Part 17
This, as already mentioned, happens more especially in _Deutschland_. Observe with what care and skill Heine prepares for the fantastic description of Barbarossa's subterranean dwelling-place in the Kyffhäuser. First he introduces the refrain of an old legendary ballad: "Sonne, du klagende Flamme!" (Sun, thou accusing flame!) with a sketch of the legend which tells how the sun acted as the accuser of the murderer of a young maiden; then he describes the good old nurse who sang this ballad and told many an entrancing tale--the tale of the princess disguised as a goose-herd, the tale of the emperor who lived deep down in the earth below the mountain; this second he relates at length--and presently all else is forgotten; we see Barbarossa with his mail-clad followers, we hear him call them to horse, to arms, to battle, to avenge the wrong which the murderers have done to the golden-haired Germania. Then we return to the mood of the nursery ballad, and to its refrain: "Sonne! du klagende Flamme!" now chanted with enthusiasm and rejoicing. There is an Aristophanic _verve_ in this poetic description of the old arsenal, the empty suits of armour, the faded flags, the sleeping soldiers, and then the sudden revulsion, the appeal to awakening power, the supplication that the Middle Ages may return again, as being infinitely preferable to the sanctimonious Prussia of the day, with her mixture of Gothic folly and modern falsehood. The two following cantos, which contain a further description of the interior of the mountain, and conversations with Barbarossa, take the form of an account of a dream which the poet had while travelling at night in the stage-coach.
The anti-Prussian rhapsody in the inn at Minden is prepared for in the same manner. Heine wants to summon forth the Prussian eagle, and to pluck him and shoot him. If Aristophanes had had the same designs, he would have introduced the eagle without more ado. Heine goes to work in his roundabout way. In the act of falling asleep he dreams that the red bed-curtain tassel above his head turns into an eagle with feathers and claws, which threatens to tear the liver out of his breast, and which he taunts with bitter hatred.
In a few single instances Heine's artistic procedure is bolder, more like that of the great Greek. One of these is the splendid harangue to the wolves at night in the Teutoburgerwald. At midnight the traveller hears them howling round his carriage, which has lost a wheel. He comes out and makes a speech to the savage brutes:
"Mitwölfe, ich bin glücklich, heut' In eurer Mitte zu weilen, Wo so viel' edle Gemüther mir Mit Liebe entgegen heulen."[6]
[6]
Brother wolves! it gives me great pleasure to-day To tarry awhile midst your growling, Where so many noble spirits have met, Around me lovingly howling. (BOWRING)
And the speech is a humorous imitation of those which great men are in the habit of making on such occasions: This is an hour which to him will be ever memorable. They lie who say that he has joined the dogs; the idea of becoming court-councillor to the lambs has never even occurred to him. From time to time he has dressed himself in a sheepskin, but only for the sake of the warmth; he is and always will be a wolf.
In the scene between the poet and the strapping woman with the mural crown who represents Hamburg, we have, as Heine himself informs us, a direct imitation of the wedding of Peithetaerus and Basileia in _The Birds_. It is wanton and boyishly frolicsome; its licentiousness is really more offensive than that of similar passages in Aristophanes, who never appears in his own plays except in defence of himself as a poet. Heine does not go the same length as Aristophanes, but he is more personal.
In _Atta Troll_ the parallel between the two poets is still more obvious. Here Heine's imagination has freer play, because the hero is not a man, but a bear. There is fine fancy in the passage where the bear, after his flight, is described dancing for his cubs in the moonlight. There is inimitable humour in his declamation against the rights of man, and in his boast of the more ancient rights of bears, which recalls the charming parabasis in _The Birds_, in which it is established that the bird world is the oldest: Everything proceeds from the original egg, the egg of Night, Love first of all, and the birds are children of Love. Atta Troll's pride in the animal world is most amusing, especially so because Heine manages to insinuate into the bear's utterances sarcastic hits at persons whom he himself wishes to depreciate--Freiligrath, for instance, whose popular but foolish poem, _Löwenritt_, and infelicitous _Mohrenkönig_ had roused his mirthful derision:
"Giebt es nicht gelehrte Hunde? Und auch Pferde, welche rechnen? . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schreiben Esel nicht Kritiken? Spielen Affen nicht Komödie? . . . . . . . . . . . . . Singen nicht die Nachtigallen? Ist der Freiligrath kein Dichter? Wer besäng' den Löwen besser? Als sein Landsmann, das Kamel?"[7]
7:
Are there not such things as learned Dogs, and horses too, who reckon? . . . . . . . . Write not asses criticisms? Are not apes all good comedians? . . . . . . . . Are not nightingales good singers? And is Freiligrath no poet? Who can sing of lions better Than their countryman, the camel?[*] (BOWRING)
[*]In German slang "camel" is equivalent to "blockhead."
