The German Cla.s.sics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Vol. VI.
by Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke.
THE LIFE OF HEINRICH HEINE
BY WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.
a.s.sistant Professor of German, Harvard University
I.
The history of German literature makes mention of few men more self-centered and at the same time more unreserved than Heinrich Heine. It may be said that everything which Heine wrote gives us, and was intended to give us, first of all some new impression of the writer; so that after a perusal of his works we know him in all his strength and weakness, as we can know only an amiable and communicative egotist; moreover, besides losing no opportunity for self-expression, both in and out of season, Heine published a good deal of frankly autobiographical matter, and wrote memoirs, only fragments of which have come down to us, but of which more than has yet appeared will perhaps ultimately be made accessible. Heine"s life, then, is to us for the most part an open book. Nevertheless, there are many obscure pa.s.sages in it, and there remain many questions not to be answered with certainty, the first of which is as to the date of his birth. His own statements on this subject are contradictory, and the original records are lost. But it seems probable that he was born on the thirteenth of December, 1797, the eldest child of Jewish parents recently domiciled at Dusseldorf on the Rhine.
The parentage, the place, and the time were almost equally significant aspects of the constellation under which young Harry Heine--for so he was first named--began his earthly career. He was born a Jew in a German city which, with a brief interruption, was for the first sixteen years of his life administered by the French. The citizens of Dusseldorf in general had little reason, except for high taxes and the hardships incident to conscription in the French armies, to complain of the foreign dominion. Their trade flourished, they were given better laws, and the machinery of justice was made much less c.u.mbersome than it had been before. But especially the Jews hailed the French as deliverers; for now for the first time they were relieved of political disabilities and were placed upon a footing of equality with the gentile population. To Jew and gentile alike the military achievements of the French were a source of satisfaction and admiration; and when the Emperor of the French himself came to town, as Heine saw him do in 1810, we can easily understand how the enthusiasm of the boy surrounded the person of Napoleon, and the idea that he was supposed to represent, with a glamor that never lost its fascination for the man. To Heine, Napoleon was the incarnation of the French Revolution, the glorious new-comer who took by storm the intrenched strongholds of hereditary privilege, the dauntless leader in whose army every common soldier carried a field marshal"s baton in his knapsack. If later we find Heine mercilessly a.s.sailing the repressive and reactionary aristocracy of Germany, we shall not lightly accuse him of lack of patriotism. He could not be expected to hold dear inst.i.tutions of which he felt only the burden, without a share in the sentiment which gives stability even to inst.i.tutions that have outlived their usefulness. Nor shall we call him a traitor for loving the French, a people to whom his people owed so much, and to whom he was spiritually akin.
French influences, almost as early as Hebrew or German, were among the formative forces brought to bear upon the quick-witted but not precocious boy. Heine"s parents were orthodox, but by no means bigoted Jews. We read with amazement that one of the plans of the mother, ambitious for her firstborn, was to make of him a Roman Catholic priest. The boy"s father, Samson Heine, was a rather unsuccessful member of a family which in other representatives--particularly Samson"s brother Salomon in Hamburg--attained to wealth and prominence in the world of finance.
[Ill.u.s.tration: W. KRAUSKOPF HEINRICH HEINE After a Drawing in the Possession of Mr. Carl Meinert in Dessau]
Samson Heine seems to have been too easy-going, self-indulgent, and ostentatious, to have made the most of the talents that he unquestionably had. Among his foibles was a certain fondness for the pageantry of war, and he was in all his glory as an officer of the local militia. To his son Gustav he transmitted real military capacity, which led to a distinguished career and a patent of n.o.bility in the Austrian service. Harry Heine inherited his father"s more amiable but less strenuous qualities. Inquisitive and alert, he was rather impulsive than determined, and his practical mother had her trials in directing him toward preparation for a life work, the particular field of which neither she nor he could readily choose.
