Chapter IV: German Wit: Henry Heine. {99} (2)

Since this time Paris has been Heine’s home, and his best prose works have been written either to inform the Germans on French affairs or to inform the French on German philosophy and literature. He became a correspondent of the _Allgemeine Zeitung_, and his correspondence, which extends, with an interruption of several years, from 1831 to 1844, forms the volume entitled “Französische Zustände” (French Affairs), and the second and third volume of his “Vermischte Schriften.” It is a witty and often wise commentary on public men and public events: Louis Philippe, Casimir Périer, Thiers, Guizot, Rothschild, the Catholic party, the Socialist party, have their turn of satire and appreciation, for Heine deals out both with an impartiality which made his less favorable critics—Börne, for example—charge him with the rather incompatible sins of reckless caprice and venality. Literature and art alternate with politics: we have now a sketch of George Sand or a description of one of Horace Vernet’s pictures; now a criticism of Victor Hugo or of Liszt; now an irresistible caricature of Spontini or Kalkbrenner; and occasionally the predominant satire is relieved by a fine saying or a genial word of admiration. And all is done with that airy lightness, yet precision of touch, which distinguishes Heine beyond any living writer. The charge of venality was loudly made against Heine in Germany: first, it was said that he was paid to write; then, that he was paid to abstain from writing; and the accusations were supposed to have an irrefragable basis in the fact that he accepted a stipend from the French government. He has never attempted to conceal the reception of that stipend, and we think his statement (in the “Vermischte Schriften”) of the circumstances under which it was offered and received, is a sufficient vindication of himself and M. Guizot from any dishonor in the matter.

It may be readily imagined that Heine, with so large a share of the Gallic element as he has in his composition, was soon at his ease in Parisian society, and the years here were bright with intellectual activity and social enjoyment. “His wit,” wrote August Lewald, “is a perpetual gushing fountain; he throws off the most delicious descriptions with amazing facility, and sketches the most comic characters in conversations.” Such a man could not be neglected in Paris, and Heine was sought on all sides—as a guest in distinguished salons, as a possible proselyte in the circle of the Saint Simonians. His literary productiveness seems to have been furthered by his congenial life, which, however, was soon to some extent embittered by the sense of exile; for since 1835 both his works and his person have been the object of denunciation by the German governments. Between 1833 and 1845 appeared the four volumes of the “Salon,” “Die Romantische Schule” (both written, in the first instance, in French), the book on Börne, “Atta Troll,” a romantic poem, “Deutschland,” an exquisitely humorous poem, describing his last visit to Germany, and containing some grand passages of serious writing; and the “Neue Gedichte,” a collection of lyrical poems. Among the most interesting of his prose works are the second volume of the “Salon,” which contains a survey of religion and philosophy in Germany, and the “Romantische Schule,” a delightful introduction to that phase of German literature known as the Romantic school. The book on Börne, which appeared in 1840, two years after the death of that writer, excited great indignation in Germany, as a wreaking of vengeance on the dead, an insult to the memory of a man who had worked and suffered in the cause of freedom—a cause which was Heine’s own. Börne, we may observe parenthetically for the information of those who are not familiar with recent German literature, was a remarkable political writer of the ultra-liberal party in Germany, who resided in Paris at the same time with Heine: a man of stern, uncompromising partisanship and bitter humor. Without justifying Heine’s production of this book, we see excuses for him which should temper the condemnation passed on it. There was a radical opposition of nature between him and Börne; to use his own distinction, Heine is a Hellene—sensuous, realistic, exquisitely alive to the beautiful; while Börne was a Nazarene—ascetic, spiritualistic, despising the pure artist as destitute of earnestness. Heine has too keen a perception of practical absurdities and damaging exaggerations ever to become a thoroughgoing partisan; and with a love of freedom, a faith in the ultimate triumph of democratic principles, of which we see no just reason to doubt the genuineness and consistency, he has been unable to satisfy more zealous and one-sided liberals by giving his adhesion to their views and measures, or by adopting a denunciatory tone against those in the opposite ranks. Börne could not forgive what he regarded as Heine’s epicurean indifference and artistic dalliance, and he at length gave vent to his antipathy in savage attacks on him through the press, accusing him of utterly lacking character and principle, and even of writing under the influence of venal motives. To these attacks Heine remained absolutely mute—from contempt according to his own account; but the retort, which he resolutely refrained from making during Börne’s life, comes in this volume published after his death with the concentrated force of long-gathering thunder. The utterly inexcusable part of the book is the caricature of Börne’s friend, Madame Wohl, and the scurrilous insinuations concerning Börne’s domestic life. It is said, we know not with how much truth, that Heine had to answer for these in a duel with Madame Wohl’s husband, and that, after receiving a serious wound, he promised to withdraw the offensive matter from a future edition. That edition, however, has not been called for. Whatever else we may think of the book, it is impossible to deny its transcendent talent—the dramatic vigor with which Börne is made present to us, the critical acumen with which he is characterized, and the wonderful play of wit, pathos, and thought which runs through the whole. But we will let Heine speak for himself, and first we will give part of his graphic description of the way in which Börne’s mind and manners grated on his taste:

“To the disgust which, in intercourse with Börne, I was in danger of
feeling toward those who surrounded him, was added the annoyance I
felt from his perpetual talk about politics. Nothing but political
argument, and again political argument, even at table, where he
managed to hunt me out. At dinner, when I so gladly forget all the
vexations of the world, he spoiled the best dishes for me by his
patriotic gall, which he poured as a bitter sauce over everything.
Calf’s feet, _à la maître d’hôtel_, then my innocent _bonne bouche_,
he completely spoiled for me by Job’s tidings from Germany, which he
scraped together out of the most unreliable newspapers. And then his
accursed remarks, which spoiled one’s appetite! . . . This was a sort
of table-talk which did not greatly exhilarate me, and I avenged
myself by affecting an excessive, almost impassioned indifference for
the object of Börne’s enthusiasm. For example, Börne was indignant
that immediately on my arrival in Paris I had nothing better to do
than to write for German papers a long account of the Exhibition of
Pictures. I omit all discussion as to whether that interest in Art
which induced me to undertake this work was so utterly irreconcilable
with the revolutionary interests of the day; but Börne saw in it a
proof of my indifference toward the sacred cause of humanity, and I
could in my turn spoil the taste of his patriotic _sauerkraut_ for
him by talking all dinner-time of nothing but pictures, of Robert’s
‘Reapers,’ Horace Vernet’s ‘Judith,’ and Scheffer’s ‘Faust.’ . . .
That I never thought it worth while to discuss my political
principles with him it is needless to say; and once when he declared
that he had found a contradiction in my writings, I satisfied myself
with the ironical answer, ‘You are mistaken, _mon cher_; such
contradictions never occur in my works, for always before I begin to
write, I read over the statement of my political principles in my
previous writings, that I may not contradict myself, and that no one
may be able to reproach me with apostasy from my liberal
principles.’”

And here is his own account of the spirit in which the book was written:

“I was never Börne’s friend, nor was I ever his enemy. The
displeasure which he could often excite in me was never very
important, and he atoned for it sufficiently by the cold silence
which I opposed to all his accusations and raillery. While he lived
I wrote not a line against him, I never thought about him, I ignored
him completely; and that enraged him beyond measure. If I now speak
of him, I do so neither out of enthusiasm nor out of uneasiness; I am
conscious of the coolest impartiality. I write here neither an
apology nor a critique, and as in painting the man I go on my own
observation, the image I present of him ought perhaps to be regarded
as a real portrait. And such a monument is due to him—to the great
wrestler who, in the arena of our political games, wrestled so
courageously, and earned, if not the laurel, certainly the crown of
oak leaves. I give an image with his true features, without
idealization—the more like him the more honorable for his memory. He
was neither a genius nor a hero; he was no Olympian god. He was a
man, a denizen of this earth; he was a good writer and a great
patriot. . . . Beautiful, delicious peace, which I feel at this
moment in the depths of my soul! Thou rewardest me sufficiently for
everything I have done and for everything I have despised. . . . I
shall defend myself neither from the reproach of indifference nor
from the suspicion of venality. I have for years, during the life of
the insinuator, held such self-justification unworthy of me; now even
decency demands silence. That would be a frightful
spectacle!—polemics between Death and Exile! Dost thou stretch out
to me a beseeching hand from the grave? Without rancor I reach mine
toward thee. . . . See how noble it is and pure! It was never soiled
by pressing the hands of the mob, any more than by the impure gold of
the people’s enemy. In reality thou hast never injured me. . . . In
all thy insinuations there is not a _louis d’or’s_ worth of truth.”

