Chapter IV: German Wit: Henry Heine. {99} (1)

“Nothing,” says Goethe, “is more significant of men’s character than what they find laughable.” The truth of this observation would perhaps have been more apparent if he had said _culture_ instead of character. The last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar is their jocularity; and we can hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide gulf which separates him from them, than by comparing the object which shakes the diaphragm of a coal-heaver with the highly complex pleasure derived from a real witticism. That any high order of wit is exceedingly complex, and demands a ripe and strong mental development, has one evidence in the fact that we do not find it in boys at all in proportion to their manifestation of other powers. Clever boys generally aspire to the heroic and poetic rather than the comic, and the crudest of all their efforts are their jokes. Many a witty man will remember how in his school days a practical joke, more or less Rabelaisian, was for him the _ne plus ultra_ of the ludicrous. It seems to have been the same with the boyhood of the human race. The history and literature of the ancient Hebrews gives the idea of a people who went about their business and their pleasure as gravely as a society of beavers; the smile and the laugh are often mentioned metaphorically, but the smile is one of complacency, the laugh is one of scorn. Nor can we imagine that the facetious element was very strong in the Egyptians; no laughter lurks in the wondering eyes and the broad calm lips of their statues. Still less can the Assyrians have had any genius for the comic: the round eyes and simpering satisfaction of their ideal faces belong to a type which is not witty, but the cause of wit in others. The fun of these early races was, we fancy, of the after-dinner kind—loud-throated laughter over the wine-cup, taken too little account of in sober moments to enter as an element into their Art, and differing as much from the laughter of a Chamfort or a Sheridan as the gastronomic enjoyment of an ancient Briton, whose dinner had no other “removes” than from acorns to beech-mast and back again to acorns, differed from the subtle pleasures of the palate experienced by his turtle-eating descendant. In fact they had to live seriously through the stages which to subsequent races were to become comedy, as those amiable-looking preadamite amphibia which Professor Owen has restored for us in effigy at Sydenham, took perfectly _au sérieux_ the grotesque physiognomies of their kindred. Heavy experience in their case, as in every other, was the base from which the salt of future wit was to be made.

Humor is of earlier growth than Wit, and it is in accordance with this earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic tendencies, while Wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humor draws its materials from situations and characteristics; Wit seizes on unexpected and complex relations. Humor is chiefly representative and descriptive; it is diffuse, and flows along without any other law than its own fantastic will; or it flits about like a will-of-the-wisp, amazing us by its whimsical transitions. Wit is brief and sudden, and sharply defined as a crystal; it does not make pictures, it is not fantastic; but it detects an unsuspected analogy or suggests a startling or confounding inference. Every one who has had the opportunity of making the comparison will remember that the effect produced on him by some witticisms is closely akin to the effect produced on him by subtle reasoning which lays open a fallacy or absurdity, and there are persons whose delight in such reasoning always manifests itself in laughter. This affinity of wit with ratiocination is the more obvious in proportion as the species of wit is higher and deals less with less words and with superficialities than with the essential qualities of things. Some of Johnson’s most admirable witticisms consist in the suggestion of an analogy which immediately exposes the absurdity of an action or proposition; and it is only their ingenuity, condensation, and instantaneousness which lift them from reasoning into Wit—they are _reasoning raised to a higher power_. On the other hand, Humor, in its higher forms, and in proportion as it associates itself with the sympathetic emotions, continually passes into poetry: nearly all great modern humorists may be called prose poets.

Some confusion as to the nature of Humor has been created by the fact that those who have written most eloquently on it have dwelt almost exclusively on its higher forms, and have defined humor in general as the _sympathetic_ presentation of incongruous elements in human nature and life—a definition which only applies to its later development. A great deal of humor may coexist with a great deal of barbarism, as we see in the Middle Ages; but the strongest flavor of the humor in such cases will come, not from sympathy, but more probably from triumphant egoism or intolerance; at best it will be the love of the ludicrous exhibiting itself in illustrations of successful cunning and of the _lex talionis_ as in _Reineke Fuchs_, or shaking off in a holiday mood the yoke of a too exacting faith, as in the old Mysteries. Again, it is impossible to deny a high degree of humor to many practical jokes, but no sympathetic nature can enjoy them. Strange as the genealogy may seem, the original parentage of that wonderful and delicious mixture of fun, fancy, philosophy, and feeling, which constitutes modern humor, was probably the cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy—such is the tendency of things toward the good and beautiful on this earth! Probably the reason why high culture demands more complete harmony with its moral sympathies in humor than in wit, is that humor is in its nature more prolix—that it has not the direct and irresistible force of wit. Wit is an electric shock, which takes us by violence, quite independently of our predominant mental disposition; but humor approaches us more deliberately and leaves us masters of ourselves. Hence it is, that while coarse and cruel humor has almost disappeared from contemporary literature, coarse and cruel wit abounds; even refined men cannot help laughing at a coarse _bon mot_ or a lacerating personality, if the “shock” of the witticism is a powerful one; while mere fun will have no power over them if it jar on their moral taste. Hence, too, it is, that while wit is perennial, humor is liable to become superannuated.

