Part 13
His direct political action was null, and this is neither to be wondered at nor regretted; direct political action is not the true function of literature, and Heine was a born man of letters. Even in his favorite France the turn taken by public affairs was not at all what he wished, though he read French politics by no means as we in England, most of us, read them. He thought things were tending there to the triumph of communism; and to a champion of the idea like Heine, what there is gross and narrow in communism was very repulsive, “It is all of no use,” he cried on his death-bed, “the future belongs to our enemies, the Communists, and Louis Napoleon is their John the Baptist.” “And yet,”—he added with all his old love for that remarkable entity, so full of attraction for him, so profoundly unknown in England, the French people,—“do not believe that God lets all this go forward merely as a grand comedy. Even though the Communists deny him to-day, he knows better than they do, that a time will come when they will learn to believe in him.” After 1831, his hopes of soon upsetting the German Governments had died away, and his propagandism took another, a more truly literary, character. It took the character of an intrepid application of the modern spirit to literature. To the ideas with which the burning questions of modern life filled him, he made all his subject-matter minister. He touched all the great points in the career of the human race, and here he but followed the tendency of the wide culture of Germany; but he touched them with a wand which brought them all under a light where the modern eye cares most to see them, and here he gave a lesson to the culture of Germany,—so wide, so impartial, that it is apt to become slack and powerless, and to lose itself in its materials for want of a strong central idea round which to group all its other ideas. So the mystic and romantic school of Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Gœrres, or Brentano, or Arnim, Heine the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel,—along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself,—the power of modern ideas.
A French critic of Heine thinks he has said enough in saying that Heine proclaimed in German countries, with beat of drum, the ideas of 1789, and that at the cheerful noise of his drum the ghosts of the Middle Age took to flight. But this is rather too French an account of the matter. Germany, that vast mine of ideas, had no need to import ideas, as such, from any foreign country; and if Heine had carried ideas, as such, from France into Germany, he would but have been carrying coals to Newcastle. But that for which France, far less meditative than Germany, is eminent, is the prompt, ardent, and practical application of an idea, when she seizes it, in all departments of human activity which admit it. And that in which Germany most fails, and by failing in which she appears so helpless and impotent, is just the practical application of her innumerable ideas. “When Candide,” says Heine himself, “came to Eldorado, he saw in the streets a number of boys who were playing with gold-nuggets instead of marbles. This degree of luxury made him imagine that they must be the king’s children, and he was not a little astonished when he found that in Eldorado gold-nuggets are of no more value than marbles are with us, and that the schoolboys play with them. A similar thing happened to a friend of mine, a foreigner, when he came to Germany and first read German books. He was perfectly astounded at the wealth of ideas which he found in them; but he soon remarked that ideas in Germany are as plentiful as gold-nuggets in Eldorado, and that those writers whom he had taken for intellectual princes, were in reality only common schoolboys.” Heine was, as he called himself, a “Child of the French Revolution,” an “Initiator,” because he vigorously assured the Germans that ideas were not counters or marbles, to be played with for their own sake; because he exhibited in literature modern ideas applied with the utmost freedom, clearness, and originality. And therefore he declared that the great task of his life had been the endeavor to establish a cordial relation between France and Germany. It is because he thus operates a junction between the French spirit, and German ideas and German culture, that he founds something new, opens a fresh period, and deserves the attention of criticism far more than the German poets his contemporaries, who merely continue an old period till it expires. It may be predicted that in the literature of other countries, too, the French spirit is destined to make its influence felt,—as an element, in alliance with the native spirit, of novelty and movement,—as it has made its influence felt in German literature; fifty years hence a critic will be demonstrating to our grandchildren how this phenomenon has come to pass.
We in England, in our great burst of literature during the first thirty years of the present century, had no manifestation of the modern spirit, as this spirit manifests itself in Goethe’s works or Heine’s. And the reason is not far to seek. We had neither the German wealth of ideas, nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas. There reigned in the mass of the nation that inveterate inaccessibility to ideas, that Philistinism,—to use the German nickname,—which reacts even on the individual genius that is exempt from it. In our greatest literary epoch, that of the Elizabethan age, English society at large was accessible to ideas, was permeated by them, was vivified by them, to a degree which has never been reached in England since. Hence the unique greatness in English literature of Shakspeare and his contemporaries. They were powerfully upheld by the intellectual life of their nation; they applied freely in literature the then modern ideas,—the ideas of the Renascence and the Reformation. A few years afterwards the great English middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakspeare, entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years. _He enlargeth a nation_, says Job, _and straiteneth it again_.