In one of these years Heine was married, and, in deference to the sentiments of his wife, married according to the rites of the Catholic Church. On this fact busy rumor afterward founded the story of his conversion to Catholicism, and could of course name the day and spot on which he abjured Protestanism. In his “Geständnisse” Heine publishes a denial of this rumor; less, he says, for the sake of depriving the Catholics of the solace they may derive from their belief in a new convert, than in order to cut off from another party the more spiteful satisfaction of bewailing his instability:

“That statement of time and place was entirely correct. I was
actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was,
moreover, a Jesuit church, namely, St. Sulpice; and I then went
through a religious act. But this act was no odious abjuration, but
a very innocent conjugation; that is to say, my marriage, already
performed, according to the civil law there received the
ecclesiastical consecration, because my wife, whose family are
staunch Catholics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough
without such a ceremony. And I would on no account cause this
beloved being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views.”

For sixteen years—from 1831 to 1847—Heine lived that rapid concentrated life which is known only in Paris; but then, alas! stole on the “days of darkness,” and they were to be many. In 1847 he felt the approach of the terrible spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed in acute suffering. The last time he went out of doors, he tells us, was in May, 1848:

“With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank
down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess
of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her
feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied
me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time
disconsolately, as if she would say, Dost thou not see, then, that I
have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?”

Since 1848, then, this poet, whom the lovely objects of Nature have always “haunted like a passion,” has not descended from the second story of a Parisian house; this man of hungry intellect has been shut out from all direct observation of life, all contact with society, except such as is derived from visitors to his sick-room. The terrible nervous disease has affected his eyes; the sight of one is utterly gone, and he can only raise the lid of the other by lifting it with his finger. Opium alone is the beneficent genius that stills his pain. We hardly know whether to call it an alleviation or an intensification of the torture that Heine retains his mental vigor, his poetic imagination, and his incisive wit; for if this intellectual activity fills up a blank, it widens the sphere of suffering. His brother described him in 1851 as still, in moments when the hand of pain was not too heavy on him, the same Heinrich Heine, poet and satirist by turns. In such moments he would narrate the strangest things in the gravest manner. But when he came to an end, he would roguishly lift up the lid of his right eye with his finger to see the impression he had produced; and if his audience had been listening with a serious face, he would break into Homeric laughter. We have other proof than personal testimony that Heine’s disease allows his genius to retain much of its energy, in the “Romanzero,” a volume of poems published in 1851, and written chiefly during the three first years of his illness; and in the first volume of the “Vermischte Schriften,” also the product of recent years. Very plaintive is the poet’s own description of his condition, in the epilogue to the “Romanzero:”

“Do I really exist? My body is so shrunken that I am hardly anything
but a voice; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave of the
magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in Brittany,
under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames toward heaven.
Alas! I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that moves their
branches, brother Merlin, for no green leaf rustles about my
mattress-grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but the
rolling of vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strumming. A
grave without repose, death without the privileges of the dead, who
have no debts to pay, and need write neither letters nor books—that
is a piteous condition. Long ago the measure has been taken for my
coffin and for my necrology, but I die so slowly that the process is
tedious for me as well as my friends. But patience: everything has
an end. You will one day find the booth closed where the puppet-show
of my humor has so often delighted you.”