As is usual with definitions and classifications, however, this distinction between wit and humor does not exactly represent the actual fact. Like all other species, Wit and Humor overlap and blend with each other. There are _bon mots_, like many of Charles Lamb’s, which are a sort of facetious hybrids, we hardly know whether to call them witty or humorous; there are rather lengthy descriptions or narratives, which, like Voltaire’s “Micromégas,” would be more humorous if they were not so sparkling and antithetic, so pregnant with suggestion and satire, that we are obliged to call them witty. We rarely find wit untempered by humor, or humor without a spice of wit; and sometimes we find them both united in the highest degree in the same mind, as in Shakespeare and Molière. A happy conjunction this, for wit is apt to be cold, and thin-lipped, and Mephistophelean in men who have no relish for humor, whose lungs do never crow like Chanticleer at fun and drollery; and broad-faced, rollicking humor needs the refining influence of wit. Indeed, it may be said that there is no really fine writing in which wit has not an implicit, if not an explicit, action. The wit may never rise to the surface, it may never flame out into a witticism; but it helps to give brightness and transparency, it warns off from flights and exaggerations which verge on the ridiculous—in every _genre_ of writing it preserves a man from sinking into the _genre ennuyeux_. And it is eminently needed for this office in humorous writing; for as humor has no limits imposed on it by its material, no law but its own exuberance, it is apt to become preposterous and wearisome unless checked by wit, which is the enemy of all monotony, of all lengthiness, of all exaggeration.

Perhaps the nearest approach Nature has given us to a complete analysis, in which wit is as thoroughly exhausted of humor as possible, and humor as bare as possible of wit, is in the typical Frenchman and the typical German. Voltaire, the intensest example of pure wit, fails in most of his fictions from his lack of humor. “Micromégas” is a perfect tale, because, as it deals chiefly with philosophic ideas and does not touch the marrow of human feeling and life, the writer’s wit and wisdom were all-sufficient for his purpose. Not so with “Candide.” Here Voltaire had to give pictures of life as well as to convey philosophic truth and satire, and here we feel the want of humor. The sense of the ludicrous is continually defeated by disgust, and the scenes, instead of presenting us with an amusing or agreeable picture, are only the frame for a witticism. On the other hand, German humor generally shows no sense of measure, no instinctive tact; it is either floundering and clumsy as the antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lapland day, in which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will ever come. For this reason, Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorists, is unendurable to many readers, and frequently tiresome to all. Here, as elsewhere, the German shows the absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility to gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the necessary concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region of metaphysics. For _Identität_ in the abstract no one can have an acuter vision, but in the concrete he is satisfied with a very loose approximation. He has the finest nose for _Empirismus_ in philosophical doctrine, but the presence of more or less tobacco smoke in the air he breathes is imperceptible to him. To the typical German—_Vetter Michel_—it is indifferent whether his door-lock will catch, whether his teacup be more or less than an inch thick; whether or not his book have every other leaf unstitched; whether his neighbor’s conversation be more or less of a shout; whether he pronounce _b_ or _p_, _t_ or _d_; whether or not his adored one’s teeth be few and far between. He has the same sort of insensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like a German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word _Langeweile_, the equivalent for ennui, and we have secretly wondered _what_ it can be that produces ennui in a German. Not the longest of long tragedies, for we have known him to pronounce that _höchst fesselnd_ (_so_ enchaining!); not the heaviest of heavy books, for he delights in that as _gründlich_ (deep, Sir, deep!); not the slowest of journeys in a _Postwagen_, for the slower the horses, the more cigars he can smoke before he reaches his journey’s end. German ennui must be something as superlative as Barclay’s treble X, which, we suppose, implies an extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction.

