Part 14

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.

To make the central objects stand out from the shadow or half-darkness in which they are concealed; to make light, natural light, produce a ghostly, supernatural effect by conjuring it forth from a sea of dark shadow-waves, bringing it flickering or flaring out of half-darkness; to make darkness penetrable, half-darkness transparent--this is Rembrandt's art.

Heine's, which is closely related, consists in gradually, imperceptibly, conjuring forth out of the world of reality, and back into it again, a perfectly modern, fantastic dreamworld.

At times the vision is in a full blaze of light, and the reality hidden in black darkness; but presently the vision fades, and the reality gradually emerges into the light.

XV

HEINE AND GOETHE

It has already been mentioned that Heine, when a student in Bonn, conceived an enthusiastic admiration for the founder of the Romantic school. A. W. Schlegel's personality was as attractive to him as his teaching. In Schlegel, Heine admired the man who had guided German poetry from artificiality to truth. He was dazzled, too, by the fashionable professor's aristocratic bearing, his knowledge of the world, his acquaintance with the good society and famous people of the day.

He was also touched by the kindly interest which Schlegel showed in himself and his first literary efforts. It was to Schlegel that he was indebted for his early initiation into the secrets of metrical art, and for something more valuable still, confidence in his own powers and his future.

In Heine's first prose article, that on Romanticism, written in 1820, he expresses his gratitude and makes his Romantic confession of faith in the same breath. He protests against the idea of Romanticism being "a mixture of Spanish enamel, Scotch mists, and Italian jingle"; no, Romantic poetry ought not to be obscure and vague; its images may be as plastic in contour as those of classic poetry. "Hence it is," he writes, "that our two greatest Romanticists, Goethe and A. W. Schlegel, are at the same time our greatest plastic artists." And he names Goethe's _Faust_ and Schlegel's _Rome_ in the same breath, as models of plastic outline, concluding pathetically: "O, that those who love to call themselves Schlegelians would lay this to heart!" This passage should be noted by those whose only knowledge of Heine's connection with Schlegel is derived from the low attack on the latter's private life in _Die Romantische Schule_. It was to A. W. Schlegel, moreover, that Heine addressed his three first sonnets. In the earliest he thanks him for his personal kindness, and declares his own great indebtedness to him; in the second he extols him for the service which he has rendered to German poetry by banishing that caricature in hoop and patches which in his day figured as the Muse; in the third he praises him for his introduction of English, Spanish, early German, Italian, and Indian poetry into modern German literature. The tone is enthusiastic:

"Der schlimmste Wurm: des Zweifels Dolchgedanken, Das schlimmste Gift: an eigner Kraft verzagen, Das wollt' mir fast des Lebens Mark zernagen; Ich war ein Reis, dem seine Stützen sanken.

Da mochtest du das arme Reis beklagen, An deinem güt'gen Wort lässt du es ranken, Und dir, mein hoher Meister, soll ich's danken, Wird einst das schwache Reislein Blüthen tragen," &c.[1]

[1] The most dangerous worm--doubt, with its dagger tooth; the most deadly poison--distrust of one's own powers, were eating away my life; I was a sapling bereft of its supports.

Thou hadst pity on the poor sapling, thou gavest it the support of encouraging word; if ever the weak sapling blossoms, thine, great master, be the praise.

It is under this first Romantic influence that Heine writes his earliest, purely Romantic poems in archaistic style, verses like:

"Die du bist so schön und rein, Wunnevolles Magedein, Deinem Dienste ganz allein Möcht' ich wohl mein Leben weihn.

Deine süssen Aeugelein Glänzen mild wie Mondenschein, Helle Rosenlichter streun Deine rothen Wängelein."

This reminds us forcibly of Tieck's earliest verses, those introduced into his tales. In the one little poem from which these stanzas are taken, we come upon Wunne, Magedein, Aeugelein, Wängelein, Mündchen, weiland, a whole string of diminutives and archaisms.