Peira, or Betty, Heine was a stronger character than her husband; and in her family, several members of which had taken high rank as physicians, there had prevailed a higher degree of intellectual culture than the Heines had attained to. She not only managed the household with prudence and energy, but also took the chief care of the education of the children. To both parents Harry Heine paid the homage of true filial affection; and of the happiness of the home life, _The Book Le Grand_ and a number of poems bear unmistakable witness. The poem "My child, we were two children" gives a true account of Harry and his sister Charlotte at play.
In Dusseldorf, Heine"s formal education culminated in attendance in the upper cla.s.ses of a Lyceum, organized upon the model of a French Lycee and with a corps of teachers recruited chiefly from the ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy. The spirit of the inst.i.tution was rationalistic and the discipline wholesome. Here Heine made solid acquisitions in history, literature, and the elements of philosophy.
Outside of school, he was an eager spectator, not merely of stirring events in the world of politics, but also of many a picturesque manifestation of popular life--a spectator often rather than a partic.i.p.ant; for as a Jew he stood beyond the pale of both the German and the Roman Catholic traditions that gave and give to the cities of the Rhineland their characteristic nave gaiety and harmless superst.i.tion. Such a poem as _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ would be amazing as coming from an unbeliever, did we not see in it evidence of the poet"s capacity for perfect sympathetic adoption of the spirit of his early environment. The same is true of many another poetic expression of simple faith, whether in Christianity or in the mythology of German folk-lore.
Interest in medieval Catholicism and in folk-lore is one of the most prominent traits in the Romantic movement, which reached its culmination during the boyhood of Heine. The history of Heine"s connection with this movement is foreshadowed by the circ.u.mstances of his first contact with it. He tells us that the first book he ever read was _Don Quixote_ (in the translation by Tieck). At about the same time he read _Gulliver"s Travels_, the tales of n.o.ble robbers written by Goethe"s brother-in-law, Vulpius, the wildly fantastic stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Schiller"s _Robbers_; but also Uhland"s ballads, and the songs collected by Arnim and Brentano in _The Boy"s Magic Horn_. That is to say: At the time when in school a critical and skeptical mind was being developed in him by descendants of the age of enlightenment, his private reading led him for the most part into the region of romanticism in its most exaggerated form. At the time, furthermore, when he took healthy romantic interest in the picturesque Dusseldorf life, his imagination was morbidly stimulated by furtive visits to a woman reputed to be a witch, and to her niece, the daughter of a hangman. His earliest poems, the _Dream Pictures_, belong in an atmosphere charged with witchery, crime, and the irresponsibility of nightmare. This coincidence of incompatible tendencies will later be seen to account for much of the mystery in Heine"s problematic character.
It having been decided, perhaps because the downfall of Napoleon shut the door of all other opportunity, that Heine should embark upon a mercantile career, he was given a brief apprenticeship, in 1815 at Frankfurt, in the following years at Hamburg, under the immediate patronage of his uncle Salomon who, in 1818, even established the young poet in a dry goods business of his own. The only result of these experiments was the demonstration of Heine"s total inapt.i.tude for commercial pursuits. But the uncle was magnanimous and offered his nephew the means necessary for a university course in law, with a view to subsequent practice in Hamburg. Accordingly, after some brushing up of Latin at home, Heine in the fall of 1819 was matriculated as a student at the University of Bonn.
In spite of failure to accomplish his immediate purpose, Heine had not sojourned in vain at Hamburg. He had gained the good will of an opulent uncle whose bounty he continued almost uninterruptedly to enjoy to the end of his days. But in a purpose that lay much nearer to his heart he had failed lamentably; for, always sensitive to the charms of the other s.e.x, Heine had conceived an overpowering pa.s.sion for his cousin Amalie, the daughter of Salomon, only to meet with scornful rebuffs at the hands of the coquettish and worldly-minded heiress. There is no reason to suppose that Amalie ever took her cousin"s advances seriously. Her father certainly did not so take them. On the other hand, there is equally little reason to doubt the sincerity and depth of Heine"s feelings, first of unfounded hope, then of persistent despair that pursued him in the midst of other occupations and even in the fleeting joys of other loves. The most touching poems included among the _Youthful Sorrows_ of his first volume were inspired by Amalie Heine.