It is easy to see that this national deficiency in nicety of perception must have its effect on the national appreciation and exhibition of Humor. You find in Germany ardent admirers of Shakespeare, who tell you that what they think most admirable in him is his _Wortspiel_, his verbal quibbles; and one of these, a man of no slight culture and refinement, once cited to a friend of ours Proteus’s joke in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”—“Nod I? why that’s Noddy,” as a transcendant specimen of Shakespearian wit. German facetiousness is seldom comic to foreigners, and an Englishman with a swelled cheek might take up _Kladderadatsch_, the German Punch, without any danger of agitating his facial muscles. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that, among the five great races concerned in modern civilization, the German race is the only one which, up to the present century, had contributed nothing classic to the common stock of European wit and humor; for _Reineke Fuchs_ cannot be regarded as a peculiarly Teutonic product. Italy was the birthplace of Pantomime and the immortal Pulcinello; Spain had produced Cervantes; France had produced Rabelais and Molière, and classic wits innumerable; England had yielded Shakspeare and a host of humorists. But Germany had borne no great comic dramatist, no great satirist, and she has not yet repaired the omission; she had not even produced any humorist of a high order. Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit—the “flavor of mind”—throughout his writings; and it is often concentrated into pungent satire, as every reader of the _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ remembers. Still Lessing’s name has not become European through his wit, and his charming comedy, _Minna von Barnhelm_, has won no place on a foreign stage. Of course we do not pretend to an exhaustive acquaintance with German literature; we not only admit—we are sure that it includes much comic writing of which we know nothing. We simply state the fact, that no German production of that kind, before the present century, ranked as European; a fact which does not, indeed, determine the _amount_ of the national facetiousness, but which is quite decisive as to its _quality_. Whatever may be the stock of fun which Germany yields for home consumption, she has provided little for the palate of other lands. All honor to her for the still greater things she has done for us! She has fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, has produced the grandest inventions, has made magnificent contributions to science, has given us some of the divinest poetry, and quite the divinest music in the world. No one reveres and treasures the products of the German mind more than we do. To say that that mind is not fertile in wit is only like saying that excellent wheat land is not rich pasture; to say that we do not enjoy German facetiousness is no more than to say that, though the horse is the finest of quadrupeds, we do not like him to lay his hoof playfully on our shoulder. Still, as we have noticed that the pointless puns and stupid jocularity of the boy may ultimately be developed into the epigrammatic brilliancy and polished playfulness of the man; as we believe that racy wit and chastened delicate humor are inevitably the results of invigorated and refined mental activity, we can also believe that Germany will, one day, yield a crop of wits and humorists.

Perhaps there is already an earnest of that future crop in the existence of Heinrich Heine, a German born with the present century, who, to Teutonic imagination, sensibility, and humor, adds an amount of _esprit_ that would make him brilliant among the most brilliant of Frenchmen. True, this unique German wit is half a Hebrew; but he and his ancestors spent their youth in German air, and were reared on _Wurst_ and _Sauerkraut_, so that he is as much a German as a pheasant is an English bird, or a potato an Irish vegetable. But whatever else he may be, Heine is one of the most remarkable men of this age: no echo, but a real voice, and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth studying; a surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art—who sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most scorching lightnings of satire; an artist in prose literature, who has shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose; and—in spite of all charges against him, true as well as false—a lover of freedom, who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. He is, moreover, a suffering man, who, with all the highly-wrought sensibility of genius, has to endure terrible physical ills; and as such he calls forth more than an intellectual interest. It is true, alas! that there is a heavy weight in the other scale—that Heine’s magnificent powers have often served only to give electric force to the expression of debased feeling, so that his works are no Phidian statue of gold, and ivory, and gems, but have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay mingled with the precious metal. The audacity of his occasional coarseness and personality is unparalleled in contemporary literature, and has hardly been exceeded by the license of former days. Hence, before his volumes are put within the reach of immature minds, there is need of a friendly penknife to exercise a strict censorship. Yet, when all coarseness, all scurrility, all Mephistophelean contempt for the reverent feelings of other men, is removed, there will be a plenteous remainder of exquisite poetry, of wit, humor, and just thought. It is apparently too often a congenial task to write severe words about the transgressions committed by men of genius, especially when the censor has the advantage of being himself a man of _no_ genius, so that those transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; _he_, forsooth, never lacerated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion, and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that lies in transcendent power. We are also apt to measure what a gifted man has done by our arbitrary conception of what he might have done, rather than by a comparison of his actual doings with our own or those of other ordinary men. We make ourselves overzealous agents of heaven, and demand that our brother should bring usurious interest for his five Talents, forgetting that it is less easy to manage five Talents than two. Whatever benefit there may be in denouncing the evil, it is after all more edifying, and certainly more cheering, to appreciate the good. Hence, in endeavoring to give our readers some account of Heine and his works, we shall not dwell lengthily on his failings; we shall not hold the candle up to dusty, vermin-haunted corners, but let the light fall as much as possible on the nobler and more attractive details. Our sketch of Heine’s life, which has been drawn from various sources, will be free from everything like intrusive gossip, and will derive its coloring chiefly from the autobiographical hints and descriptions scattered through his own writings. Those of our readers who happen to know nothing of Heine will in this way be making their acquaintance with the writer while they are learning the outline of his career.

We have said that Heine was born with the present century; but this statement is not precise, for we learn that, according to his certificate of baptism, he was born December 12th, 1799. However, as he himself says, the important point is that he was born, and born on the banks of the Rhine, at Düsseldorf, where his father was a merchant. In his “Reisebilder” he gives us some recollections, in his wild poetic way, of the dear old town where he spent his childhood, and of his schoolboy troubles there. We shall quote from these in butterfly fashion, sipping a little nectar here and there, without regard to any strict order:

“I first saw the light on the banks of that lovely stream, where
Folly grows on the green hills, and in autumn is plucked, pressed,
poured into casks, and sent into foreign lands. Believe me, I
yesterday heard some one utter folly which, in anno 1811, lay in a
bunch of grapes I then saw growing on the Johannisberg. . . . Mon
Dieu! if I had only such faith in me that I could remove mountains,
the Johannisberg would be the very mountain I should send for
wherever I might be; but as my faith is not so strong, imagination
must help me, and it transports me at once to the lovely Rhine. . . .
I am again a child, and playing with other children on the
Schlossplatz, at Düsseldorf on the Rhine. Yes, madam, there was I
born; and I note this expressly, in case, after my death, seven
cities—Schilda, Krähwinkel, Polkwitz, Bockum, Dülken, Göttingen, and
Schöppenstädt—should contend for the honor of being my birthplace.
Düsseldorf is a town on the Rhine; sixteen thousand men live there,
and many hundred thousand men besides lie buried there. . . . . Among
them, many of whom my mother says, that it would be better if they
were still living; for example, my grandfather and my uncle, the old
Herr von Geldern and the young Herr von Geldern, both such celebrated
doctors, who saved so many men from death, and yet must die
themselves. And the pious Ursula, who carried me in her arms when I
was a child, also lies buried there and a rosebush grows on her
grave; she loved the scent of roses so well in life, and her heart
was pure rose-incense and goodness. The knowing old Canon, too, lies
buried there. Heavens, what an object he looked when I last saw him!
_He was made up of nothing but mind and plasters_, and nevertheless
studied day and night, as if he were alarmed lest the worms should
find an idea too little in his head. And the little William lies
there, and for this I am to blame. We were schoolfellows in the
Franciscan monastery, and were playing on that side of it where the
Düssel flows between stone walls, and I said, ‘William, fetch out the
kitten that has just fallen in’—and merrily he went down on to the
plank which lay across the brook, snatched the kitten out of the
water, but fell in himself, and was dragged out dripping and dead.
_The kitten lived to a good old age_. . . . Princes in that day were
not the tormented race as they are now; the crown grew firmly on
their heads, and at night they drew a nightcap over it, and slept
peacefully, and peacefully slept the people at their feet; and when
the people waked in the morning, they said, ‘Good morning, father!’
and the princes answered, ‘Good morning, dear children!’ But it was
suddenly quite otherwise; for when we awoke one morning at
Düsseldorf, and were ready to say, ‘Good morning, father!’ lo! the
father was gone away; and in the whole town there was nothing but
dumb sorrow, everywhere a sort of funeral disposition; and people
glided along silently to the market, and read the long placard placed
on the door of the Town Hall. It was dismal weather; yet the lean
tailor, Kilian, stood in his nankeen jacket which he usually wore
only in the house, and his blue worsted stockings hung down so that
his naked legs peeped out mournfully, and his thin lips trembled
while he muttered the announcement to himself. And an old soldier
read rather louder, and at many a word a crystal tear trickled down
to his brave old mustache. I stood near him and wept in company, and
asked him, ‘_Why we wept_?’ He answered, ‘The Elector has
abdicated.’ And then he read again, and at the words, ‘for the
long-manifested fidelity of my subjects,’ and ‘hereby set you free
from your allegiance,’ he wept more than ever. It is strangely
touching to see an old man like that, with faded uniform and scarred
face, weep so bitterly all of a sudden. While we were reading, the
electoral arms were taken down from the Town Hall; everything had
such a desolate air, that it was as if an eclipse of the sun were
expected. . . . I went home and wept, and wailed out, ‘The Elector
has abdicated!’ In vain my mother took a world of trouble to explain
the thing to me. I knew what I knew; I was not to be persuaded, but
went crying to bed, and in the night dreamed that the world was at an
end.”

The next morning, however, the sun rises as usual, and Joachim Murat is proclaimed Grand Duke, whereupon there is a holiday at the public school, and Heinrich (or Harry, for that was his baptismal name, which he afterward had the good taste to change), perched on the bronze horse of the Electoral statue, sees quite a different scene from yesterday’s:

“The next day the world was again all in order, and we had school as
before, and things were got by heart as before—the Roman emperors,
chronology, the nouns in _im_, the _verba irregularia_, Greek,
Hebrew, geography, mental arithmetic!—heavens! my head is still dizzy
with it—all must be learned by heart! And a great deal of this came
very conveniently for me in after life. For if I had not known the
Roman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite
indifferent to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that
they never really existed. . . . But oh! the trouble I had at school
with the endless dates. And with arithmetic it was still worse.
What I understood best was subtraction, for that has a very practical
rule: ‘Four can’t be taken from three, therefore I must borrow one.’
But I advise every one in such a case to borrow a few extra pence,
for no one can tell what may happen. . . . As for Latin, you have no
idea, madam, what a complicated affair it is. The Romans would never
have found time to conquer the world if they had first had to learn
Latin. Luckily for them, they already knew in their cradles what
nouns have their accusative in _im_. I, on the contrary, had to
learn them by heart in the sweat of my brow; nevertheless, it is
fortunate for me that I know them . . . and the fact that I have them
at my finger-ends if I should ever happen to want them suddenly,
affords me much inward repose and consolation in many troubled hours
of life. . . . Of Greek I will not say a word, I should get too much
irritated. The monks in the Middle Ages were not so far wrong when
they maintained that Greek was an invention of the devil. God knows
the suffering I endured over it. . . . With Hebrew it went somewhat
better, for I had always a great liking for the Jews, though to this
very hour they crucify my good name; but I could never get on so far
in Hebrew as my watch, which had much familiar intercourse with
pawnbrokers, and in this way contracted many Jewish habits—for
example, it wouldn’t go on Saturdays.”