Heine's next model was a genial, true poet, who died in 1827, at the early age of thirty-one--Wilhelm Müller, the author of the _Müllerlieder_, particularly well known from Schubert's musical setting, and of the _Griechenlieder_, which were equally admired in their day. A son of Wilhelm Müller's is the well-known German-English philologist, Max Müller, whose novel, _Deutsche Liebe_, the story of the tender love of a young German savant for a sickly, bedridden princess, is said to be based on events in his father's life.

On the 7th of June 1826, Heine writes to Müller: "I am magnanimous enough to confess frankly that the resemblance of my little Intermezzo metre [the one most frequently employed by Heine] to your usual metre is not purely accidental; the secret of its cadence was in all probability learned from your verses." He goes on to explain that he had early felt the influence of the German popular ballad and song, and that at Bonn, Schlegel had initiated him into the art of verses; "but," he adds, "it is in your verse that I seem for the first time to have found the clear ring, the true simplicity, which I have always aimed at. How clear, how simple your poems are, and they are one and all popular poems. In mine only the form is popular; the ideas are those of conventional society."

It was from Müller that Heine first learned how to evolve new popular forms out of the old. To behold as it were with our own eyes the birth and growth of Heine's style, we only need to set certain of his verses alongside of Müller's.

Müller writes:

"Wir sassen so traulich beisammen Im kühlen Erlendach, Wir schauten so traulich zusammen Hinab in den rieselnden Bach."

And Heine:

"Wir sassen am Fischerhause Und schauten nach der See, Die Abendnebel kamen Und stiegen in die Höh'."

How closely this last stanza resembles such a stanza of Müller's as:

"Die Abendnebel sinken Hernieder kalt und schwer, Und Todesengel schweben In ihren Dampf umher."[2]

[2] Wilhelm Müller: _Gedichte_, i. p. 26; "Thränenregen," p. 194; "Dasselbe noch einmal."

These are the introductory lines of a long, beautiful poem called _Hirtenbiwouak in der römischen Campagna_, the most important part of which is the shepherd's song of longing for his sweetheart. How much Heine must have learned from such a verse as that which describes the young girl:

"Darunter sitzt ein Mädchen, Die Spindel in der Hand, Und spinnt und sinnt und schauet Herab in's eb'ne Land."

We do not find Wilhelm Müller marring the impression of his idyll by any sudden revulsion of mood; there is nothing of the devil in him; the gentle andante is maintained to the end of the piece. But it is not in this that the principal difference between his style and Heine's lies; for Heine at times retains his tranquil mood throughout a whole poem. The essential difference is the extraordinary condensation of Heine's style, as compared with Müller's. He gives in one verse, at most two, what the other requires ten to express.

The novelty in his lyric style is its unparalleled condensation. The poems are all epitomes. They present us with a spiced, fragrant essence of passion, experience, bitterness, mockery, wit, emotion, and fancy; an essence of poetry and prose in combination. Psychologists talk of a condensation of thought;[3] in comparison with the pupil's thought, the master's is condensed. In the history of all mechanism, increasing condensation is to be observed. Once there were only church clocks; now people carry clocks in their pockets. That is to say, the mechanism which once required for its wheels and springs the space provided by a church clock, now finds room enough in a watch. In like manner, many an old tragedy does not contain more thoughts or more feeling than a Heine poem of two or three verses.

[3] Lazarus: _Das Leben der Seele_, 2nd edition, p. 229.

Heine's short stanza has, then, two advantages over Wilhelm Müllers--more passion, and much greater condensation of style.

In his favourite short iambic metre, Heine is influenced by Wilhelm Müller, in his trochees he resembles another Romantic, far more Romantic poet, Clemens Brentano. In Heine's _Romancero_ there are some curious correspondences with Brentano's _Romanzen vom Rosenkranze_ ("Romances of the Rosary"). These latter were written before _Romancero_, but as they were not published till 1853, Heine cannot possibly have been influenced by them.