At Bonn Heine was a diligent student. Though never a roysterer, he took part in various extra-academic enterprises, was a member of the _Burschenschaft_, that democratic-patriotic organization so gravely suspected by the reactionary governments, and made many friends. He duly studied history and law; he heard Ernst Moritz Arndt interpret the _Germania_ of Tacitus; but more especially did he profit by official and personal relations with A.W. Schlegel, who taught Heine what he himself knew best, namely, the secret of literary form and the art of metrical expression.
The fall of 1820 saw Heine at Gottingen, the Hanoverian university to which, shortly before, the Americans Ticknor and Everett had repaired and at which in that very year Bancroft had attained his degree of doctor of philosophy. Here, however, Heine was repelled by the aristocratic exclusiveness of the Hanoverian squires who gave the tone to student society, as well as by the mummified dryness of the professors. In marked contrast to the patriotic and romantic spirit of Bonn he noted here with amazement that the distinguished Germanist Benecke lectured on the _Nibelungenlied_ to an auditory of nine. His own residence was destined this time to be brief; for serious quarrels coming to the ear of the faculty, he was, on January 23, 1821, advised to withdraw; and in April he enrolled himself as a student at the University of Berlin.
The next three years were filled with manifold activities. As a student Heine was deeply impressed by the absolute philosophy expounded by Hegel; as a Jew he lent a willing hand to the endeavors of an a.s.sociation recently founded for the amelioration of the social and political condition of the Hebrews; in the drawing room of Rahel Levin, now the wife of Varnhagen von Ense, he came in touch with gifted men and women who were ardent admirers of Goethe, and some of whom, a quarter of a century before, had befriended Friedrich Schlegel; and in the subterranean restaurant of Lutter and Wegener he joined in the revels of Hoffmann, Grabbe, and other eccentric geniuses. Heine now began to be known as a man of letters. After having, from 1817 on, printed occasional poems in newspapers and magazines, he published in December, 1821 (with the date 1822), his first volume, ent.i.tled simply _Poems_; he wrote newspaper articles on Berlin and on Poland, which he visited in the summer of 1822; and in the spring of 1823 he published _Tragedies together with a Lyrical Intermezzo_--two very romantic and undramatic plays in verse, separated in the volume by a short series of lyrical poems.
Meanwhile Amalie Heine had been married and Harry"s parents had moved to Luneburg. Regret for the loss of Amalie soon gave way to a new pa.s.sion for a very young girl, whose ident.i.ty remains uncertain, but who was probably Amalie"s little sister Therese. In any case, Heine met the new love on the occasion of a visit to Luneburg and Hamburg in the spring of 1823, and was haunted by her image during the summer spent at Cuxhaven. Here Heine first saw the sea. In less exalted moods he dallied with fisher maidens; he did not forget Amalie; but the youthful grace and purity of Therese dominate most of the poems of this summer. The return from the watering place gave Heine the t.i.tle _The Return Home_ for this collection of pieces which, when published in 1826, was dedicated to Frau Varnhagen von Ense.
Uncle Salomon, to whom the _Tragedies_ had been affectionately inscribed, was not displeased with the growing literary reputation of his nephew. But he saw no sense in the idea that Heine already entertained of settling in Paris. He insisted that the young man should complete his studies; and so, in January, 1824, Heine once more betook himself to Gottingen, where on the twenty-first of July, 1825, he was duly promoted _Doctor utriusque Juris_. In the summer of 1824 he made the trip through the Hartz mountains which served as the basis of _The Journey to the Hartz_; immediately before his promotion he submitted to baptism in the Lutheran church as Christian Johann Heinrich Heine.
Submission is the right word for this conversion. It was an act of expediency such as other ambitious men found unavoidable in those days; but Heine performed it in a spirit of bitterness caused not so much by a sense of apostasy as by contempt for the conventional Christianity that he now embraced. There can be no sharper contrast than that presented by such a poem as _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ and sundry satirical pieces not included in this volume.