Heine’s parents were apparently not wealthy, but his education was cared for by his uncle, Solomon Heine, a great banker in Hamburg, so that he had no early pecuniary disadvantages to struggle with. He seems to have been very happy in his mother, who was not of Hebrew but of Teutonic blood; he often mentions her with reverence and affection, and in the “Buch der Lieder” there are two exquisite sonnets addressed to her, which tell how his proud spirit was always subdued by the charm of her presence, and how her love was the home of his heart after restless weary ramblings:

“Wie mächtig auch mein stolzer Muth sich blähe,
In deiner selig süssen, trauten Nahe
Ergreift mich oft ein demuthvolles Zagen.

* * * * *

Und immer irrte ich nach Liebe, immer
Nach Liebe, doch die Liebe fand ich nimmer,
Und kehrte um nach Hause, krank und trübe.
Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen,
Und ach! was da in deinem Aug’ geschwommen,
Das war die süsse, langgesuchte Liebe.”

He was at first destined for a mercantile life, but Nature declared too strongly against this plan. “God knows,” he has lately said in conversation with his brother, “I would willingly have become a banker, but I could never bring myself to that pass. I very early discerned that bankers would one day be the rulers of the world.” So commerce was at length given up for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the University of Bonn. He had already published some poems in the corner of a newspaper, and among them was one on Napoleon, the object of his youthful enthusiasm. This poem, he says in a letter to St. Réné Taillandier, was written when he was only sixteen. It is still to be found in the “Buch der Lieder” under the title “Die Grenadiere,” and it proves that even in its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly specific character.

It will be easily imagined that the germs of poetry sprouted too vigorously in Heine’s brain for jurisprudence to find much room there. Lectures on history and literature, we are told, were more diligently attended than lectures on law. He had taken care, too, to furnish his trunk with abundant editions of the poets, and the poet he especially studied at that time was Byron. At a later period, we find his taste taking another direction, for he writes, “Of all authors, Byron is precisely the one who excites in me the most intolerable emotion; whereas Scott, in every one of his works, gladdens my heart, soothes, and invigorates me.” Another indication of his bent in these Bonn days was a newspaper essay, in which he attacked the Romantic school; and here also he went through that chicken-pox of authorship—the production of a tragedy. Heine’s tragedy—_Almansor_—is, as might be expected, better than the majority of these youthful mistakes. The tragic collision lies in the conflict between natural affection and the deadly hatred of religion and of race—in the sacrifice of youthful lovers to the strife between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and Christian. Some of the situations are striking, and there are passages of considerable poetic merit; but the characters are little more than shadowy vehicles for the poetry, and there is a want of clearness and probability in the structure. It was published two years later, in company with another tragedy, in one act, called _William Ratcliffe_, in which there is rather a feeble use of the Scotch second-sight after the manner of the Fate in the Greek tragedy. We smile to find Heine saying of his tragedies, in a letter to a friend soon after their publication: “I know they will be terribly cut up, but I will confess to you in confidence that they are very good, better than my collection of poems, which are not worth a shot.” Elsewhere he tells us, that when, after one of Paganini’s concerts, he was passionately complimenting the great master on his violin-playing. Paganini interrupted him thus: “But how were you pleased with my _bows_?”

In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen. He there pursued his omission of law studies, and at the end of three months he was rusticated for a breach of the laws against duelling. While there, he had attempted a negotiation with Brockhaus for the printing of a volume of poems, and had endured the first ordeal of lovers and poets—a refusal. It was not until a year after that he found a Berlin publisher for his first volume of poems, subsequently transformed, with additions, into the “Buch der Lieder.” He remained between two and three years at Berlin, and the society he found there seems to have made these years an important epoch in his culture. He was one of the youngest members of a circle which assembled at the house of the poetess Elise von Hohenhausen, the translator of Byron—a circle which included Chamisso, Varnhagen, and Rahel (Varnhagen’s wife). For Rahel, Heine had a profound admiration and regard; he afterward dedicated to her the poems included under the tide “Heimkehr;” and he frequently refers to her or quotes her in a way that indicates how he valued her influence. According to his friend F. von Hohenhausen, the opinions concerning Heine’s talent were very various among his Berlin friends, and it was only a small minority that had any presentiment of his future fame. In this minority was Elise von Hohenhausen, who proclaimed Heine as the Byron of Germany; but her opinion was met with much head-shaking and opposition. We can imagine how precious was such a recognition as hers to the young poet, then only two or three and twenty, and with by no means an impressive personality for superficial eyes. Perhaps even the deep-sighted were far from detecting in that small, blonde, pale young man, with quiet, gentle manners, the latent powers of ridicule and sarcasm—the terrible talons that were one day to be thrust out from the velvet paw of the young leopard.

