schinden mein Gesicht, Lass mich mit Ruthen peitschen, stäupen— Nur warten, warten lass mich nicht!"[4]

But the great mystic poem which celebrates the nuptials of the dead poet with the passion-flower that blossoms on his grave, is a poem of resignation, resignation in the presence of Death:

"Du warst die Blume, du geliebtes Kind, An deinen Küssen musst' ich dich erkennen. So zärtlich keine Blumenlippen sind, So feurig keine Blumenthränen brennen. Geschlossen war mein Aug', doch angeblickt Hat meine Seel' beständig dein Gesichte, Du sahst mich an, beseeligt und verzückt Und geisterhaft beglänzt vom Mondenlichte."[5]

These images, these feelings, belong to an insubstantial world, a world like the blind man's, where there are kisses, but not from visible lips, and tears which fall from unseen eyes, a world fragrant with the perfume of flowers that cannot be touched, and illuminated by magic, spirit-like moonshine instead of the light of the sun. There is no substantiality and there is no sound:

"Wir sprachen nicht, jedoch mein Herz vernahm Was du verschwiegen dachtest im Gemüthe— Das ausgesprochene Wort ist ohne Scham, Das Schweigen ist der Liebe keusche Blüthe."[6]

They held noiseless converse, but what they talked of we are forbidden to ask:

"Frag, was er strahlet, den Karfunkelstein, Frag, was sie duften, Nachtviol' und Rosen— Doch frage nie, wovon im Mondenschein Die Marterblume und ihr Todter kosen!"[7]

Heine rises here to a level with Shelley, the sublimest of modern lyric poets. This is Shelley's note—the violin strain of an Ariel, clear and spirit-like and full, and entirely modern in its trembling, thrilling, almost morbid tenderness.

XVIII

LITERATURE AND PARTY

Börne and many later critics have maintained that Heine was never in earnest about anything, and have condemned him accordingly. Setting aside slighter and unimportant causes, Börne's resentment was really aroused by what appeared to him to be Heine's determination not to espouse the cause of any party. He himself, as far as it was possible in those unparliamentary days, was an extreme partyman in literature.

It is now a generally accepted, trite axiom, that art is its own aim and end, but then people were accustomed to look upon it as the handmaid of the great general aims of the day; and in all German literary productions of that period, important and unimportant, we feel exactly what it was that induced the writer to take up his pen. Even an author as strongly actuated by a purpose as Heine was, did not satisfy those who, like Börne, lived for their convictions. They applied to him the expression "talented but characterless" ("wohl ein Talent, aber kein Charakter"), which he ridicules so unmercifully in Atta Troll. Even in the introduction he alludes jestingly to the consolation for the great majority which is contained in the doctrine that respectable people are as a rule bad musicians, while, to make up for this, good musicians are anything but respectable people—and every one knows that respectability and not music is the important thing in this world.

Elsewhere Heine maintains that it is, as a rule, a sign of a man's narrowmindedness when he is straightway discerned and held in high esteem by the narrow-minded majority as a man of character; the chief reason for such distinction being that a narrow, superficial, but always consistent philosophy of life is what the multitude most easily understands.

Stoic firmness was assuredly not one of the qualities of Heine's nature. Allowing that in certain given circumstances he showed want of character, we proceed to what is really the vital question: Ought the poet to be a party-man?

At the time when Heine was jeering in Atta Troll at those who in their philanthropic and political ardour imagined strength of character to be a sufficient substitute for talent, a serious literary war was being waged in Germany over the question whether the poet ought to be a party-man or to take up a position superior to all parties. Atta Troll, which pours such ridicule on Freiligrath's youthful poems, appeared in the autumn of 1841; in November of the same year Freiligrath, who till then had been best known by oriental poems in Victor Hugo's style, and who had a short time previously accepted a pension from the King of Prussia, wrote, in a poem entitled Año Spanien (on Diego Leon, the Spanish general shot in 1841) the following lines on the poet as such:

"Er beugt sein Knie dem Helden Bonaparte, Und hört mit Zürnen d'Enghien's Todesschrei: Der Dichter steht auf einer höhern Warte Als auf den Zinnen der Partei."[1]

This sentiment was condemned by Georg Herwegh in the poem Die Partei (an Ferdinand Freiligrath), the most striking lines of which are:

"Partei! Partei! wer sollte sie nicht nehmen, Die noch die Mutter aller Siege war! Wie mag ein Dichter solch ein Wort verfehmen, Ein Wort, das alles Herrliche gebar! Nur offen wie ein Mann: Für oder wider? Und die Parole: Sklave oder frei? Selbst Götter stiegen vom Olymp hernieder Und kämpften auf den Zinnen der Partei."[2]

A year later, in his poem Duett der Pensionirten, Herwegh taunted Freiligrath with accepting a pension from the King of Prussia, whereupon Freiligrath, as is well known, threw up his pension, joined the ranks of the political poets, and developed so rapidly into a Radical and revolutionary, that at the time of the outbreak in 1848, he was looked upon as the representative revolutionary poet in Germany. It is plain, then, that Freiligrath considered Herwegh to be in the right. Still this does not prove him to have been so.

The question whether and to what extent the poet ought to be a party-man is a very complex one. It is so in the first instance because of the ambiguity of the word party, a word which Heine and Börne, Freiligrath and Herwegh employed with a different meaning at different times.

The poet, even if he is a small-minded man, can only lose by pinning his faith to any narrow, political, party programme, to any social or religious theory. How is it possible that his ideals should exactly correspond with the limited, definite aims of any party! Thomas Moore was a Whig poet, Walter Scott a Tory poet, because, with all their great talent, they were not great minds. Byron went more to the root of things than either of them, or than either of the political parties—yet every one instinctively feels that it is absurd to say that Byron, as a poet, did not take a side in politics or religion. He did so even more markedly than Schiller, who also could not be said to belong to any political party, for one reason because there were none in the Germany of his day.

There are certain branches of literature which plainly have nothing to do with party. The poet of love, as such, belongs to no political or religious party; though it is not impossible that he may belong to an art party, for as soon as there is any question of style in art, we at once encounter party again. But the moment he begins to treat a theme in which there is any trace of theory, of thought, of fundamental principle, he is obliged to choose his side, to rank himself among the disciples of this or that philosophy of life.

When, however, as in Freiligrath's case, we have simply an assertion of the poet's right to admire Napoleon and yet to be incensed by the death of d'Enghien, party does not come into question at all; for all that is meant is, that the poet has not dispossessed himself of his right to judge the past with equity and to see the vices as well as the virtues of his heroes. The question of party, strictly so called, is not a question of the judging of the past, but of the shaping of the future; and no man can proceed in two directions at the same time.

Another difficulty presents itself to us in the word party. It means, generally speaking, part of the population of one's own country. And the poet ought to belong to his country and his people, not only to part of them. Looked upon in this light, party is the narrower, country the wider conception, and if by party an actual political party, corresponding more or less perfectly to its name or its programme, is meant, then as a matter of course country is superior to party.

But if we take the word party in the sense in which we use it when we speak of Schiller and of Byron as party-men, then party is a wider, a grander conception than country. For by country we understand a definitely bounded tract of land, definitely limited interests, a definitely circumscribed history; but by party in this sense we understand a system of ideas which, from their very nature, are not confined to any place—world-wide thoughts, the great general interests of humanity. And even if the party sided with represents only the great moving ideas of one age, an age is a wider, greater native land than a country; and the poet does his people a service by extending their horizon beyond their country's bounds.

Börne and Heine were, in my opinion, both strong party-men, but none the less both zealous patriots, their patriotism quite uninjured by their partisanship.

The official press of the day proclaimed Börne to be not only a mad Radical, but a libeller of his country. He had the dangerous habit of expressing all his opinions in such violent terms that they offended, wounded, or incited to action. There was an outcry of indignation when he wrote that any nation had a right to depose its king even if it were only because it had taken a dislike to the shape of his nose. And whole volumes of invective were called forth by his observations on the servility (Bedientennatur) of the Germans. He had gone so far as to call them "a nation of flunkeys."