Two vacations at Norderney, where Heine renewed and deepened acquaintance with his beloved North Sea, not very resolute attempts to take up the practice of law in Hamburg, a trip to London, vain hopes of a professorship in Munich, a sojourn in Italy, vacillations between Hamburg, Berlin, and the North Sea, complete the narrative of Heine"s movements to the end of the first period of his life. He was now Heine the writer: poet, journalist, and novelist. _The Journey to the Hartz_, first published in a magazine, _Der Gesellschafter_, in January and February, 1826, was issued in May of that year by Campe in Hamburg, as the first volume of _Pictures of Travel_, beginning with the poems of _The Return Home_ and concluding with the first group of hymns to the North Sea, written at Norderney in the previous year.
_Pictures of Travel II_, issued in 1827, consisted of the second cycle of poems on the _North Sea_, an account in prose of life on the island, ent.i.tled _Norderney, The Book Le Grand_, to which epigrams by Immermann were appended, and extracts from _Letters from Berlin_ published in 1822. _Pictures of Travel III_ (1830) began with experiences in Italy, but degenerated into a provoked but ruthless attack upon Platen. _Pictures of Travel IV_ (1831) included _English Fragments_, the record of Heine"s observations in London, and _The City of Lucca_, a supplementary chapter on Italy. In October, 1827, Heine collected under the t.i.tle _Book of Songs_ nearly all of his poems written up to that time.
The first period in Heine"s life closes with the year 1831. The Parisian revolution of July, 1830, had turned the eyes of all Europe toward the land in which political experiments are made for the benefit of mankind. Many a German was attracted thither, and not without reason Heine hoped to find there a more promising field for the employment of his talents than with all his wanderings he had discovered in Germany. Toward the end of May, 1831, he arrived in Paris, and Paris was thenceforth his home until his death on the seventeenth of February, 1856.
II
In the preface to the second edition of the _Book of Songs_, written at Paris in 1837, Heine confessed that for some time past he had felt a certain repugnance to versification; that the poems therewith offered for the second time to the public were the product of a time when, in contrast to the present, the flame of truth had rather heated than clarified his mind; and expressed the hope that his recent political, theological, and philosophical writings--all springing from the same idea and intention as the poems--might atone for any weakness in the poems. Heine wrote poetry after 1831, and he wrote prose before 1831; but in a general way what he says of his two periods is correct: before his emigration he was primarily a poet, and afterwards primarily a critic, journalist, and popular historian. In his first period he wrote chiefly about his own experiences; in his second, chiefly about affairs past and present in which he was interested.
As to the works of the first period, we might hesitate to say whether the _Pictures of Travel_ or the _Book of Songs_ were the more characteristic product. In whichever way our judgment finally inclined, we should declare that the _Pictures of Travel_ were essentially prosified poems and that the poems were, in their collected form, versified _Pictures of Travel_; and that both, moreover, were dominated, as the writings after 1831 were dominated, by a romantically tinged longing for individual liberty.