A good deal of what the bear says, sounds like satire on foolish communistic democracy. He holds forth volubly against property--bears are born without pockets, but men have pockets and stuff them; and discourses eagerly on equality:
"Strenge Gleichheit! Jeder Esel Sei befugt zum höchsten Staatsamt, Und der Löwe soll dagegen Mit dem Sack zur Mühle traben."[8]
[8]
Strict equality! Each donkey Be entitled to high office; On the other hand, the lion Carry to the mill the sack. (BOWRING)
But on the whole it is harmless, stingless satire, fantastical banter alike of the clerical party and communists, misanthropes and revolutionists, cosmopolitans and patriots--for the bear speaks like them all in turn. A very wonderful passage is Atta Troll's sermon against atheism and its development from his deism, the passage beginning:
"Hüte dich vor Menschendenkart, Sie verdirbt dir Leib und Seele; Unter allen Menschen giebt es Keinen ordentlichen Menschen."[9]
[9]
Guard against man's ways of thinking, They destroy both soul and body; 'Mongst all men there's no such thing as Any good and decent man. (BOWRING)
There is a gay profundity in the warning against Feuerbach and Bauer, and there is wit, as brilliant as Voltaire's, but richer, and warmer, in the description of the creative deity:
"Droben in dem Sternenzelte, Auf dem gold'nen Herrscherstuhle, Weltregierend, majestätisch, Sitzt ein kolossaler Eisbär" &c.[10]
[10]
In yon starry bright pavilion, On the golden seat of power, World-directing and majestic, Sits a mighty polar-bear. (BOWRING)
What humour there is in the description of the bear-saints who dance before his throne!
The bear gives us something of the phraseology of all the different
## parties in turn, but it is the bigoted Teuton that he chiefly favours;
it is he who is most severely satirised. The sleek bear-damsels remind us of a German pastor's daughters; the youngest cub turns somersaults exactly like Massmann, and is, like him, the product of home education, has never been able to learn Greek or Latin, or any language but his mother-tongue.
By strange, fantastic detours Heine invariably brings his reader back to the realities of his native land.
Aristophanic, in this respect, is the passage in which, when it rains, the cry is heard: "Six-and-thirty kings for an umbrella!" and again, when shelter is reached: "Six-and-thirty kings for a warm dressing-gown!"
And absolutely Aristophanic is the suppressed passage, in which the bird Hut-Hut tells how Solomon and Balkis ask each other riddles in the realm of shades, riddles like:
"Wer ist wohl der grösste Lump Unter allen deutschen Lumpen; Die in allen sechs und dreissig Deutschen Bundesstaaten leben?"[11]
[11]
Who, think you, is the paltriest wight Amongst the crowd of worthless fellows In all the different States of Germany, Which are in number six-and-thirty?
Balkis, to whom the question is put, sends secret messengers to make inquiry in every country and state in Germany, but each time she informs Solomon of the discovery of a specially contemptible wretch, he answers:
"Kind! es giebt noch einen grösser'n! (Child! there is a worse one still!)
And it is explained to us as a peculiarity of Germany, that as often as we imagine we have discovered her most despicable character, one still more despicable makes his appearance. There is no progress so certain as the progress in general contemptibility. It was only yesterday that X. appeared to be the sorriest knave, to-day he is not to be named in comparison with N. N. Heine must have felt that he had plentiful stores of invention to draw upon, else he would hardly, in his final revision of the poem, have rejected this means of satirising his opponents, one by one, in the most amusing manner.