In the literary movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century the signal attempt to apply freely the modern spirit was made in England by two members of the aristocratic class, Byron and Shelley. Aristocracies are, as such, naturally impenetrable by ideas; but their individual members have a high courage and a turn for breaking bounds; and a man of genius, who is the born child of the idea, happening to be born in the aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from freely developing it. But Byron and Shelley did not succeed in their attempt freely to apply the modern spirit in English literature; they could not succeed in it; the resistance to baffle them, the want of intelligent sympathy to guide and uphold them, were too great. Their literary creation, compared with the literary creation of Shakspeare and Spenser, compared with the literary creation of Goethe and Heine, is a failure. The best literary creation of that time in England proceeded from men who did not make the same bold attempt as Byron and Shelley. What, in fact, was the career of the chief English men of letters, their contemporaries? The gravest of them, Wordsworth, retired (in Middle-Age phrase) into a monastery. I mean, he plunged himself in the inward life, he voluntarily cut himself off from the modern spirit. Coleridge took to opium. Scott became the historiographer-royal of feudalism. Keats passionately gave himself up to a sensuous genius, to his faculty for interpreting nature; and he died of consumption at twenty-five. Wordsworth, Scott, and Keats have left admirable works; far more solid and complete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left. But their works have this defect,—they do not belong to that which is the main current of the literature of modern epochs, they do not apply modern ideas to life; they constitute, therefore, _minor currents_, and all other literary work of our day, however popular, which has the same defect, also constitutes but a minor current. Byron and Shelley will long be remembered, long after the inadequacy of their actual work is clearly recognized for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature; their names will be greater than their writings; _stat magni nominis umbra_.
Heine’s literary good fortune was superior to that of Byron and Shelley. His theater of operations was Germany, whose Philistinism does not consist in her want of ideas, or in her inaccessibility to ideas, for she teems with them and loves them, but, as I have said, in her feeble and hesitating application of modern ideas to life. Heine’s intense modernism, his absolute freedom, his utter rejection of stock classicism and stock romanticism, his bringing all things under the point of view of the nineteenth century, were understood and laid to heart by Germany, through virtue of her immense, tolerant intellectualism, much as there was in all Heine said to affront and wound Germany. The wit and ardent modern spirit of France Heine joined to the culture, the sentiment, the thought of Germany. This is what makes him so remarkable; his wonderful clearness, lightness, and freedom, united with such power of feeling, and width of range. Is there anywhere keener wit than in his story of the French abbé who was his tutor, and who wanted to get from him that _la religion_ is French for _der Glaube_: “Six times did he ask me the question: ‘Henry, what is _der Glaube_ in French?’ and six times, and each time with a greater burst of tears, did I answer him—‘It is _le crédit_.’ And at the seventh time, his face purple with rage, the infuriated questioner screamed out: ‘It is _la religion_;’ and a rain of cuffs descended upon me, and all the other boys burst out laughing. Since that day I have never been able to hear _la religion_ mentioned, without feeling a tremor run through my back, and my cheeks grow red with shame.” Or in that comment on the fate of Professor Saalfeld, who had been addicted to writing furious pamphlets against Napoleon, and who was a professor at Göttingen, a great seat, according to Heine, of pedantry and Philistinism: “It is curious,” says Heine, “the three greatest adversaries of Napoleon have all of them ended miserably. Castlereagh cut his own throat; Louis the Eighteenth rotted upon his throne; and Professor Saalfeld is still a professor at Göttingen.” It is impossible to go beyond that.
What wit, again, in that saying which every one has heard: “The Englishman loves liberty like his lawful wife, the Frenchman loves her like his mistress, the German loves her like his old grandmother.” But the turn Heine gives to this incomparable saying is not so well known; and it is by that turn he shows himself the born poet he is,—full of delicacy and tenderness, of inexhaustible resource, infinitely new and striking:—
“And yet, after all, no one can ever tell how things may turn out. The grumpy Englishman, in an ill-temper with his wife, is capable of some day putting a rope round her neck, and taking her to be sold at Smithfield. The inconstant Frenchman may become unfaithful to his adored mistress, and be seen fluttering about the Palais Royal after another. _But the German will never quite abandon his old grandmother_; he will always keep for her a nook by the chimney-corner, where she can tell her fairy stories to the listening children.”
Is it possible to touch more delicately and happily both the weakness and the strength of Germany;—pedantic, simple, enslaved, free, ridiculous, admirable Germany?