The t.i.tle _Pictures of Travel_, to which Heine gave so definite a connotation, is not in itself a true index to the multifarious contents of the series of traveler"s notes, any more than the volumes taken each by itself were units. Pages of verse followed pages of prose; and in the _Journey to the Hartz_, verse interspersed in prose emphasizes the lyrical character of the composition. Heine does indeed give pictures of some of the scenes that he visits; but he also narrates his pa.s.sage from point to point; and at every point he sets forth his recollections, his thoughts, his dreams, his personal reaction upon any idea that comes into his head; so that the substance, especially of the _Journey to the Hartz_, is less what was to be seen in the Hartz than what was suggested to a very lively imagination; and we admire the agility with which the writer jumps from place to place quite as much as the suppleness with which he can at will unconditionally subject himself to the genius of a single locality. For Heine is capable of writing straightforward descriptive prose, as well-ordered and as matter-of-fact as a narrative of Kleist"s. But the world of reality, where everything has an a.s.signable reason for its being and doing, is not the world into which he most delights to conduct us. This world, on the contrary, is that in which the water "murmurs and rustles so wonderfully, the birds pour forth broken love-sick strains, the trees whisper as if with a thousand maidens" tongues, the odd mountain flowers peep up at us as if with a thousand maidens" eyes, stretching out to us their curious, broad, drolly scalloped leaves; the sunrays flash here and there in sport, the herbs, as though endowed with reason, are telling one another their green legends, all seems enchanted"--in other words, a wonderland disturbed by no doubts on the part of a rationalistic Alice. And a further secret of this fascinating, though in the long run exasperating style, is the sublime audacity with which Heine dances now on one foot and now on the other, leaving you at every moment in amused perplexity, whether you shall next find him standing firmly on mother earth or bounding upward to recline on the clouds.
"A mixture of description of nature, wit, poetry, and observation a la Washington Irving" Heine himself called the _Journey to the Hartz_.
The novelty lay in the mixture, and in the fact that though the ingredients are, so to speak, potentized in the highest degree, they are brought to nearly perfect congruence and fusion by the irresistible solvent of the second named. The _Journey to the Hartz_ is a work of wit, in the present sense, and in the older sense of that word. It is a product of superior intelligence--not a _Sketch Book_, but a single canvas with an infinitude of details; not a _Sentimental Journey_--although Heine can outdo Sterne in sentimentality, he too persistently outdoes him also in satire--the work, fragmentary and outwardly formless, is in essence thoroughly informed by a two-fold purpose: to ridicule pedantry and philistinism, and to extol nature and the life of those uncorrupted by the world.
A similar unity is unmistakable in the _Book of Songs_. It would be difficult to find another volume of poems so cunningly composed. If we examine the book in its most obvious aspect, we find it beginning with _Youthful Sorrows_ and ending with hymns to the North Sea; pa.s.sing, that is to say, from the most subjective to the most objective of Heine"s poetic expressions. The first of the _Youthful Sorrows_ are _Dream Pictures_, crude and grotesque imitations of an inferior romantic _genre_; the _North Sea Pictures_ are magnificent attempts in highly original form to catch the elusive moods of a great natural element which before Heine had played but little part in German poetry. From the _Dream Pictures_ we proceed to _Songs_ (a very simple love story told in forms as nearly conventional as Heine ever used), to _Romances_ which, with the notable exception of _The Two Grenadiers_ and _Belshazzar_, are relatively feeble attempts at the objectivation of personal suffering; and thence to _Sonnets_, direct communications to particular persons. Thereupon follow the _Lyrical Intermezzo_ and the _Return Home_, each with a prologue and an epilogue, and with several series of pieces which, like the _Songs_ above mentioned, are printed without t.i.tles and are successive sentences or paragraphs in the poet"s own love story. This he tells over and over again, without monotony, because the story gains in significance as the lover gains in experience, because each time he finds for it a new set of symbols, and because the symbols become more and more objective as the poet"s horizon broadens. Then come a few pieces of religious content (culminating in _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_), the poems in the _Journey to the Hartz_ (the most striking of which are animated by the poetry of folk-lore)--these poems clearly transitional to the poetry of the ocean which Heine wrote with such vigor in the two cycles on the North Sea. The movement is a steady climax.
The truth of the foregoing observations can be tested only by an examination of the entire _Book of Songs_. The total effect is one of arrangement. The order of the sections is chronological; the order of the poems within the sections is logical; and some poems were altered to make them fit into the scheme. Each was originally the expression of a moment; and the peculiarity of Heine as a lyric poet is his disposition to fix a moment, however fleeting, and to utter a feeling, of however slight consequence to humanity it might at first blush seem to be. In the _Journey to the Hartz_ he never lost an opportunity to make a point; in his lyrical confessions he suppressed no impulse to self-revelation; and seldom did his mastery of form fail to enn.o.ble even the meanest substance.
