Part 13

The _Buch der Lieder_ closes with the North Sea poems (_Die Nordsee_, 1825-1826), inspired by two visits to Norderney, and written in forcible, irregular rhythm. In them we observe first and foremost a particular understanding of nature which is a new gain for German poetry.

As far as nature was concerned, Goethe seemed to have exhausted everything. His love for every living thing, his feeling of kinship with animals and plants, his persuasion that the human being is one with all other beings, his intuition of the unity that underlies perpetual change of form--this gift of resolving all nature into feeling was his earliest characteristic. It was soon superseded, or rather supplemented, by his capacity for observing and reproducing natural scenes without any ascription of his own feelings to them. He studies nature, becomes an observer and investigator, and finally, thanks to the steadily increasing profundity of his observation, in combination with his genial intuition, an epoch-making discoverer in two great domains of natural science. We see him pass through all the phases of a great mind in its relation to nature--the emotional, the religious-pantheistic, the poetic-scientific--and see him in the end lay such exclusive stress upon material impressions that he thrusts all that is psychical from him as merely disturbing. His views become more and more positive and realistic. In his essay on granite he writes: "I do not fear the reproach of its being a spirit of contradiction that has led me from the observation and delineation of the human heart, that youngest, most multiform, most mobile, most changeable part of creation, that which it is easiest to unsettle and to shake, to the observation of nature's oldest, firmest, deepest, most immovable son"[18] --namely, granite.

[18] Goethe: _Werke_, xxxiii. 164.

In what domain was it still possible for a German poet to display fresh, original understanding of nature? From the human heart to granite Goethe had embraced them all.

There was one left. Goethe had never sung the sea. He saw it for the first time when he was nearly forty, in Venice, from the Lido. "I heard a loud noise," he writes; "it was the sea, and I soon saw it, rolling high waves up the beach, as it drew back. It was midday and ebb-tide. At last, then, I have seen the sea also with my own eyes." A little further on we come upon the short sentence: "Yes, the sea is a wonderful sight." In the Fifth Act of the Second Part of _Faust_, where the sea and navigation are touched on, it is less the sea itself that is in question than the rescuing of land from it and the making of canals. This was all that Goethe had written about the sea.

In Heine's North Sea poems we hear, for the first time in German poetry, the roar of the ocean, with all its freshness and in all its might. Here for the first time we have shells in the sand beneath our feet, and sea-gulls in the air above us. The sea is painted in storm and calm, from the shore and from the ship, by day and by night, with the peace that at times lies over it, and with the madness of the hurricane; we have the sweet day-dreams to which it gives rise, and also the sea-sickness; there arise from its depths and there hover over its expanse a whole company of mythic figures, old and new, old that have been metamorphosed into new, a world of gods and goddesses, Tritons and Oceanides, at times pathetic, more frequently burlesque. And yet there is comparatively little description; it is the poet's own memories, griefs, and hopes that fill these poems. And it is his intense longing to be able to breathe freely that breaks forth in the famous cry with which the ten thousand Greeks, after their long and terrible march, hailed the element that spoke to them of home: "Thalatta! Thalatta!--I salute thee, O eternal sea!"

Amongst these poems are some of Heine's most beautiful and unforgettable. First there is the humorously frivolous idyll _Die Nacht am Strande_ ("Night by the Seashore"); the poet's visit to the pretty fisherman's daughter, with the masterly description of her appearance, as she sits bending over the fire:

"Dass die flackernd rothen Lichter Zauberlieblich wiederstrahlen Auf das glühende Antlitz, Auf die zarte, weisse Schulter, Die rührend hervorlauscht Aus dem groben, grauen Hemde, Und auf die kleine, sorgsame Hand, Die das Unterröckchen fester bindet Um die feine Hüfte."[19]

[19]

Till the flashing, ruddy flame-rays Shine again in magic lustre On her glowing countenance, On the soft and snow-white shoulder Which so touchingly peers out From its coarse grey linen covering, And on the busy little hand Which is fastening the garment That conceals her slender limbs. (Adapted from LELAND.)