As early as 1850 it was rumored that since Heine’s illness a change had taken place in his religious views; and as rumor seldom stops short of extremes, it was soon said that he had become a thorough pietist, Catholics and Protestants by turns claiming him as a convert. Such a change in so uncompromising an iconoclast, in a man who had been so zealous in his negations as Heine, naturally excited considerable sensation in the camp he was supposed to have quitted, as well as in that he was supposed to have joined. In the second volume of the “Salon,” and in the “Romantische Schule,” written in 1834 and ’35, the doctrine of Pantheism is dwelt on with a fervor and unmixed seriousness which show that Pantheism was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity as the enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well-being. Now, however, it was said that Heine had recanted all his heresies; but from the fact that visitors to his sick-room brought away very various impressions as to his actual religious views, it seemed probable that his love of mystification had found a tempting opportunity for exercise on this subject, and that, as one of his friends said, he was not inclined to pour out unmixed wine to those who asked for a sample out of mere curiosity. At length, in the epilogue to the “Romanzero,” dated 1851, there appeared, amid much mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced Theism and the belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and reliability to this affirmation was the fact that he took care to accompany it with certain negations:

“As concerns myself, I can boast of no particular progress in
politics; I adhered (after 1848) to the same democratic principles
which had the homage of my youth, and for which I have ever since
glowed with increasing fervor. In theology, on the contrary, I must
accuse myself of retrogression, since, as I have already confessed, I
returned to the old superstition—to a personal God. This fact is,
once for all, not to be stifled, as many enlightened and well-meaning
friends would fain have had it. But I must expressly contradict the
report that my retrograde movement has carried me as far as to the
threshold of a Church, and that I have even been received into her
lap. No: my religious convictions and views have remained free from
any tincture of ecclesiasticism; no chiming of bells has allured me,
no altar candles have dazzled me. I have dallied with no dogmas, and
have not utterly renounced my reason.”

This sounds like a serious statement. But what shall we say to a convert who plays with his newly-acquired belief in a future life, as Heine does in the very next page? He says to his reader:

“Console thyself; we shall meet again in a better world, where I also
mean to write thee better books. I take for granted that my health
will there be improved, and that Swedenborg has not deceived me. He
relates, namely, with great confidence, that we shall peacefully
carry on our old occupations in the other world, just as we have done
in this; that we shall there preserve our individuality unaltered,
and that death will produce no particular change in our organic
development. Swedenborg is a thoroughly honorable fellow, and quite
worthy of credit in what he tells us about the other world, where he
saw with his own eyes the persons who had played a great part on our
earth. Most of them, he says, remained unchanged, and busied
themselves with the same things as formerly; they remained
stationary, were old-fashioned, _rococo_—which now and then produced
a ludicrous effect. For example, our dear Dr. Martin Luther kept
fast by his doctrine of Grace, about which he had for three hundred
years daily written down the same mouldy arguments—just in the same
way as the late Baron Ekstein, who during twenty years printed in the
_Allgemeine Zeitung_ one and the same article, perpetually chewing
over again the old cud of Jesuitical doctrine. But, as we have said,
all persons who once figured here below were not found by Swedenborg
in such a state of fossil immutability: many had considerably
developed their character, both for good and evil, in the other
world; and this gave rise to some singular results. Some who had
been heroes and saints on earth had _there_ sunk into scamps and
good-for-nothings; and there were examples, too, of a contrary
transformation. For instance, the fumes of self-conceit mounted to
Saint Anthony’s head when he learned what immense veneration and
adoration had been paid to him by all Christendom; and he who here
below withstood the most terrible temptations was now quite an
impertinent rascal and dissolute gallows-bird, who vied with his pig
in rolling himself in the mud. The chaste Susanna, from having been
excessively vain of her virtue, which she thought indomitable, came
to a shameful fall, and she who once so gloriously resisted the two
old men, was a victim to the seductions of the young Absalom, the son
of David. On the contrary, Lot’s daughters had in the lapse of time
become very virtuous, and passed in the other world for models of
propriety: the old man, alas! had stuck to the wine-flask.”

In his “Geständnisse,” the retractation of former opinions and profession of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony that repels our sympathy and baffles our psychology. Yet what strange, deep pathos is mingled with the audacity of the following passage!

“What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my
marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged nurse are
pressing Spanish flies behind my ears? What avails it me, that all
the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me? Alas! Shiraz is
two thousand miles from the Rue d’Amsterdam, where, in the wearisome
loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it be, perhaps,
the perfume of warmed towels. Alas! God’s satire weighs heavily on
me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven,
was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little,
earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only
pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably
I am beneath him in humor, in colossal mockery.”