Some of Heine"s most perfect products are his smallest. Whether, however, a slight substance can be fittingly presented only in the briefest forms, or a larger matter calls for extended treatment, the method is the same, and the merit lies in the justness and suggestiveness of details. Single points, or points in juxtaposition or in succession, not the developed continuity of a line, are the means to the effect which Heine seeks. Connecting links are left to be supplied by the imagination of the reader. Even in such a narrative poem as _Belshazzar_ the movement is _staccato_; we are invited to contemplate a series of moments; and if the subject is impiety and swift retribution, we are left to infer the fact from the evidence presented; there is neither editorial introduction nor moralizing conclusion. Similarly with _The Two Grenadiers_, a presentation of character in circ.u.mstance, a translation of pictorial details into terms of action and prophecy; and most strikingly in _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_, a poem of such fundamentally pictorial quality that it has been called a triptych, three depicted scenes in a little religious drama.
It is in pieces like these that we find Heine most successfully making of himself the interpreter of objects in the outside world. The number of such objects is greater than is everywhere believed--though naturally his success is surest in the case of objects congenial to him, and the variety of these is not great. Indeed, the outside world, even when he appears to treat it most objectively, proves upon closer examination to be in the vast majority of cases only a treasure-trove of symbols for the expression of his inner self. Thus, _Poor Peter_ is the narrative of a humble youth unfortunate in love, but poor Peter"s story is Heine"s; otherwise, we may be sure, Heine would not have thought it worth the telling. Nothing could seem to be less the property of Heine than _The Lorelei_; nevertheless, he has given to this borrowed subject so personal a turn that instead of the siren we see a human maiden, serenely indifferent to the effect of her charms, which so take the luckless lover that, like the boatman, he, Heine, is probably doomed ere long to death in the waves.
Toward the outside world, then, Heine"s habitual att.i.tude is not that of an interpreter; it is that of an artist who seeks the means of expression where they may be found. He does not, like Goethe and Morike, read out of the phenomena of nature and of life what these phenomena in themselves contain; he reads into them what he wishes them to say. _The Book of Songs_ is a human doc.u.ment, but it is no doc.u.ment of the life of humanity; it is a collection of kaleidoscopic views of one life, a life not fortified by wholesome cooperation with men nor nourished with the strength of nature, but vivifying nature with its own emotions. Heine has treated many a situation with overwhelming pathos, but none from which he was himself so completely absent as Morike from the kitchen of The _Forsaken Maiden_. Goethe"s "Hush"d on the hill" is an apostrophe to himself; but peace which the world cannot give and cannot take away is the atmosphere of that poem; whereas Heine"s "The shades of the summer evening lie" gets its princ.i.p.al effectiveness from fantastic contributions of the poet"s own imagination.
The length to which Heine goes in attributing human emotions to nature is hardly to be paralleled before or since. His aim not being the reproduction of reality, nor yet the objectivation of ideas, his poetry is essentially a poetry of tropes-that is, the conception and presentation of things not as they are but as they may be conceived to be. A simple ill.u.s.tration of this method may be seen in _The Herd-Boy_. Uhland wrote a poem on a very similar subject, _The Boy"s Mountain Song_. But the contrast between Uhland"s hardy, active, public-spirited youth and Heine"s sleepy, amorous individualist is no more striking than the difference between Uhland"s rhetorical and Heine"s tropical method. Heine"s poem is an elaboration of the single metaphor with which it begins: "Kingly is the herd-boy"s calling." The poem _Pine and Palm_, in which Heine expresses his hopeless separation from the maiden of whom he dreams--incidentally attributing to Amalie a feeling of sadness and solitude to which she was a stranger--is a bolder example of romantic self-projection into nature. But not the boldest that Heine offers us. He transports us to India, and there--
The violets t.i.tter, caressing, Peeping up as the planets appear, And the roses, their warm love confessing, Whisper words, soft perfumed, to each ear.