He himself writes: "What can I do with people who really seriously believe that I have advised the nations of Europe to depose their kings as soon as they take a dislike to their noses.... If I were to say: Gentlemen! I did not mean you to take me so literally, they would perhaps believe me—but that would avail me nothing. They would say: You ought to have remembered that you do not write for educated readers only, but that a large proportion of your readers are uneducated men. To this I would answer nothing but: Take me to prison! Then when I was brought into court I would say: Gentlemen! The German is a crocodile! (Cries of indignation. Crocodile! Order!) Gentlemen! The German is a crocodile! (Order! Judge: You are abusing your right of self-defence.) Gentlemen! The German is a crocodile—I beg of you to allow me to continue. When I use the word crocodile I am not hinting at savage instincts or crocodile tears. The German is tame and good-natured, and weeps tears that are as sincere as the tears of a whipped child. If I have applied the name of crocodile to the German, it is only on account of his skin, which does resemble that of the crocodile. It consists of hard scales, and is like a slated roof. Anything solid that falls upon it rebounds, anything liquid runs off. Suppose, now, gentlemen, that you wished to mesmerise such a crocodile, with the final intention of curing his weak nerves, but in the first instance of making him so clear sighted that he could see inside himself, discover his own disease, and find out the proper remedy for it. How would you set about it? Would you gently stroke the crocodile coat-of-mail with your warm hand? No, you would not be so foolish; you know that would make no impression on it. You would stamp on it, drive nails into it, and if that were not enough, you would fire a hundred bullets at it, calculating that ninety-nine of them would take no effect, and that the hundredth would bring about just the mild, modest results your mesmerism was intended to produce. This is what I have done."[3]

One sees that Börne's strong language on the subject of German servility and indolence is simply the negative expression of his patriotism. It is a patriotism which as a rule finds only indirect expression, but we feel it as distinctly in his melancholy derision as in the enthusiastic demonstrations of others.

As regards Heine, Börne's charges were, no doubt, to a certain extent well founded. The versatile poet's temperament made the monotonous struggle for a political conviction hard for him, and he was, as we have already shown, drawn two ways and rendered vague in his utterances by feeling himself to be at one and the same time a popular revolutionist and an enthusiastic aristocrat. But his objection to connecting himself with any of the existing political or religious parties was more a proof of his high intellectual standard than of anything else. His raillery in Atta Troll at the canting preachers of the Opposition is delightful and perfectly justifiable; it only shows that he abhorred dogmatism in all its forms.

Börne is wrong in assuming that Heine, the man, was false to his party, taking that word in its greater, wider, signification, namely, the ideas for which he contended. For to these he was faithful, even throughout the eight long years when he lay on his deathbed, with difficulty opening his paralysed eyelids to look for God in that heaven whose emptiness he himself had so sadly and defiantly described.

And Heine was as true a patriot as Börne. Every reader of his works must remember the beautiful passage at the conclusion of the Reisebilder, in which he tells how the Emperor Maximilian sate in sore straits in the Tyrol, encompassed by his enemies, forgotten by his knights and courtiers. Suddenly the door of his prison cell was opened, and there entered a man in disguise, whom the Emperor recognised as Kunz von der Rosen, his faithful court jester.

I feel it to be not only beautiful but true when Heine says: "O German fatherland! beloved German people! I am thy Kunz von der Rosen. The man whose only business it was to amuse thee, to cater for thy mirth in times of prosperity, makes his way into thy prison in time of need. Here, under my cloak, I bring thee thy strong sceptre and thy beautiful crown—dost thou not recognise me, my Emperor? ... Thou liest in fetters now, but in the end thy rightful cause will prevail; the day of deliverance is at hand, a new time is beginning, my Emperor, the night is over; look out and see the ruddy dawn."

If we beware of attaching too much importance to single expressions, to the wanton or arrogant outbursts scattered here and there throughout his works, we shall perceive that the feeling which finds classic expression in the words just quoted was very strong in Heine's breast. Neither his party standpoint, nor the admiration of things foreign which it entailed, affected a very sincere, deep love of his native land, which made exile in many ways a punishment to him. But he had not the kind of patriotism which he somewhere ascribes to the average German, the kind that narrows the heart, makes it shrink like leather in the cold. His was the patriotism that warms the heart and widens it until it is able to embrace the whole realm of civilization.[4] How could he help loving Germany! As he himself has said, and as we all must say each of his own country: "The truth is—Germany is ourselves." His whole nature and character were determined by his German birth and upbringing. The second half of his life being spent in an exile that was partly voluntary, partly compulsory—in so far a homeless man, that his works were prohibited throughout the German Confederation—the German language became to him a true, a grander, a real fatherland. He himself called the German tongue the most sacred of all possessions, the unsilenceable call to liberty, a new fatherland for him whom stupidity or malice has banished from the land of his birth.