In the second of the _Rosary Romances_ we read of the hero, Cosmo, that:

"Aus dem Wasserspiegel mahnt Ihn des Alters ernste Bote: Du wirst bald die Schuld bezahlen, Spricht des Hauptes Silberlocke."[4]

[4] The solemn messengers of age, the white locks of the man who gazes at him from the water-mirror, cry: Soon thou must pay thy debt.

In Heine's posthumous poem _Bimini_, one of the divisions begins:

"Einsam auf dem Strand von Cuba, Vor dem stillen Wasserspiegel, Steht ein Mensch und er betrachtet In der Flut sein Konterfei.

Eben nicht mit sonderlichem Wohlgefallen scheint der Greis In dem Wasser zu betrachten Sein bekümmert Spiegelbildniss."[5]

[5]

On the shore of Cuba's island Stands an old man solitary, Gazing at his own reflection In the tranquil water-mirror.

Not with any special pleasure Does the sad and aged man See beneath him in the water His own image, sorrowful.

Metre, situation, idea are identical in the two passages.

There is also a certain resemblance between the tale of a mystery-book in the Ninth Romance of the Rosary and the story of the beautiful casket in Heine's poem of _Jehuda ben Halevy_.[6] Only that Brentano's story of the passing of the mystery-book from hand to hand, through many ages, merely opens up to us a Romantic wonder-world, whereas Heine's tale of the wanderings of the casket is at the same time a jest at the vicissitudes of life: the pearls first belong to Smerdis, who gives them to Atossa, then to the great Alexander, who gives them to Thais, then in course of time to Cleopatra, to a Moorish sultan, to the regalia of Castille, and to the Baroness Solomon Rothschild, in a compliment to whom the life-history of the casket terminates.

[6] _Cf_. Eduard Grisebach; _Die deutsche Litteratur_, p. 254, &c.; where, however, a definite influence is insisted on, regardless of Heine's priority.

It is quite certain that Heine is indebted to Clemens Brentano for the subject of what in Germany is the best known and most sung of all his songs, the song of _Lorelei_, "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten."

As far back as 1802 Brentano had published, in his _Godwi,_ a ballad entitled "Lorelei." It is not the story of a siren, but of a young girl of Bacharach on the Rhine, who was so beautiful that all men fell in love with her. She was accused of witchcraft. But the bishop, who ought to have condemned her to be burned, fell in love with her himself. She desires to die, for the one man she loves will have nothing to say to her and has gone away; so, on her way to the convent to which the bishop is sending her, she climbs a high cliff, Lurelei (Ley means slate-rock), and in despairing longing for her beloved, throws herself into the Rhine.

This ballad suggested to a writer called Nikolaus Vogt the fabrication of a Rhine legend, which he published in 1811, passing it off as an old one. In it Lorelei, on her way to the convent, sees the man of her heart sail past her on the Rhine, and throws herself from the cliff in grief at having failed to win him. Three of her adorers follow her to a watery grave. Hence a rock in that neighbourhood is known by the name of the Dreiritterstein (Rock of the Three Knights). The last incident was perhaps suggested by the ending of Brentano's poem:

"Wer hat dies' Lied gesungen? Ein Schiffer auf dem Rhein. Und immer hat geklungen Vom hohen Felsenstein: Lore Lay! Lore Lay! Lore Lay! Als wären es unser Drei."[7]

[7] Who was it sang this song? A boatman on the Rhine. And still we heard the cry, from the high cliff overhead: "Lore Lay! Lore Lay! Lore Lay!" Me-seemed that we were three.

From this fabricated legend a certain Count Loeben, in 1821, took the theme for a poem, _Lorelei_,[8] in which the young girl who drowns herself is transformed into a mermaid, whose singing lures into the depths those who are sailing past:

"Da wo der Mondschein blitzet Um's hohe Felsgestein, Das Zauberfräulein sitzet Und schauet auf den Rhein.