For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence with which Heine professes his theoretical reverence as pathological, as the diseased exhibition of a predominant tendency urged into anomalous action by the pressure of pain and mental privation—as a delirium of wit starved of its proper nourishment. It is not for us to condemn, who have never had the same burden laid on us; it is not for pigmies at their ease to criticise the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock.

On one other point we must touch before quitting Heine’s personal history. There is a standing accusation against him in some quarters of wanting political principle, of wishing to denationalize himself, and of indulging in insults against his native country. Whatever ground may exist for these accusations, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be found in his writings. He may not have much faith in German revolutions and revolutionists; experience, in his case as in that of others, may have thrown his millennial anticipations into more distant perspective; but we see no evidence that he has ever swerved from his attachment to the principles of freedom, or written anything which to a philosophic mind is incompatible with true patriotism. He has expressly denied the report that he wished to become naturalized in France; and his yearning toward his native land and the accents of his native language is expressed with a pathos the more reliable from the fact that he is sparing in such effusions. We do not see why Heine’s satire of the blunders and foibles of his fellow-countrymen should be denounced as a crime of _lèse-patrie_, any more than the political caricatures of any other satirist. The real offences of Heine are his occasional coarseness and his unscrupulous personalities, which are reprehensible, not because they are directed against his fellow-countrymen, but because they are _personalities_. That these offences have their precedents in men whose memory the world delights to honor does not remove their turpitude, but it is a fact which should modify our condemnation in a particular case; unless, indeed, we are to deliver our judgments on a principle of compensation—making up for our indulgence in one direction by our severity in another. On this ground of coarseness and personality, a true bill may be found against Heine; _not_, we think, on the ground that he has laughed at what is laughable in his compatriots. Here is a specimen of the satire under which we suppose German patriots wince:

“Rhenish Bavaria was to be the starting-point of the German
revolution. Zweibrücken was the Bethlehem in which the infant
Saviour—Freedom—lay in the cradle, and gave whimpering promise of
redeeming the world. Near his cradle bellowed many an ox, who
afterward, when his horns were reckoned on, showed himself a very
harmless brute. It was confidently believed that the German
revolution would begin in Zweibrücken, and everything was there ripe
for an outbreak. But, as has been hinted, the tender-heartedness of
some persons frustrated that illegal undertaking. For example, among
the Bipontine conspirators there was a tremendous braggart, who was
always loudest in his rage, who boiled over with the hatred of
tyranny, and this man was fixed on to strike the first blow, by
cutting down a sentinel who kept an important post. . . . . ‘What!’
cried the man, when this order was given him—‘What!—me! Can you
expect so horrible, so bloodthirsty an act of me? I—_I_, kill an
innocent sentinel? I, who am the father of a family! And this
sentinel is perhaps also father of a family. One father of a family
kill another father of a family? Yes. Kill—murder!’”

In political matters Heine, like all men whose intellect and taste predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted “trimmer.” He has no sympathy, as he says, with “that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from the top of a mast into the sea, crying, “_I die for General Jackson_!”

“But thou liest, Brutus, thou liest, Cassius, and thou, too, liest,
Asinius, in maintaining that my ridicule attacks those ideas which
are the precious acquisition of Humanity, and for which I myself have
so striven and suffered. No! for the very reason that those ideas
constantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, he
is the more irresistibly overcome by laughter when he sees how
rudely, awkwardly, and clumsily those ideas are seized and mirrored
in the contracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mirrors
which have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in them
becomes a caricature, and excites our laughter. _But we laugh then
only at the caricature_, _not at the god_.”

For the rest, why should we demand of Heine that he should be a hero, a patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than we should demand of a gazelle that it should draw well in harness? Nature has not made him of her sterner stuff—not of iron and adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the juice of the grape, and Puck’s mischievous brain, plenteously mixing also the dews of kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble thoughts. It is, after all, a _tribute_ which his enemies pay him when they utter their bitterest dictum, namely, that he is “_nur Dichter_”—only a poet. Let us accept this point of view for the present, and, leaving all consideration of him as a man, look at him simply as a poet and literary artist.