Nor does he allow us to question the occurrence of these marvels; how do we know what takes place on the banks of the Ganges, whither we are borne on the wings of song? This, indeed, would be Heine"s answer to any criticism based upon Ruskin"s notion as to the "pathetic fallacy."
If the setting is such as to induce in us the proper mood, we readily enter the non-rational realm, and with credulous delight contemplate wonders such as we too have seen in our dreams; just as we find the romantic syntheses of sound and odor, or of sound and color, legitimate attempts to express the inexpressible. The atmosphere of prose, to be sure, is less favorable to Heine"s habitual indulgence in romantic tropes.
Somewhat blunted by over-employment is another romantic instrument, eminently characteristic of Heine, namely, irony. Nothing could be more trenchant than his bland a.s.sumption of the point of view of the Jew-baiter, the hypocrite, or the slave-trader. It is as perfect as his adoption of childlike faith in _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_. Many a time he attains an effect of ironical contrast by the juxtaposition of incongruous poems, as when a deification of his beloved is followed by a cynical utterance of a different kind of love. But often the incongruity is within the poem itself, and the poet, destroying the illusion of his created image, gets a melancholy satisfaction from derision of his own grief. This procedure perfectly symbolizes a distracted mind; it undoubtedly suggests a superior point of view, from which the tribulations of an insignificant individual are seen to be insignificant; but in a larger sense it symbolizes the very instability and waywardness of Heine himself. His emotions were unquestionably deep and recurrent, but they were not constant. His devotion to ideals did not preclude indulgence in very unideal pleasures; and his love of Amalie and Therese, hopeless from the beginning, could not, except in especially fortunate moments, avoid erring in the direction either of sentimentality or of bitterness. But Heine was too keenly intellectual to be indulgent of sentimentality, and too caustic to restrain bitterness. Hence the bitter-sweet of many of his pieces, so agreeably stimulating and so suggestive of an elastic temperament.
There is, however, a still more pervasive incongruity between this temperament and the forms in which it expressed itself. Heine"s love poems--two-thirds of the _Book of Songs_--are written in the very simplest of verses, mostly quatrains of easy and seemingly inevitable structure. Heine learned the art of making them from the _Magic Horn_, from Uhland, and from Eichendorff, and he carried the art to the highest pitch of virtuosity. They are the forms of the German Folk-song, a fit vehicle for homely sentiments and those elemental pa.s.sions which come and go like the tide in a humble heart, because the humble heart is single and yields unresistingly to their flow. But Heine"s heart was not single, his pa.s.sion was complex, and the greatest of his ironies was his use of the most unsophisticated of forms for his most sophisticated substances. This, indeed, was what made his love poetry so novel and so piquant to his contemporaries; this is one of the qualities that keep it alive today; but it is a highly individual device which succeeded only with this individual; and that it was a device adopted from no lack of capacity in other measures appears from the perfection of Heine"s sonnets and the incomparable free rhythmic verses of the _North Sea_ cycles.
Taken all in all, _The Book of Songs_ was a unique collection, making much of little, and making it with an amazing economy of means.
III
Heine"s first period, to 1831, when he was primarily a literary artist, nearly coincides with the epoch of the Restoration (1815-1830). Politically, this time was unproductive in Germany, and the very considerable activity in science, philosophy, poetry, painting, and other fine arts stood in no immediate relation to national exigencies. There was indeed plenty of agitation in the circles of the _Burschenschaft_, and there were sporadic efforts to obtain from reluctant princes the const.i.tutions promised as a reward for the rising against Napoleon; but as a whole the people of the various states seemed pa.s.sive, and whatever was accomplished was the work of individuals, with or without royal patronage, and, in the main, in continuation of romantic tendencies. But with the Revolution of July, 1830, the political situation in Germany became somewhat more acute, demands for emanc.i.p.ation took more tangible form, and the so-called "Young Germans "--Wienbarg, Gutzkow, Laube, Mundt, Borne, and others-endeavored in essays, novels, plays, and pamphlets to stir up public interest in questions of political, social, and religious reform.