In purely literary satire, too, Heine's methods have a distinct resemblance to those of Aristophanes. An example of this is the hit in _Atta Troll_ at the Swabian school of poets--the cat in the witch's cottage, which is a bewitched Swabian poet, who will turn into a man again when a pure maiden can read Gustav Pfizer's poems on New Year's eve without falling asleep. Another example is the satire in the same poem on the following rather ridiculous lines of Freiligrath's _Der Mohrenfürst_ (The Moorish Prince) with their far-fetched simile:
"Aus dem schimmernd weissen Zelte hervor Tritt der schlachtgerüstete fürstliche Mohr; So tritt aus schimmernder Wolken Thor Der Mond, der verfinsterte, dunkle, hervor."[12]
[12] From the glistening white tent the royal Moor issues forth, armed for the fray; even as the moon, gloomy and dark, issues from the glistening gate-way of the clouds.
It is a poem about a negro king, who is taken prisoner, brought to Europe, and made to play the drum outside a circus; while doing so he thinks of his former greatness, and beats his drum to pieces. The idea of the black man at the opening of the tent resembling the moon appearing through the clouds is undoubtedly comical.
In _Atta Troll_ the red tongue hangs out of the bear's black jaws as the moon shows herself through white clouds. And towards the end of the poem Heine tells us how, in the Jardin des Plantes, he makes acquaintance with a negro caretaker, who confides to him that he is Freiligrath's negro king, that he has married a white Alsatian cook, whose feet remind him of the feet of the elephants in his native land, and whose French sounds to him like the negro tongue. She feeds him so well that he has developed a little round black stomach, which shows itself through the opening of his shirt like a black moon, appearing from behind white clouds.
And there is something especially Aristophanic in the recklessly brutal satire upon Platen in the second part of the _Reisebilder_. Certain amusing artifices in their literary warfare are common to the Greek and the German comic poet. In _The Frogs_, in the contest between Æschylus and Euripides (a poet whom Aristophanes hates), Æschylus tacks a refrain, equivalent to "spoiled his verse," to everything that Euripides recites. In the _Reisebilder_ Heine revenges himself by making Hyacinth alternately tack the words _von vorn_ (from the front) and _von hinten_ (from behind) to the end of Platen's lines, thereby maliciously perverting their meaning.
The Aristophanic comedy resembles the majestic frescoes that cover the interior of some great dome; to compare Heine's comic writings with those of Aristophanes, is to compare pictures carefully painted on the easel with such frescoes. In the Greek comedies there is the light and space of the Sistine Chapel; in them, as in the frescoes of Michael Angelo, everything is large, sweeping, strong; the creation of a mind that sets recognised rules at defiance by the vehemence of its lyric emotion, the audacity of its fore-shortening, and the force of its allegory. Only that Michael Angelo's world is solemnly, wildly tragic, whereas the world of Aristophanes is dithyrambic, a world of caricatures set in a framework of Greek social conditions.
Compared with Aristophanes, Heine is a private, stay-at-home citizen. Aristophanes holds forth to an audience of thousands in the broad daylight of the theatre; Heine communes with his public sitting alone in his room. But the scenes that depict themselves simply on the retina of his eye, are aglow with more ardent, passionate life than those which Aristophanes embodied on the stage. And his aims are not the purely local aims of the Greek poet. When he is at his best, he appeals to millions who are not of his nationality, appeals, indeed, to the elect among all who can read. His lyric poetry is more personal, more intense, more nervous than that of any Greek; his satire is dedicated to the cause of general ideas, which did not exist for Aristophanes. He is not less witty than his Greek forerunner, and he always fought for political progress and personal liberty, whereas the enemy of Euripides and Socrates most frequently fought for a past that was gone beyond recall, a past to which he himself most certainly did not belong.