Heine is essentially a lyric poet. The finest products of his genius are

“Short swallow flights of song that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away;”

and they are so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same inspiration. Heine is too impressible and mercurial for any sustained production; even in his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into laughter and his laughter into tears; and his longer poems, “Atta Troll” and “Deutschland,” are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His song has a wide compass of notes; he can take us to the shores of the Northern Sea and thrill us by the sombre sublimity of his pictures and dreamy fancies; he can draw forth our tears by the voice he gives to our own sorrows, or to the sorrows of “Poor Peter;” he can throw a cold shudder over us by a mysterious legend, a ghost story, or a still more ghastly rendering of hard reality; he can charm us by a quiet idyl, shake us with laughter at his overflowing fun, or give us a piquant sensation of surprise by the ingenuity of his transitions from the lofty to the ludicrous. This last power is not, indeed, essentially poetical; but only a poet can use it with the same success as Heine, for only a poet can poise our emotion and expectation at such a height as to give effect to the sudden fall. Heine’s greatest power as a poet lies in his simple pathos, in the ever-varied but always natural expression he has given to the tender emotions. We may perhaps indicate this phase of his genius by referring to Wordsworth’s beautiful little poem, “She dwelt among the untrodden ways;” the conclusion—

“She dwelt alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh!
The difference to me”—

is entirely in Heine’s manner; and so is Tennyson’s poem of a dozen lines, called “Circumstance.” Both these poems have Heine’s pregnant simplicity. But, lest this comparison should mislead, we must say that there is no general resemblance between either Wordsworth, or Tennyson, and Heine. Their greatest qualities lie quite a way from the light, delicate lucidity, the easy, rippling music, of Heine’s style. The distinctive charm of his lyrics may best be seen by comparing them with Goethe’s. Both have the same masterly, finished simplicity and rhythmic grace; but there is more thought mingled with Goethe’s feeling—his lyrical genius is a vessel that draws more water than Heine’s, and, though it seems to glide along with equal ease, we have a sense of greater weight and force, accompanying the grace of its movements.

But for this very reason Heine touches our hearts more strongly; his songs are all music and feeling—they are like birds that not only enchant us with their delicious notes, but nestle against us with their soft breasts, and make us feel the agitated beating of their hearts. He indicates a whole sad history in a single quatrain; there is not an image in it, not a thought; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a “big round tear”—it is pure feeling, breathed in pure music:

“Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen
Und ich glaubt’ ich trug es nie,
Und ich hab’ es doch getragen—
Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie.” {134}

He excels equally in the more imaginative expression of feeling: he represents it by a brief image, like a finely cut cameo; he expands it into a mysterious dream, or dramatizes it in a little story, half ballad, half idyl; and in all these forms his art is so perfect that we never have a sense of artificiality or of unsuccessful effort; but all seems to have developed itself by the same beautiful necessity that brings forth vine-leaves and grapes and the natural curls of childhood. Of Heine’s humorous poetry, “Deutschland” is the most charming specimen—charming, especially, because its wit and humor grow out of a rich loam of thought. “Atta Troll” is more original, more various, more fantastic; but it is too great a strain on the imagination to be a general favorite. We have said that feeling is the element in which Heine’s poetic genius habitually floats; but he can occasionally soar to a higher region, and impart deep significance to picturesque symbolism; he can flash a sublime thought over the past and into the future; he can pour forth a lofty strain of hope or indignation. Few could forget, after once hearing them, the stanzas at the close of “Deutschland,” in which he warns the King of Prussia not to incur the irredeemable hell which the injured poet can create for him—the _singing flames_ of a Dante’s _terza rima_!

“Kennst du die Hölle des Dante nicht,
Die schrecklichen Terzetten?
Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt
Den kann kein Gott mehr retten.