Many pa.s.sages in Heine"s _Pictures of Travel_ breathe the spirit of the Young German propaganda--the celebrated confession of faith, for example, in the _Journey to the Hartz_, in which he declares himself a knight of the holy spirit of iconoclastic democracy. In Paris he actively enlisted in the cause, and for about fifteen years continued, as a journalist, the kind of expository and polemic writing that he had developed in the later volumes of the _Pictures of Travel_.
Regarding himself, like many an expatriate, as a mediator between the country of his birth and the country of his adoption, he wrote for German papers accounts of events in the political and artistic world of France, and for French periodicals more ambitious essays on the history of religion, philosophy, and recent literature in Germany.
Most of the works of this time were published in both French and German, and Heine arranged also for the appearance of the _Pictures of Travel_ and the _Book of Songs_ in French translations. To all intents and purposes he became a Frenchman; from 1836 or 1837 until 1848 he was the recipient of an annual pension of 4,800 francs from the French government; he has even been suspected of having become a French citizen. But he in no sense curbed his tongue when speaking of French affairs, nor was he free from longing to be once more in his native land.
In Germany, however, he was commonly regarded as a traitor; and at the same time the Young Germans, with the more influential of whom he soon quarreled, looked upon him as a renegade; so that there was a peculiar inappropriateness in the notorious decree of the Bundesrat at Frankfurt, voted December 10, 1835, and impotently forbidding the circulation in Germany of the writings of the Young Germans: Heine, Gutzkow, Laube, Wienbarg, and Mundt--in that order. But the occupants of insecure thrones have a fine scent for the odor of sedition, and Heine was an untiring sapper and miner in the modern army moving against the strongholds of aristocrats and priests. A keen observer in Hamburg who was resolved, though not in the manner of the Young Germans, to do his part in furthering social reform, Friedrich Hebbel, wrote to a friend in March, 1836: "Our time is one in which action destined to be decisive for a thousand years is being prepared. What artillery did not accomplish at Leipzig must now be done by pens in Paris."
During the first years of his sojourn in Paris Heine entered gleefully into all the enjoyment and stimulation that the gay capital had to offer. "I feel like a fish in water" is a common expression of contentment with one"s surroundings; but when one fish inquires after the health of another, he now says, Heine told a friend, "I feel like Heine in Paris." The well-accredited German poet quickly secured admission to the circle of artists, journalists, politicians, and reformers, and became a familiar figure on the boulevards. In October, 1834, be made the acquaintance of a young Frenchwoman, Crescence Eugenie Mirat, or Mathilde, as he called her, and fell violently in love with her. She was a woman of great personal attractiveness, but entirely without education, frivolous, and pa.s.sionate. They were soon united; not for long, Heine thought, and he made efforts to escape from her seductive charms, but ineffectually; and like Tannhauser, he was drawn back to his Frau Venus with an attachment pa.s.sing all understanding. From December, 1835, Heine regarded her as his wife, and in 1841 they were married. But Mathilde was no good housekeeper; Heine was frequently in financial straits; he quarreled with his relatives, as well as with literary adversaries in Germany and France; and only after considerable negotiation was peace declared, and the continuation of a regular allowance arranged with Uncle Salomon.
[Ill.u.s.tration: HEINRICH HEINE E. HADER]
Moreover, Heine"s health was undermined. In the latter thirties he suffered often from headaches and afflictions of the eyes; in the middle of the forties paralysis of the spinal cord began to manifest itself; and for the last ten years of his life he was a hopelessly stricken invalid, finally doomed for five years to that "mattress grave" which his fort.i.tude no less than his woeful humor has pathetically glorified. His wife cared for him dutifully, he was visited by many distinguished men of letters, and in 1855 a ministering angel came to him in the person of Elise von Krinitz ("Camille Selden") whom he called "_Die Mouche_" and for whom he wrote his last poem, _The Pa.s.sion Flower_, a kind of apology for his life.