And Heine’s verse,—his _Lieder_? Oh, the comfort, after dealing with French people of genius, irresistibly impelled to try and express themselves in verse, launching out into a deed which destiny has sown with so many rocks for them,—the comfort of coming to a man of genius, who finds in verse his freest and most perfect expression, whose voyage over the deep of poetry destiny makes smooth! After the rhythm, to us, at any rate, with the German paste in our composition, so deeply unsatisfying, of—
“Ah! que me dites-vous, et que vous dit mon âme? Que dit le ciel à l’aube et la flamme à la flamme?”
what a blessing to arrive at rhythms like—
“Take, oh, take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn—”
or—
“Siehst sehr sterbeblässlich aus, Doch getrost! du bist zu Haus—”
in which one’s soul can take pleasure! The magic of Heine’s poetical form is incomparable; he chiefly uses a form of old German popular poetry, a ballad-form which has more rapidity and grace than any ballad-form of ours; he employs this form with the most exquisite lightness and ease, and yet it has at the same time the inborn fulness, pathos, and old-world charm of all true forms of popular poetry. Thus in Heine’s poetry, too, one perpetually blends the impression of French modernism and clearness, with that of German sentiment and fulness; and to give this blended impression is, as I have said, Heine’s great characteristic. To feel it, one must read him; he gives it in his form as well as in his contents, and by translation I can only reproduce it so far as his contents give it. But even the contents of many of his poems are capable of giving a certain sense of it. Here, for instance, is a poem in which he makes his profession of faith to an innocent beautiful soul, a sort of Gretchen, the child of some simple mining people having their hut among the pines at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, who reproaches him with not holding the old articles of the Christian creed:—
“Ah, my child, while I was yet a little boy, while I yet sate upon my mother’s knee, I believed in God the Father, who rules up there in Heaven, good and great;
“Who created the beautiful earth, and the beautiful men and women thereon; who ordained for sun, moon, and stars their courses.
“When I got bigger, my child, I comprehended yet a great deal more than this, and comprehended, and grew intelligent; and I believe on the Son also;
“On the beloved Son, who loved us, and revealed love to us; and, for his reward, as always happens, was crucified by the people.
“Now, when I am grown up, have read much, have traveled much, my heart swells within me, and with my whole heart I believe on the Holy Ghost.
“The greatest miracles were of his working, and still greater miracles doth he even now work; he burst in sunder the oppressor’s stronghold, and he burst in sunder the bondsman’s yoke.
“He heals old death-wounds, and renews the old right; all mankind are one race of noble equals before him.
“He chases away the evil clouds and the dark cobwebs of the brain, which have spoilt love and joy for us, which day and night have loured on us.
“A thousand knights, well harnessed, has the Holy Ghost chosen out to fulfil his will, and he has put courage into their souls.
“Their good swords flash, their bright banners wave; what, thou wouldst give much, my child, to look upon such gallant knights?
“Well, on me, my child, look! kiss me, and look boldly upon me! one of those knights of the Holy Ghost am I.”
One has only to turn over the pages of his _Romancero_,—a collection of poems written in the first years of his illness, with his whole power and charm still in them, and not, like his latest poems of all, painfully touched by the air of his _Matrazzen-gruft_, his “mattress-grave,”—to see Heine’s width of range; the most varied figures succeed one another,—Rhampsinitus, Edith with the Swan Neck, Charles the First, Marie Antoinette, King David, a heroine of _Mabille_, Melisanda of Tripoli, Richard Cœur de Lion, Pedro the Cruel, Firdusi, Cortes, Dr. Döllinger;—but never does Heine attempt to be _hübsch objectiv_, “beautifully objective,” to become in spirit an old Egyptian, or an old Hebrew, or a Middle-Age knight, or a Spanish adventurer, or an English royalist; he always remains Heinrich Heine, a son of the nineteenth century. To give a notion of his tone, I will quote a few stanzas at the end of the _Spanish Atridæ_, in which he describes, in the character of a visitor at the court of Henry of Transtamare at Segovia, Henry’s treatment of the children of his brother, Pedro the Cruel. Don Diego Albuquerque, his neighbor, strolls after dinner through the castle with him:
“In the cloister-passage, which leads to the kennels where are kept the king’s hounds, that with their growling and yelping let you know a long way off where they are.
“There I saw, built into the wall, and with a strong iron grating for its outer face, a cell like a cage.
“Two human figures sate therein, two young boys; chained by the leg, they crouched in the dirty straw.
“Hardly twelve years old seemed the one, the other not much older; their faces fair and noble, but pale and wan with sickness.
“They were all in rags, almost naked; and their lean bodies showed wounds, the marks of ill-usage; both of them shivered with fever.
“They looked up at me out of the depth of their misery; ‘who,’ I cried in horror to Don Diego, ‘are these pictures of wretchedness?’
“Don Diego seemed embarrassed; he looked round to see that no one was listening; then he gave a deep sigh; and at last, putting on the easy tone of a man of the world, he said:
“‘These are a pair of king’s sons, who were early left orphans; the name of their father was King Pedro, the name of their mother, Maria de Padilla.
“‘After the great battle of Navarette, when Henry of Transtamare had relieved his brother, King Pedro, of the troublesome burden of the crown.
“‘And likewise of that still more troublesome burden, which is called life, then Don Henry’s victorious magnanimity had to deal with his brother’s children.
