Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (606 page)

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.”

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.” 

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
.”