It was apparently during this residence in Berlin that Heine united himself with the Lutheran Church. He would willingly, like many of his friends, he tells us, have remained free from all ecclesiastical ties if the authorities there had not forbidden residence in Prussia, and especially in Berlin, to every one who did not belong to one of the positive religions recognized by the State.

“As Henry IV. once laughingly said, ‘_Paris vaut bien une messe_,’ so
I might with reason say, ‘_Berlin vaut bien une prêche_;’ and I could
afterward, as before, accommodate myself to the very enlightened
Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be
had in the churches of Berlin, and which was even free from the
divinity of Christ, like turtle-soup without turtle.”

At the same period, too, Heine became acquainted with Hegel. In his lately published “Geständnisse” (Confessions) he throws on Hegel’s influence over him the blue light of demoniacal wit, and confounds us by the most bewildering double-edged sarcasms; but that influence seems to have been at least more wholesome than the one which produced the mocking retractations of the “Geständnisse.” Through all his self-satire, we discern that in those days he had something like real earnestness and enthusiasm, which are certainly not apparent in his present theistic confession of faith.

“On the whole, I never felt a strong enthusiasm for this philosophy,
and conviction on the subject was out of question. I never was an
abstract thinker, and I accepted the synthesis of the Hegelian
doctrine without demanding any proof; since its consequences
flattered my vanity. I was young and proud, and it pleased my
vainglory when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my
grandmother believed, the God who lives in heaven, but myself here
upon earth. This foolish pride had not in the least a pernicious
influence on my feelings; on the contrary, it heightened these to the
pitch of heroism. I was at that time so lavish in generosity and
self-sacrifice that I must assuredly have eclipsed the most brilliant
deeds of those good _bourgeois_ of virtue who acted merely from a
sense of duty, and simply obeyed the laws of morality.”

His sketch of Hegel is irresistibly amusing; but we must warn the reader that Heine’s anecdotes are often mere devices of style by which he conveys his satire or opinions. The reader will see that he does not neglect an opportunity of giving a sarcastic lash or two, in passing, to Meyerbeer, for whose music he has a great contempt. The sarcasm conveyed in the substitution of _reputation_ for _music_ and _journalists_ for _musicians_, might perhaps escape any one unfamiliar with the sly and unexpected turns of Heine’s ridicule.

“To speak frankly, I seldom understood him, and only arrived at the
meaning of his words by subsequent reflection. I believe he wished
not to be understood; and hence his practice of sprinkling his
discourse with modifying parentheses; hence, perhaps, his preference
for persons of whom he knew that they did not understand him, and to
whom he all the more willingly granted the honor of his familiar
acquaintance. Thus every one in Berlin wondered at the intimate
companionship of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich Beer, a
brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by his
reputation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists.
This Beer, namely Heinrich, was a thoroughly stupid fellow, and
indeed was afterward actually declared imbecile by his family, and
placed under guardianship, because instead of making a name for
himself in art or in science by means of his great fortune, he
squandered his money on childish trifles; and, for example, one day
bought six thousand thalers’ worth of walking-sticks. This poor man,
who had no wish to pass either for a great tragic dramatist, or for a
great star-gazer, or for a laurel-crowned musical genius, a rival of
Mozart and Rossini, and preferred giving his money for
walking-sticks—this degenerate Beer enjoyed Hegel’s most confidential
society; he was the philosopher’s bosom friend, his Pylades, and
accompanied him everywhere like his shadow. The equally witty and
gifted Felix Mendelssohn once sought to explain this phenomenon, by
maintaining that Hegel did not understand Heinrich Beer. I now
believe, however, that the real ground of that intimacy consisted in
this—Hegel was convinced that no word of what he said was understood
by Heinrich Beer; and he could therefore, in his presence, give
himself up to all the intellectual outpourings of the moment. In
general, Hegel’s conversation was a sort of monologue, sighed forth
by starts in a noiseless voice; the odd roughness of his expressions
often struck me, and many of them have remained in my memory. One
beautiful starlight evening we stood together at the window, and I, a
young man of one-and-twenty, having just had a good dinner and
finished my coffee, spoke with enthusiasm of the stars, and called
them the habitations of the departed. But the master muttered to
himself, ‘The stars! hum! hum! The stars are only a brilliant
leprosy on the face of the heavens.’ ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried, ‘is
there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is rewarded after
death?’ But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said, cuttingly,
‘So you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick mother, and
refrained from poisoning your worthy brother?’ At these words he
looked anxiously round, but appeared immediately set at rest when he
observed that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite
him to a game at whist.”