XVII
HEINE
Heine's prose is not on the same level with his verse. In his most famous prose book, the _Reisebilder_, he shows himself to be a pupil of Sterne; in later works, where he has attained to greater independence, he is always witty and lively, but seldom properly qualified to treat the subjects of his choice. Whether he is writing on German philosophy for French readers, or on French art for Germans, he does it in equally dilettante fashion. Judged as journalism, his writing was always excellent, but he is too strong, too great a man to be classified as a journalist.
Too much has been made of Heine's superficiality by the pedants among his detractors. He was not a hard worker, but he was by no means idle, and he possessed a fund of solid and varied knowledge. Still, it is only as a poet that he is great; most of his prose writings treat of the passing topics of the day; and his fame has been actually injured by the publication of his letters, which, as a rule, present him to us in an unfavourable light, namely entirely taken up with his own interests. Pecuniary difficulties are a tiresome subject, even when they happen to be the pecuniary difficulties of a genius.
Heine, as every one knows, did not live to be an old man. He was carried off in the prime of his mental powers by a terrible disease.
He had always been delicate and suffering; in his youth he was plagued by severe headaches, and was obliged to be so moderate in the matter of drink that his friends used laughingly to declare that he contented himself with _smelling_ a bottle of Rhenish wine which he kept in his room. His nervous system was undermined while he was still a young man, but it is certain that this was to a much less extent the result of excesses than is generally believed, for Heine is a real _fanfaron des vices_, given to perpetual boasting of his own depravity. He was attacked by the disease which is so frequently the fate of those who have lived lives of unbroken mental productivity. An affection of the spine, with paralysis first of the eyelids and in course of time of almost the whole body, consigned him to that "mattress-grave" in Paris, where he lay for nearly eight years.
His life, which can neither be called a great nor a happy one, falls of itself into two distinctly defined parts--the life in Germany till the Revolution of July, and the life in Paris from 1831 till his death in 1856. It was a life led without calculation, but not without instinctive perception of the direction in which possibilities of development for his talent lay; it is hardly probable that Heine would have attained to his great cosmopolitan fame, or even that he would have become so eminent a satiric poet, if he had lived in his native country all his life.
His youthful years in Germany are passed under the oppression of the reaction--his _Reisebilder_ won popularity as an expression of the general political dissatisfaction--but he soon makes up his mind that it is useless to meddle with politics. The Revolution of July puts new life into everything; Heine goes off to Paris, settles there, and is kept there by the embargo placed upon his works in all the states of the German Confederation. The Guizot Government secretly give him the small pension which enables him to live in comparative comfort. His acceptance of this laid him open to accusations, which, though they were not altogether groundless, were in many points quite unjustifiable. It must be borne in mind that Heine did not understand the art of making money; and even if he had, it would have been of little use to him. Many thousands of pounds must have been made by the sale of his books, but he himself made over the most profitable of them all, the _Buch der Lieder_, to Campe in payment of an old debt of 50 Louis d'ors, and was all his life long dependent on the unwilling assistance of his rich uncle. If he, and if the little Parisian grisette whom he married, had had more idea of economy, it might have been unnecessary for him to accept Government support. The fact of his accepting it no doubt occasionally prevented him from criticising the French ministry freely in German newspapers, but it had no other bad result, and least of all did it induce him to write anything he did not mean.
From French soil he waged uninterrupted, unremitting intellectual warfare with the European reaction. In this respect he may be called Byron's great successor. Only a few years after the sword of sarcasm, wielded in the cause of liberty, had slipped from the hands of the dying Byron, it was seized by Heine, who wielded it for a whole generation with equal skill and power. Yet for the eight last years it was a mortally wounded man who fought.
At no time did he write truer, more incisive, more brilliant verse than when he lay nailed to the low, broad bed of torture in Paris. And never, so far as we know, has a great productive mind borne superhuman sufferings with more undaunted courage and endurance. The power of the soul over the body has seldom displayed itself so unmistakably. To bear such agonies as his in close-lipped silence would have been admirable; but to create, to bubble over with sparkling, whimsical jest and mockery, to let his spirit wander the world round in charming and profound reverie, while he himself lay crippled, almost lifeless, on his couch--this was great.