Es schauet herüber, hinüber, Es schauet hinab, hinauf, Die Schifflein ziehen vorüber, Lieb' Knabe, sieh nicht auf!

Sie singt dir hold am Ohre, Sie blickt dich thöricht an, Sie ist die schöne Lore, Sie hat dir's angethan," &c.[9]

[8] A. Strodtmann: H. Heine's _Leben und Werke_, 2nd edition, i. 696.

[9] Where the moonlight glitters on the lofty cliff, there the magic-maiden sits, and gazes on the Rhine. She looks across the stream, looks up the stream and down; softly the boats glide past-look not on her, O youth! She sings so sweetly in your ear, she looks at you bewitchingly; she is the lovely Lore, and in her spells you're caught.

Now take Heine's world-famed poem, first a students' song, then a popular song, melting and thrilling with the tender harmony of melody and words. The direct imitation is unmistakable. The theme is the same, the metre is the same, even some of the rhymes are the same: "blitzet--sitzet;" instead of "an--gethan, Kahn--gethan." But what a difference! Feeling has been added. First the personal starting-point, the inexplicable melancholy of the narrator and his inability to banish the old legend from his thoughts, then the instantaneous, clear, definite picture of the landscape:

"Die Luft ist kühl, und es dunkelt, Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein, Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt Im Abendsonnenschein.

Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet Dort oben wunderbar, Ihr gold'nes Geschmeide blitzet, Sie kämmt ihr goldenes Haar."[10]

[10]

The cool air darkens, and listen, How softly flows the Rhine! The mountain peaks still glisten Where the evening sunbeams shine.

The fairest maid sits dreaming In radiant beauty there. Her gold and her jewels are gleaming, She combeth her golden hair. (E. LAZARUS.)

And something more has been added--that element of dæmonic passion which the earlier manipulators of the theme were unable to communicate to it. Heine here represents an elemental luring power, akin to that delineated with simpler means and more powerful effect by Goethe in _Der Fischer_. But Goethe, in conformity with his nature, describes a tranquil, enchanting ensnarement; Heine, in conformity with his, an instantaneous, irresistible, maddening bewitchment.

A still more profound insight into Heine's art, in the making, and into the manner in which his fancy deals with a theme, is perhaps to be gained by observing how he makes use of a subject which offers itself to him in prose.

In Henri Beyle's book, _De l'amour_, he evidently found the three following anecdotes, translated from the Arabic. 1. Sahid ben Agba one day asked an Arab: "Of what tribe art thou?" "Of that tribe," answered the Arabian, "in which men die when they love." "Then thou art of the tribe of Asra?" "Yea, verily, by the Lord of Kaaba!" "Whence comes it that ye love thus?" "Our women are beautiful, and our young men chaste." 2. A man once asked Arua ben Hezam of the tribe of Asra: "Is it true that ye love with a tenderness surpassing that of all other men?" "It is true," answered Arua. "Thirty young men of my tribe have I seen carried off by death, whose only sickness was that of love." 3. An Arab of the tribe Beni-Fazarat said one day to an Arab of the tribe Beni-Asra: "Ye think that to die of love is a sweet and noble death; whereas it is nought but weakness and foolishness." "Thou would'st not speak so," answered the other, "had'st thou seen the great dark, long-lashed eyes of our veiled women, seen their teeth gleam between their brown lips when they smile."

Here we have the origin of Heine's famous _Der Asra_: "Täglich ging die wunderschöne." He first paints the place for us--the garden with the fountain whose white waters flash; then he shows us the slave, standing there every day when the sultan's daughter comes to walk, paler every day; then he tells how the princess one evening closely questions the slave: "I would know thy name, thy race, thy family...":

"Und der Sklave sprach: 'ich heisse Mohamet, ich bin aus Yemen Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra, Welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.'"[11]

[11]

Spake the youthful slave, "My name is Mahomet, I come from Yemen; And by birth I am an Asra, One who dieth when he loves." (E. LAZARUS.)