“Kein Gott, kein Heiland, erlöst ihn je
Aus diesen singenden Flammen!
Nimm dich in Acht, das wir dich nicht
Zu solcher Hölle verdammen.” {135}

As a prosaist, Heine is, in one point of view, even more distinguished than as a poet. The German language easily lends itself to all the purposes of poetry; like the ladies of the Middle Ages, it is gracious and compliant to the Troubadours. But as these same ladies were often crusty and repulsive to their unmusical mates, so the German language generally appears awkward and unmanageable in the hands of prose writers. Indeed, the number of really fine German prosaists before Heine would hardly have exceeded the numerating powers of a New Hollander, who can count three and no more. Persons the most familiar with German prose testify that there is an extra fatigue in reading it, just as we feel an extra fatigue from our walk when it takes us over ploughed clay. But in Heine’s hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull, becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic, brilliant; it is German in an _allotropic_ condition. No dreary labyrinthine sentences in which you find “no end in wandering mazes lost;” no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision, all those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest order of prose. And Heine has proved—what Madame de Stäel seems to have doubted—that it is possible to be witty in German; indeed, in reading him, you might imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit, so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his management. He is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth and repose, and the calm development which belong to Goethe’s style, for they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow: he alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion, and daring piquancy; and athwart all these there runs a vein of sadness, tenderness, and grandeur which reveals the poet. He continually throws out those finely chiselled sayings which stamp themselves on the memory, and become familiar by quotation. For example: “The People have time enough, they are immortal; kings only are mortal.”—“Wherever a great soul utters its thoughts, there is Golgotha.”—“Nature wanted to see how she looked, and she created Goethe.”—“Only the man who has known bodily suffering is truly a _man_; his limbs have their Passion history, they are spiritualized.” He calls Rubens “this Flemish Titan, the wings of whose genius were so strong that he soared as high as the sun, in spite of the hundred-weight of Dutch cheeses that hung on his legs.” Speaking of Börne’s dislike to the calm creations of the true artist, he says, “He was like a child which, insensible to the glowing significance of a Greek statue, only touches the marble and complains of cold.”

The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine’s prose writings are the “Reisebilder.” The comparison with Sterne is inevitable here; but Heine does not suffer from it, for if he falls below Sterne in raciness of humor, he is far above him in poetic sensibility and in reach and variety of thought. Heine’s humor is never persistent, it never flows on long in easy gayety and drollery; where it is not swelled by the tide of poetic feeling, it is continually dashing down the precipice of a witticism. It is not broad and unctuous; it is aërial and sprite-like, a momentary resting-place between his poetry and his wit. In the “Reisebilder” he runs through the whole gamut of his powers, and gives us every hue of thought, from the wildly droll and fantastic to the sombre and the terrible. Here is a passage almost Dantesque in conception:

“Alas! one ought in truth to write against no one in this world.
Each of us is sick enough in this great lazaretto, and many a
polemical writing reminds me involuntarily of a revolting quarrel, in
a little hospital at Cracow, of which I chanced to be a witness, and
where it was horrible to hear how the patients mockingly reproached
each other with their infirmities: how one who was wasted by
consumption jeered at another who was bloated by dropsy; how one
laughed at another’s cancer in the nose, and this one again at his
neighbor’s locked-jaw or squint, until at last the delirious
fever-patient sprang out of bed and tore away the coverings from the
wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was to be seen but
hideous misery and mutilation.”

And how fine is the transition in the very next chapter, where, after quoting the Homeric description of the feasting gods, he says:

“Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew, with drops of blood
on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great cross
laid on his shoulders; and he threw the cross on the high table of
the gods, so that the golden cups tottered, and the gods became dumb
and pale, and grew ever paler, till they at last melted away into
vapor.”

The richest specimens of Heine’s wit are perhaps to be found in the works which have appeared since the “Reisebilder.” The years, if they have intensified his satirical bitterness, have also given his wit a finer edge and polish. His sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slily allusive, that they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not very acute; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors of style, there can hardly be any wit more irresistible than Heine’s. We may measure its force by the degree in which it has subdued the German language to its purposes, and made that language brilliant in spite of a long hereditary transmission of dulness. As one of the most harmless examples of his satire, take this on a man who has certainly had his share of adulation:

“Assuredly it is far from my purpose to depreciate M. Victor Cousin.
The titles of this celebrated philosopher even lay me under an
obligation to praise him. He belongs to that living pantheon of
France which we call the peerage, and his intelligent legs rest on
the velvet benches of the Luxembourg. I must indeed sternly repress
all private feelings which might seduce me into an excessive
enthusiasm. Otherwise I might be suspected of servility; for M.
Cousin is very influential in the State by means of his position and
his tongue. This consideration might even move me to speak of his
faults as frankly as of his virtues. Will he himself disapprove of
this? Assuredly not. I know that we cannot do higher honor to great
minds than when we throw as strong a light on their demerits as on
their merits. When we sing the praises of a Hercules, we must also
mention that he once laid aside the lion’s skin and sat down to the
distaff: what then? he remains notwithstanding a Hercules! So when
we relate similar circumstances concerning M. Cousin, we must
nevertheless add, with discriminating eulogy: _M. Cousin_, _if he has
sometimes sat twaddling at the distaff_, _has never laid aside the
lion’s skin_. . . . It is true that, having been suspected of
demagogy, he spent some time in a German prison, just as Lafayette
and Richard Cœur de Lion. But that M. Cousin there in his leisure
hours studied Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ is to be doubted on
three grounds. First, this book is written in German. Secondly, in
order to read this book, a man must understand German. Thirdly, M.
Cousin does not understand German. . . . I fear I am passing unawares
from the sweet waters of praise into the bitter ocean of blame. Yes,
on one account I cannot refrain from bitterly blaming M.
Cousin—namely, that he who loves truth far more than he loves Plato
and Tenneman is unjust to himself when he wants to persuade us that
he has borrowed something from the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel.
Against this self-accusation I must take M. Cousin under my
protection. On my word and conscience! this honorable man has not
stolen a jot from Schelling and Hegel, and if he brought home
anything of theirs, it was merely their friendship. That does honor
to his heart. But there are many instances of such false
self-accusation in psychology. I knew a man who declared that he had
stolen silver spoons at the king’s table; and yet we all knew that
the poor devil had never been presented at court, and accused himself
of stealing these spoons to make us believe that he had been a guest
at the palace. No! In German philosophy M. Cousin has always kept
the sixth commandment; here he has never pocketed a single idea, not
so much as a salt-spoon of an idea. All witnesses agree in attesting
that in this respect M. Cousin is honor itself. . . . I prophesy to
you that the renown of M. Cousin, like the French Revolution, will go
round the world! I hear some one wickedly add: Undeniably the renown
of M. Cousin is going round the world, and _it has already taken its
departure from France_.”

The following “symbolical myth” about Louis Philippe is very characteristic of Heine’s manner:

“I remember very well that immediately on my arrival (in Paris) I
hastened to the Palais Royal to see Louis Philippe. The friend who
conducted me told me that the king now appeared on the terrace only
at stated hours, but that formerly he was to be seen at any time for
five francs. ‘For five francs!’ I cried with amazement; ‘does he
then show himself for money?’ ‘No, but he is shown for money, and it
happens in this way: There is a society of _claqueurs_, _marchands de
contremarques_, and such riff-raff, who offered every foreigner to
show him the king for five francs: if he would give ten francs, he
might see the king raise his eyes to heaven, and lay his hand
protestingly on his heart; if he would give twenty francs, the king
would sing the Marseillaise. If the foreigner gave five francs, they
raised a loud cheering under the king’s windows, and His Majesty
appeared on the terrace, bowed, and retired. If ten francs, they
shouted still louder, and gesticulated as if they had been possessed,
when the king appeared, who then, as a sign of silent emotion, raised
his eyes to heaven and laid his hand on his heart. English visitors,
however, would sometimes spend as much as twenty francs, and then the
enthusiasm mounted to the highest pitch; no sooner did the king
appear on the terrace than the Marseillaise was struck up and roared
out frightfully, until Louis Philippe, perhaps only for the sake of
putting an end to the singing, bowed, laid his hand on his heart, and
joined in the Marseillaise. Whether, as is asserted, he beat time
with his foot, I cannot say.’”

One more quotation, and it must be our last:

“Oh the women! We must forgive them much, for they love much—and
many. Their hate is properly only love turned inside out. Sometimes
they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they can in
this way gratify another man. When they write, they have always one
eye on the paper and the other on a man; and this is true of all
authoresses, except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who has only one eye.”