He lay there shrunk to a skeleton, with his eyes closed, his hands almost powerless, his noble features painfully emaciated; the white, perfectly formed hands were nearly transparent; at times, when he spoke, a Mephistophelian smile passed over the suffering, martyr-like face. At last, as in the case of Tithonus of old, all that really remained of the man was his voice; but it was a voice of many notes, of many whimsies, many jests.
He continued to be mentally active. It was as if the driving-wheel went on turning without steam, as if the lamp went on burning without oil.
It is not true that he reverted to a connection with any church; but the suffering man clung to a kind of piety and faith in God which was a legacy from the days of his youth. At this faith he himself sometimes smiled. We have such a smile in the words with which on the last day of his life he tried to pacify an excited acquaintance: _Dieu me pardonnera--c'est son métier._
It is a touching proof of his strength of mind and of his filial affection that during his whole long illness he took the greatest care that all knowledge of his sufferings should be kept from his old mother in Hamburg; to the last he wrote her cheerful, amusing letters, and he caused any passages that might have awakened her suspicions to be taken out of the copies of his works that were sent to her.
Another pleasant impression of his spiritual condition is conveyed by the circumstance that he, the most wanton-tongued of men and poets on the subject of love, changed during his illness into the tenderest and most spiritual exponent of that passion. The last year of his life was, as is well known, sweetened by the admiration and devotion of the young and beautiful woman who, though German born, made her appearance as a French authoress under the pseudonym of Camille Selden.[1]
[1] Meissner: _Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine_. Camille Selden: _Les derniers jours de Henri Heine_, 1884.
She was then about twenty-eight, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and so charming, gentle, and attractive, that she won Heine's heart the first time she visited him. Soon he could not live without her; he was miserable if a few days passed without his seeing her, though he was often in such pain that he was obliged to request her to delay her visit.
It is in the poems and letters to her, published after Heine's death, that we find that fervency, depth, and fulness of passion which we feel to be wanting in the rest of his love poetry.
He calls her his spiritually affianced bride, whose life is bound up with his by the will of fate. United, they would have known what happiness is; separated, they are doomed to misery:
"Ich weiss es jetzt. Bei Gott! du bist es, Die ich geliebt. Wie bitter ist es, Wenn im Momente des Erkennens Die Stunde schlägt des ew'gen Trennens! Der Willkomm ist zu gleicher Zeit Ein Lebewohl!"[2]
[2]
I know it now. By heaven! 'tis thou Whom I have loved. How bitter now, The moment we are joined for ever, To find the hour when we must sever! The welcome must at once give way To sad farewell! (BOWRING)
Half laughing, half weeping, he bemoans the compulsory platonic affection of two lovers, to whom an embrace is an impossibility:
"Worte! Worte! keine Thaten! Niemals Fleisch, geliebte Puppe, Immer Geist und keinen Braten, Keine Knödel in der Suppe!"[3]
[3]
Words, empty words, and never deeds! No roast for us, my puppet sweet, Not even dumplings in the soup; A feast of mind, but not of meat!
When, at a rare time, she keeps him waiting, he is frantic with impatience:
"Lass mich mit glüh'nden Zangen kneipen, Lass grausam schinden mein Gesicht, Lass mich mit Ruthen peitschen, stäupen-- Nur warten, warten lass mich nicht!"[4]
[4]
With red-hot irons scar my flesh, Pinch me with pincers glowing hot, Or have me heat with many stripes-- But oh! to wait compel me not!
But the great mystic poem which celebrates the nuptials of the dead poet with the passion-flower that blossoms on his grave, is a poem of resignation, resignation in the presence of Death:
"Du warst die Blume, du geliebtes Kind, An deinen Küssen musst' ich dich erkennen. So zärtlich keine Blumenlippen sind, So feurig keine Blumenthränen brennen.
Geschlossen war mein Aug', doch angeblickt Hat meine Seel' beständig dein Gesichte, Du sahst mich an, beseeligt und verzückt Und geisterhaft beglänzt vom Mondenlichte."[5]