In 1823 Heine returned to Göttingen to complete his career as a law-student, and this time he gave evidence of advanced mental maturity, not only by producing many of the charming poems subsequently included in the “Reisebilder,” but also by prosecuting his professional studies diligently enough to leave Göttingen, in 1825, as _Doctor juris_. Hereupon he settled at Hamburg as an advocate, but his profession seems to have been the least pressing of his occupations. In those days a small blonde young man, with the brim of his hat drawn over his nose, his coat flying open, and his hands stuck in his trousers pockets, might be seen stumbling along the streets of Hamburg, staring from side to side, and appearing to have small regard to the figure he made in the eyes of the good citizens. Occasionally an inhabitant more literary than usual would point out this young man to his companion as _Heinrich Heine_; but in general the young poet had not to endure the inconveniences of being a lion. His poems were devoured, but he was not asked to devour flattery in return. Whether because the fair Hamburgers acted in the spirit of Johnson’s advice to Hannah More—to “consider what her flattery was worth before she choked him with it”—or for some other reason, Heine, according to the testimony of August Lewald, to whom we owe these particulars of his Hamburg life, was left free from the persecution of tea-parties. Not, however, from another persecution of Genius—nervous headaches, which some persons, we are told, regarded as an improbable fiction, intended as a pretext for raising a delicate white hand to his forehead. It is probable that the sceptical persons alluded to were themselves untroubled with nervous headaches, and that their hands were _not_ delicate. Slight details, these, but worth telling about a man of genius, because they help us to keep in mind that he is, after all, our brother, having to endure the petty every-day ills of life as we have; with this difference, that his heightened sensibility converts what are mere insect stings for us into scorpion stings for him.

It was, perhaps, in these Hamburg days that Heine paid the visit to Goethe, of which he gives us this charming little picture:

“When I visited him in Weimar, and stood before him, I involuntarily
glanced at his side to see whether the eagle was not there with the
lightning in his beak. I was nearly speaking Greek to him; but, as I
observed that he understood German, I stated to him in German that
the plums on the road between Jena and Weimar were very good. I had
for so many long winter nights thought over what lofty and profound
things I would say to Goethe, if ever I saw him. And when I saw him
at last, I said to him, that the Saxon plums were very good! And
Goethe smiled.”

During the next few years Heine produced the most popular of all his works—those which have won him his place as the greatest of living German poets and humorists. Between 1826 and 1829 appeared the four volumes of the “Reisebilder” (Pictures of Travel) and the “Buch der Lieder” (Book of Songs), a volume of lyrics, of which it is hard to say whether their greatest charm is the lightness and finish of their style, their vivid and original imaginativeness, or their simple, pure sensibility. In his “Reisebilder” Heine carries us with him to the Hartz, to the isle of Norderney, to his native town Düsseldorf, to Italy, and to England, sketching scenery and character, now with the wildest, most fantastic humor, now with the finest idyllic sensibility—letting his thoughts wander from poetry to politics, from criticism to dreamy reverie, and blending fun, imagination, reflection, and satire in a sort of exquisite, ever-varying shimmer, like the hues of the opal.

Heine’s journey to England did not at all heighten his regard for the English. He calls our language the “hiss of egoism (_Zischlaute des Egoismus_); and his ridicule of English awkwardness is as merciless as—English ridicule of German awkwardness. His antipathy toward us seems to have grown in intensity, like many of his other antipathies; and in his “Vermischte Schriften” he is more bitter than ever. Let us quote one of his philippics, since bitters are understood to be wholesome:

“It is certainly a frightful injustice to pronounce sentence of
condemnation on an entire people. But with regard to the English,
momentary disgust might betray me into this injustice; and on looking
at the mass I easily forget the many brave and noble men who
distinguished themselves by intellect and love of freedom. But
these, especially the British poets, were always all the more
glaringly in contrast with the rest of the nation; they were isolated
martyrs to their national relations; and, besides, great geniuses do
not belong to the particular land of their birth: they scarcely
belong to this earth, the Golgotha of their sufferings. The mass—the
English blockheads, God forgive me!—are hateful to me in my inmost
soul; and I often regard them not at all as my fellow-men, but as
miserable automata—machines, whose motive power is egoism. In these
moods, it seems to me as if I heard the whizzing wheelwork by which
they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray: their praying, their
mechanical Anglican church-going, with the gilt Prayer-book under
their arms, their stupid, tiresome Sunday, their awkward piety, is
most of all odious to me. I am firmly convinced that a blaspheming
Frenchman is a more pleasing sight for the Divinity than a praying
Englishman.”

On his return from England Heine was employed at Munich in editing the _Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen_, but in 1830 he was again in the north, and the news of the July Revolution surprised him on the island of Heligoland. He has given us a graphic picture of his democratic enthusiasm in those days in some letters, apparently written from Heligoland, which he has inserted in his book on Börne. We quote some passages, not only for their biographic interest as showing a phase of Heine’s mental history, but because they are a specimen of his power in that kind of dithyrambic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily becomes ridiculous:

“The thick packet of newspapers arrived from the Continent with these
warm, glowing-hot tidings. They were sunbeams wrapped up in
packing-paper, and they inflamed my soul till it burst into the
wildest conflagration. . . . It is all like a dream to me; especially
the name Lafayette sounds to me like a legend out of my earliest
childhood. Does he really sit again on horseback, commanding the
National Guard? I almost fear it may not be true, for it is in
print. I will myself go to Paris, to be convinced of it with my
bodily eyes. . . . It must be splendid, when he rides through the
street, the citizen of two worlds, the godlike old man, with his
silver locks streaming down his sacred shoulder. . . . He greets,
with his dear old eyes, the grandchildren of those who once fought
with him for freedom and equality. . . . It is now sixty years since
he returned from America with the Declaration of Human Rights, the
decalogue of the world’s new creed, which was revealed to him amid
the thunders and lightnings of cannon. . . . And the tricolored flag
waves again on the towers of Paris, and its streets resound with the
Marseillaise! . . . It is all over with my yearning for repose. I
now know again what I will do, what I ought to do, what I must do. .
. . I am the son of the Revolution, and seize again the hallowed
weapons on which my mother pronounced her magic benediction. . . .
Flowers! flowers! I will crown my head for the death-fight. And the
lyre too, reach me the lyre, that I may sing a battle-song. . . .
Words like flaming stars, that shoot down from the heavens, and burn
up the palaces, and illuminate the huts. . . . Words like bright
javelins, that whirr up to the seventh heaven and strike the pious
hypocrites who have skulked into the Holy of Holies. . . . I am all
joy and song, all sword and flame! Perhaps, too, all delirium. . . .
One of those sunbeams wrapped in brown paper has flown to my brain,
and set my thoughts aglow. In vain I dip my head into the sea. No
water extinguishes this Greek fire: . . . Even the poor Heligolanders
shout for joy, although they have only a sort of dim instinct of what
has occurred. The fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little
sand island, which is the bathing-place here, said to me smilingly,
‘The poor people have won!’ Yes; instinctively the people comprehend
such events, perhaps, better than we, with all our means of
knowledge. Thus Frau von Varnhagen once told me that when the issue
of the Battle of Leipzig was not yet known, the maid-servant suddenly
rushed into the room with the sorrowful cry, ‘The nobles have won!’ .
. . This morning another packet of newspapers is come, I devour them
like manna. Child that I am, affecting details touch me yet more
than the momentous whole. Oh, if I could but see the dog Medor. . .
. The dog Medor brought his master his gun and cartridge-box, and
when his master fell, and was buried with his fellow-heroes in the
Court of the Louvre, there stayed the poor dog like a monument of
faithfulness, sitting motionless on the grave, day and night, eating
but little of the food that was offered him—burying the greater part
of it in the earth, perhaps as nourishment for his buried master!”

The enthusiasm which was kept thus at boiling heat by imagination, cooled down rapidly when brought into contact with reality. In the same book he indicates, in his caustic way, the commencement of that change in his political _temperature_—for it cannot be called a change in opinion—which has drawn down on him immense vituperation from some of the patriotic party, but which seems to have resulted simply from the essential antagonism between keen wit and fanaticism.

“On the very first days of my arrival in Paris I observed that things
wore, in reality, quite different colors from those which had been
shed on them, when in perspective, by the light of my enthusiasm.
The silver locks which I saw fluttering so majestically on the
shoulders of Lafayette, the hero of two worlds, were metamorphosed
into a brown perruque, which made a pitiable covering for a narrow
skull. And even the dog Medor, which I visited in the Court of the
Louvre, and which, encamped under tricolored flags and trophies, very
quietly allowed himself to be fed—he was not at all the right dog,
but quite an ordinary brute, who assumed to himself merits not his
own, as often happens with the French; and, like many others, he made
a profit out of the glory of the Revolution. . . . He was pampered
and patronized, perhaps promoted to the highest posts, while the true
Medor, some days after the battle, modestly slunk out of sight, like
the true people who created the Revolution.”

That it was not merely interest in French politics which sent Heine to Paris in 1831, but also a perception that German air was not friendly to sympathizers in July revolutions, is humorously intimated in the “Geständnisse.”

“I had done much and suffered much, and when the sun of the July
Revolution arose in France, I had become very weary, and needed some
recreation. Also, my native air was every day more unhealthy for me,
and it was time I should seriously think of a change of climate. I
had visions: the clouds terrified me, and made all sorts of ugly
faces at me. It often seemed to me as if the sun were a Prussian
cockade; at night I dreamed of a hideous black eagle, which gnawed my
liver; and I was very melancholy. Add to this, I had become
acquainted with an old Berlin Justizrath, who had spent many years in
the fortress of Spandau, and he related to me how unpleasant it is
when one is obliged to wear irons in winter. For myself I thought it
very unchristian that the irons were not warmed a trifle. If the
irons were warmed a little for us they would not make so unpleasant
an impression, and even chilly natures might then bear them very
well; it would be only proper consideration, too, if the fetters were
perfumed with essence of roses and laurels, as is the case in this
country (France). I asked my Justizrath whether he often got oysters
to eat at Spandau? He said, No; Spandau was too far from the sea.
Moreover, he said meat was very scarce there, and there was no kind
of _volaille_ except flies, which fell into one’s soup. . . . Now, as
I really needed some recreation, and as Spandau is too far from the
sea for oysters to be got there, and the Spandau fly-soup did not
seem very appetizing to me, as, besides all this, the Prussian chains
are very cold in winter, and could not be conducive to my health, I
resolved to visit Paris.”