Part 13
Still finer is the group of eight poems which was the result of his stay at Cuxhaven. _Wir sassen am Fischerhause_ is a little marvel of artistic ability--that talk with the girls, sitting outside the fisherman's hut, in which far-off India and Ultima Thule are described in a few words: "By the Ganges all is brightness and fragrance, giant trees blossom, and beautiful, tranquil men and women kneel to the lotus flowers. In Lapland the people are dirty and small; their heads are flat and their mouths are wide; they cower round the fire, roast fish, and screech and scream."
Then there are merry poems, treating of light characters like the girl whom he searches for through the whole town and finds in a fashionable hotel, and the girl in whose heart the blue hussars are quartered.
And lastly, there are single epigrammatic verses, which every one now knows by heart, but which, at the time they appeared, gave great offence and made enemies for their author. Especially noteworthy is the famous:
"Selten habt ihr mich verstanden, Selten auch verstand ich euch, Nur wenn wir im Koth uns fanden, So verstanden wir uns gleich."[15]
[15]
Little by thee comprehended, Little knew I thee, good brother; When we in the mud descended Soon we understood each other. (LELAND.)
It is incomprehensible that this verse should ever have been regarded as a confession of unclean instincts. It only applies to those who find their way straight to any exceptionable or indecent passage in a book, as the sow finds her way to the mire, and stops there. That it never occurred to Heine that he was making any admission of having desired to appeal to his reader's sensual instincts or cynic tendencies is best proved by the poem which immediately follows on the lines in question, the one beginning:
"Doch die Kastraten klagten, Als ich meine Stimm' erhob; Sie klagten und sie sagten: Ich sänge viel zu grob."[16]
[16]
How the eunuchs were complaining At the roughness of my song! Complaining and explaining That my voice was much too strong. (LELAND.)
He could not have declared more unmistakably that, where he is straightforward, plain-spoken, or cynical, it is only the result of his modern tendency to realistic truthfulness, of his antipathy to romantic embellishment, and of his instinctive inclination to face the bitter truth of life.
And there is quite as little justification for the general complaint of what Julian Schmidt has called the low-mindedness of Heine's sudden leaps from the sublime to the sordid. We have a typical instance of these sudden changes of style and mood in the poem _Frieden_ ("Peace"), one of the group of North Sea poems, in which Heine, during a calm at sea, beholds the giant form of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, striding over sea and land. He is clothed in white; his head touches the clouds; the heart in his breast is the sun, the red, flaming sun, and this sun-heart sheds its illuminating, warming rays over land and sea. Then there is a sudden revulsion of mood. Heine calls to mind a miserable, canting fellow in Berlin, weak in mind and body, strong in faith--what would not _he_ give to be able to hit upon such pious imagery, by means of which he might ingratiate himself with those in power and perhaps attain to the position of court-councillor in the pious town on the Spree--what dreams he would have of a hundred thalers rise in salary!
Heine most undoubtedly spoiled the effect of his beautiful vision. He broke up his poem, shattered its melody with grotesque discords; but yet it is easy to understand that in the case of a poet with his experience of modern life, the second vision was a perfectly natural sequel to the first; and in any case it is unjustifiable to speak of this connection of ideas, this "idea-leap," as a symptom of low-mindedness. In this connection Wilhelm Bölsche makes the true and pertinent observation that no one has accused Goethe of low-mindedness because he allows the gibes of Mephistopheles to follow directly upon Faust's confession of faith to Gretchen (_Heinrich Heine_, p. 106). And yet the only difference is that in _Faust_ the pathos and the ribaldry are put into the mouths of two people, whereas in the lyric poem the poet makes himself directly responsible for both.
Almost at the end of this collection (_Heimkehr_), we come upon a couple of poems which are distinguished by depth of feeling and perfection of form. The particular arrangement of their rhymes would distinguish them from the majority of the small poems, if nothing else did, as it is one we seldom meet with in Heine. The first, _Dämmernd liegt der Sommerabend_ ("Summer eve with day is striving"), which describes the beautiful elf-maiden bathing in the river by moonlight, has the diaphanous haze of a Corot landscape. The rhythmic treatment of the second gives it a unique place in the collection. It is the pathetic, fantastic:
"Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, Das Leben ist der schwüle Tag. Es dunkelt schon, mich schläfert, Der Tag hat mich müd gemacht.
Über mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum, Drin singt die junge Nachtigall; Sie singt von lauter Liebe, Ich hör' es sogar im Traum."[17]
[17]
Death is a cool and pleasant night, Life is a sultry day. 'Tis growing dark-I'm weary, For day has tired me with his light.
Over my bed a fair tree gleams, And in it sits a nightingale: She sings of naught save love, I hear it even in dreams. (LELAND.)
The next division of the _Buch der Lieder, Aus der Harzreise_ (1824), contains the delightful mountain-rhymes conceived in the course of a walking tour which Heine took by way of refreshment after his law studies in Göttingen. Here we have charming pictures of mountain scenery and peasant life, and a tone of witty, bold self-laudation, kept up with irresistible audacity. The beautiful and witty poem about the knight of the Holy Spirit was doubtless suggested by the catechising scene in _Faust_, but has an originality of its own which has made it popular all the world over.
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.