Then we come on a poem which is unique in its lyric vigour, _Erklärung_ ("Declaration"), to that Agnes whose name the poet would fain write on the dark vault of heaven with the highest fir of Norway, dipped in the crater of Etna. And there is also the little, reflective poem _Fragen_ ("Questions"), admirable in its pregnant brevity, which gives us an idea of the mood in which Heine conceived the foolhardy idea of writing a "Faust," after Goethe, a plan which he actually did not hesitate to mention to Goethe himself, when he visited him in Weimar. In some of these North Sea poems, and that even when he is belittling and sneering at himself, there is a repellent tone of self-satisfaction. Amongst those which are quite free from it, must be mentioned that masterly piece of pure humour, _Im Hafen_ ("In Harbour"), the immortal fantasy of the Town Cellar of Bremen, in which Heine, whose sobriety was almost equivalent to total abstinence, gives us a most irresistible picture of a clever man's merry carouse.

XIV

HEINE

It is impossible for a northerner of mature years and fairly sound artistic training to study Heinrich Heine's poems without feeling his taste offended by figures and expressions which in Heine's case early became lifeless mannerisms. The Romance nations do not feel this. One actually hears competent critics of Romance nationality compare Heine's lyrics with Goethe's, and give the preference to Heine's as more plastic and more spiritual. To Romance readers Goethe is, as a rule, wanting in transparency; the French say of Heine: _On y voit mieux_. They do not feel that in Goethe's case words always represent things; whereas in Heine's case, expressions are often set pieces, which are inserted to produce a certain poetical effect, but which have no vision, no actuality behind them. Few poets have made such abuse of lily-hands, rose-cheeks, and violet-eyes, these monstrous colour-blotches, in describing female beauty, or of the various attributes of spring--flowers that exhale fragrance, nightingales that sing both day and night--in proclaiming the praises of the lovely month of May. The nightingale in particular becomes under his treatment a purely heraldic bird in the coat-of-arms of love.

In Goethe's case all the words are images, and this is the reason why he requires to employ so little imagery. In Heine's the words are constantly allegories, devoid of perspicuity and of that inward connection which is the logic of poetry. Take as an instance: "Aus meinen Thränen spriessen--vie' blühende Blumen hervor,"[1] where by flowers poems are meant; or: "Sprüh'n einmal vert dächt'ge Funken--aus den Rosen, sorge nie--diese Welt glaubt nicht an Flammen--und sie nimmt's für Poesie,"[2] where we are presented with a skein of images more entangled than those of the notorious old Scandinavian transcriptions of the decadent period in Skaldic poetry--sparks struck out of roses; sparks, which the everyday world will not accept as fire; rose sparks, which are called poetry!

[1]

Up from my tears are growing Fair flowers in many vales. (LELAND)

[2]

If suspicious sparks should issue From the roses--fearless be! This dull world in flames believes not, But believes them poetry. (BOWRING)

What one objects to most in these poems with their allegorical rhetoric is the combination of sentimentality and materialism. Sighs and tears are talked of as if sighs were very loud breaths and tears very tangible substances. We have, for instance: "Und meine Seufzer werden--ein Nachtigallenchor" (And from my sighs go flying, A choir of nightingales), still further materialised by the addition of: "Und vor deinem Fenster soll singen--das Lied der Nachtigall" (And the nightingales at thy window, Shall sing all the summer hours). A still more striking instance is to be found in the typical poem of the lonely tear:--

"Was will die einsame Thräne? Sie trübt mir ja den Blick, Sie blieb aus alten Zeiten In meinem Auge zurück."[3]

[3]

What means this lonely tear-drop Which dims mine eye to-day? It is the last now left me Where once so many lay.

We are initiated into this particular tear's family history and present lonely situation; it had many bright sisters, who now are no more, so that it is left solitary in its eyecorner. It is addressed much as one would address any good old comrade, told to go its way, now that all the others have gone:--

"Du alte, einsame Thräne, Zerfliesse jetzunder auch!"[4]

[4]

Thou tear-drop old and lonely, Do thou, too, pass away!

The sentimentality is so crude that no parody could be more comic than this mournful apostrophe, which the arch-scoffer wrote in all good faith.

Every defect in the artist as a man, comes out in his art. It is always a want of simplicity, of genuine feeling, that produces the sentimental or ostentatious or clap-trap expression. Heine's shortcomings in this way are strongly felt when we compare certain outbursts of his with Goethe's expression of similar feelings.

Take, for example, the poem in which Heine describes himself as the ill-fated Atlas; condemned to bear the whole world of suffering:

"Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt, Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich, Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz! Und jetzo bist du elend."[5]

[5]

Proud heart, 'twas thine own choice, Thou chosest to be happy, infinitely happy, Or infinitely miserable, proud heart! And now thou art miserable.