“‘He has adopted them, as an uncle should; and he has given them free quarters in his own castle.
“‘The room which he has assigned to them is certainly rather small, but then it is cool in summer, and not intolerably cold in winter.
“‘Their fare is rye-bread, which tastes as sweet as if the goddess Ceres had baked it express for her beloved Proserpine.
“‘Not unfrequently, too, he sends a scullion to them with garbanzos, and then the young gentlemen know that it is Sunday in Spain.
“‘But it is not Sunday every day, and garbanzos do not come every day; and the master of the hounds gives them the treat of his whip.
“‘For the master of the hounds, who has under his superintendence the kennels and the pack, and the nephews’ cage also.
“‘Is the unfortunate husband of that lemon-faced woman with the white ruff, whom we remarked to-day at dinner.
“‘And she scolds so sharp, that often her husband snatches his whip, and rushes down here, and gives it to the dogs and to the poor little boys.
“‘But his majesty has expressed his disapproval of such proceedings, and has given orders that for the future his nephews are to be treated differently from the dogs.
“‘He has determined no longer to entrust the disciplining of his nephews to a mercenary stranger, but to carry it out with his own hands.’
“Don Diego stopped abruptly; for the seneschal of the castle joined us, and politely expressed his hope that we had dined to our satisfaction.”
Observe how the irony of the whole of that, finishing with the grim innuendo of the last stanza but one, is at once truly masterly and truly modern.
No account of Heine is complete which does not notice the Jewish element in him. His race he treated with the same freedom with which he treated everything else, but he derived a great force from it, and no one knew this better than he himself. He has excellently pointed out how in the sixteenth century there was a double renascence,—a Hellenic renascence and a Hebrew renascence,—and how both have been great powers ever since. He himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judæa; both these spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all poetry and all art,—the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sublimity. By his perfection of literary form, by his love of clearness, by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek; by his intensity, by his untamableness, by his “longing which cannot be uttered,” he is Hebrew. Yet what Hebrew ever treated the things of the Hebrews like this?—
“There lives at Hamburg, in a one-roomed lodging in the Baker’s Broad Walk, a man whose name is Moses Lump; all the week he goes about in wind and rain, with his pack on his back, to earn his few shillings; but when on Friday evening he comes home, he finds the candlestick with seven candles lighted, and the table covered with a fair white cloth, and he puts away from him his pack and his cares, and he sits down to table with his squinting wife and yet more squinting daughter, and eats fish with them, fish which has been dressed in beautiful white garlic sauce, sings therewith the grandest psalms of King David, rejoices with his whole heart over the deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt, rejoices, too, that all the wicked ones who have done the children of Israel hurt, have ended by taking themselves off; that King Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, Antiochus, Titus, and all such people, are well dead, while he, Moses Lump, is yet alive, and eating fish with wife and daughter; and I can tell you, Doctor, the fish is delicate and the man is happy, he has no call to torment himself about culture, he sits contented in his religion and in his green bedgown, like Diogenes in his tub, he contemplates with satisfaction his candles, which he on no account will snuff for himself; and I can tell you, if the candles burn a little dim, and the snuffers-woman, whose business it is to snuff them, is not at hand, and Rothschild the Great were at that moment to come in, with all his brokers, bill discounters, agents, and chief clerks, with whom he conquers the world, and Rothschild were to say: ‘Moses Lump, ask of me what favor you will, and it shall be granted you;’—Doctor, I am convinced, Moses Lump would quietly answer: ‘Snuff me those candles!’ and Rothschild the Great would exclaim with admiration: ‘If I were not Rothschild, I would be Moses Lump.’”
There Heine shows us his own people by its comic side; in the poem of the _Princess Sabbath_ he shows it to us by a more serious side. The Princess Sabbath, “the _tranquil Princess_, pearl and flower of all beauty, fair as the Queen of Sheba, Solomon’s bosom friend, that blue stocking from Ethiopia, who wanted to shine by her _esprit_, and with her wise riddles made herself in the long run a bore” (with Heine the sarcastic turn is never far off), this princess has for her betrothed a prince whom sorcery has transformed into an animal of lower race, the Prince Israel.
“A dog with the desires of a dog, he wallows all the week long in the filth and refuse of life, amidst the jeers of the boys in the street.
“But every Friday evening, at the twilight hour, suddenly the magic passes off, and the dog becomes once more a human being.
“A man with the feelings of a man, with head and heart raised aloft, in festal garb, in almost clean garb, he enters the halls of his Father.
“Hail, beloved halls of my royal Father! Ye tents of Jacob, I kiss with my lips your holy door-posts!”
Still more he shows us this serious side in his beautiful poem on Jehuda ben Halevy, a poet belonging to “the great golden age of the Arabian, Old-Spanish, Jewish school of poets,” a contemporary of the troubadours:—