These are lines one does not forget. But the exclamation of the first line, which expresses a perilous extreme of self-reliance, becomes self-complacency when Heine's stanza is placed alongside of Goethe's simple and grand

"Alles geben die Götter, die Unendlichen, Ihren Lieblingen ganz: Alle Freuden, die unendlichen, Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, Ganz."[6]

[6] What the eternal Gods, give to their favourites, they give without alloy-infinite joy, infinite sorrow--without alloy.

It would be most unreasonable to blame Heine because he employs other and more violent methods than Goethe does--to say, for instance, of a poem like _Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen_ ("A young man loves a maiden"), that Goethe would have shrunk from the grotesqueness of the bitter, desperate ending: "Und wem sie just passieret, Dem bricht das Herz entzwei" (And he to whom it happens, It breaks his heart in two). It would have been abhorrent to him for much the same reason that it would have been abhorrent to an old Greek. What is simply new, simply _modern_ in the feeling, is justifiable. Even the grotesqueness is in this case artistically led up to.

But at times the grotesque grimace is all that is left of the modern element. Take that famous poem: _Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig_ ("My heart, my heart is heavy"). It contains an admirable description of a wide landscape, viewed from the height of the old bastion. We see the blue town moat, with a boy fishing from a boat, and away on the other side of the moat, small and clear, we see summer-houses and gardens, men and oxen, meadows and woods, girls bleaching clothes, a turning mill-wheel sending out diamond dust, and at the foot of the old grey tower a sentry-box, with the sentry walking up and down, his gun flashing in the sunlight. H. C. Andersen, writing of this poem, remarks, "And the end is so _affecting_: 'Ich wollt', er schösse mich todt'" (I wish he would shoot me dead). Affecting? No. Startling; for nothing has prepared us for it. The ejaculation is possibly not entirely insincere; but it is so nervous that it is practically meaningless; it is in so far untruthful, that these big words only express a momentary mood, not a serious, determined desire.

Goethe has expressed, if not longing for death, at least reconciliation to the idea of death, in the famous, immortal lines:

"Ueber allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh. In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch. Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch."[7]

[7]

O'er all the hill tops Is quiet now, In all the tree tops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees. Wait; soon like these Thou too shalt rest. (LONGFELLOW)

It is unnecessary to direct attention to the contrast between the two poet-natures which is revealed by a comparison of this melody in words with Heine's discord; but note, from the purely artistic point of view, how marvellously in keeping all the different parts of the little poem are. It is one breath from the first word to the last: The calm of evening over the forest and in the human soul, the cessation of all desire, the resolution of all discords, the heart, great and tender, feeling itself one with all nature.

Alongside of this perfection, the defects of Heine's lyric effect-style, in its occasional inartistic application, show up only too glaringly. It is akin, in its weaknesses, to the allegorising, fantastic style of the German Romanticists, from whom Heine, the poet, is lineally descended. And yet he is as far from being a genuine Romanticist as he is from being what some consider him, a genuine modern realist.

He calls his _Atta Troll_ the last free forest ditty of Romance. Others have, in unfriendly criticism, called his poetry the decomposition process of Romance. "I wrote _Atta Troll_" he says, "for my own amusement, in the whimsical dream-style that prevailed in that Romantic school in which I passed the pleasantest years of my youth, and ended up by thrashing the schoolmaster." But in this case the Romanticism is really only the rich, glittering garment, in which the modern spirit masques, and which it finally throws off. None of the elements of Romance are wanting--animals talk, bears exchange ideas, we listen to a pug-dog's confidences, and we are conducted into a legendary region, the valley of Roncesvalles. Not even the blue flower is wanting:

"Ronceval, du edles Thal, Wenn ich deinen Namen höre, Bebt und duftet mir im Herzen Die verscholl'ne blaue Blume."[8]

[8]

Ronceval, thou noble valley! Whensoe 'er I hear thy name, That blue flower so long departed O'er my spirit sheds its fragrance. (BOWRING)

The dream-world reveals itself to us; great spirit eyes look into ours. The poet, with his guide, goes hunting in the Pyrenees. This guide has an old mother, who is reputed to be a witch. We are introduced into the witch's hovel, with the stuffed birds, the ghost-like vultures, and at night bears and ghosts perform a burlesque and weird dance.

The spirit as well as the style of this poem is Romantic to a certain point; there are declamations against the clumsy, didactic poetry of the day, against utilitarianism as applied to poetry, and there is literary satire (of Freiligrath, Karl Mayer, Gustav Pfizer) in the style favoured by the Romanticists.

And yet there is sedulous realism in the representation of localities and circumstances. Strictly speaking, the poem is simply an account of a stay which Heine and a young French lady friend make at Cauterets in the Pyrenees, where they see a bear dance in the market-place. The bear escapes from his master, takes flight to the mountains, where he is hunted down, shot, and flayed by Laskaro, the guide. The poet's Juliette gets the skin to lay on the floor by her bed; and Heine gives us the superfluous information that many a night he himself has stood bare-footed on this same skin.

So the tale is realistic enough. The details of the journey too are faithfully reproduced. We get the impression that Heine's description of the little mountain town up to which he clambered, and where the children danced in a circle to the accompaniment of their own singing, exactly corresponds with what he saw and heard. Even the refrain of the song: _Girofflino, Girofflette_, is doubtless the real one.

Nevertheless the finest, most powerful parts of this poem are not in the least realistic. They are visions. And the finest vision is that in which by night from the window of the cottage the poet watches the whole Wild Hunt tear three times round the horizon. He never did finer figure-painting than the passage in which we follow the shining figures across the darkness of the night sky--Diana, the fairy Abunde, and the beautiful Herodias, in wild wantonness playing at ball with the Baptist's bloody head.

A parallel may be drawn between Heine's art and that of Rembrandt. There is nothing academic about either of them; both bear the distinct stamp of modernity. But when we call Heine a great realistic poet, we make an assertion of the same qualified truth as when we call Rembrandt the great colourist. Rembrandt cannot be said to be one of the greatest colour-realists, for the reason that several painters surpass him in the power of reproducing local colour and its exact value, and of showing the actual form and colour of an object seen in half darkness. It is not colour, but light, that is the main thing with Rembrandt.[9] To him light is life; the battle of life is the battle of light, and the tragedy of life is the tragedy of light, struggling and dying in damp and darkness. To indicate in what his real greatness as a painter lies, he ought rather to be called a luminist (an expression of Fromentin's) than a colourist, if by luminist we understand an artist whose specialty is the apprehension and treatment of light. He sometimes sacrifices drawing, even painting, in his eagerness to produce some effect of light. Think, for example, of the badly painted corpse in the _Lesson in Anatomy_. But it is exactly what makes him less successful than the realists in tasks requiring absolute truthfulness--the painting of hands, the exact reproduction of stuffs--that makes him so great when he causes light to express what it alone indicates to him, the inner life, the world of waking visions.

[9] _Cf_. Fromentin: _Les maîtres d'autrefois_.

Something similar to this is the case with Heine. How few real figures this great poet has bequeathed to us! Those who would measure his deserts by what he has done in this way find themselves obliged to fall back upon that crude, grotesque sketch of an old Jew servant, Hyacinth, as his best character.

No, if Heine is to be judged by his pictures of real life, many an inferior poet surpasses him.

But think of his visions, of the world of waking dreams in his poems and in his prose! As a rule he starts closer to earth than other poets, but presently, above the darkness of earth a gleaming vision appears--and disappears.

This is felt even in such small poems as the one already referred to as containing the talk in the fisherman's cottage about the Ganges and Lapland.

Think too of the way in which Heine calls up the image of Napoleon before his readers. In the _Two Grenadiers_ it has the effect of a vision. The words, "Dann reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab" ('Tis my Emperor riding, right over my grave), are like a revelation in the darkness of night, illuminated by the glitter of swords. In the equally admirable description in the _Reisebilder_, the vision is conjured up in the form of a recollection of childhood.

Or remember how Heine brings the image of Jesus before us. In the poem _Frieden_ ("Peace") he sees him, robed in glittering white, striding over the waves. In _Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_ ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), he paints a grey, winter morning on the Paderborn heath; when the mist rises, he sees by the side of the road, in the dawning light, a wooden crucifix with the image of the great enthusiast, who desired to save mankind, and now hangs there "as a warning to others."

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

[10]

A sorry trick they played thee indeed, The lords of the council stately. (BOWRING)

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

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

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

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

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

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