Heine

“ 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. ”

“ Have I not been an hour with you here, reading the most beautiful poetry of Heine?”
“That is why I want to sing,” said the sweet voice, with a touch of wilfulness in its tone. “Listen! I will give you a reading of Heine in music!” And suddenly, rich and clear as a bell, a golden cadence of notes rang out with the words:
“Ah, Hast thou forgotten, That I possessed thy heart?” ”

“ It seemed fitting that the writer of a life of Shelley should write one of Heine, for there is a kinship between the two poets. To their biographer Heine was the strangest and most fascinating of all the poets not only of one country and one century, but of all time and of all nations; he saw in the wayward brilliant poet “one of those flowers which bloom more rarely than the aloe—human flowers which unfold their petals but once, it may be, in the whole slow growth of humanity.... At his best Heine is a creature of controlled impulse; at his worst he is a creature of impulse uncontrolled. ”

“ Notwithstanding their inequalities, the Reisebilder remain one of the surest props of Heine's fame. So clear and perfect an utterance is sufficiently rare in all languages; but it becomes little short of a miracle when, as in this case, the medium of its transmission is German prose, a vehicle so bulky and unwieldy that no one before Heine had dared to enlist it in the service of airy phantasy, delicate humor and sparkling wit. ”

“ It is unnecessary to dwell upon these years of darkness, in which Heine, shriveled to the proportions of a child, languished upon his "mattress-grave" in Paris. His patient resignation, his indomitable will, his sweetness and gayety of temper, and his unimpaired vigor and fertility of intellect, are too fresh in the memory of many living witnesses, and have been too frequently and recently described to make it needful here to enlarge upon them. In the crucial hour he proved no recreant to the convictions for which he had battled and bled during a lifetime. ”

“ The German Emperor appears at least to realize how offensive and, from his point of view, dangerous, the spirit of Heinrich Heine is to this very day, how deeply his satire cuts into questions of religion and State, how impatient he is of everything which the German Emperor esteems and venerates in his innermost heart. But the German people, on the whole, and certainly all foreigners, have long ago forgiven the poet, not because they have understood the dead bard better than the Emperor, but because they understood him less well. ”

“ Speaking generally, of course, Heine was too subjective to be a real nature poet. No writer, it is true, fills up so freely and with so fantastic an elegance the blank cheques of nightingales and violets, lilies and roses, stars and moonshine, yet none the less these rather served to grace his measure than as his real flame. ”

“ Heine was a poet and satirist by nature. Endowed with great analytical power, and educated in Germany, he of course took a pleasure in studying the operations of the human mind; but he was not a philosopher by temperament, which is sufficiently proved by the fact that he not only refrained from attaching himself to any particular system of philosophy in a country where he had so many to select from, but that he did not even take the trouble to invent a system for himself. He comprehended philosophy, liked painting, loved music, and spoke of all science and art in the spirit of a poet. ”

“ Heine was indeed an "unconscionable long time a-dying," but then he died with such brilliant patience, with such good humour, and, in the meanwhile, contrived to write such haunting poetry, such saturnine criticism.
And, all the time, during those ten years of dying, his faithful "Treasure" was by his side. The people who "understood" him better, who read his books and delighted in his genius, somehow or other seemed to forget the lonely Prometheus on the mattress-rock at No. 3 Avenue Matignon. It was 1854 when Heine was painfully removed there. ”

“ We need only turn to the volumes themselves to guess how bitter an experience must have filled the gap between the buoyant stream of sunny inspiration that ripples through the Harz-Reise, and the fierce spirit of vindictive malice which prompted Heine, six years later, to conclude his third and last volume with his unseemly diatribe against Count Platen. ”

“ But to this wretched by-way was relegated that other beauty-enamored, artist-soul, Heine, when he dared set foot in the imperial Free Town. Here must he be locked in like a wild beast, with his miserable brethren every Sunday afternoon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But a note of such tremendous power as Heine had struck in this romance, required for its prolonged sustention a singleness of purpose and an exaltation of belief in its efficacy and truth, which he no longer possessed after his renunciation of Judaism. He was no longer at one with himself, for no sooner was the irrevocable step taken than it was bitterly repented, not as a recantation of his principles—for as such, no one who follows the development of his mind can regard it,—but as an unworthy concession to tyrannic injustice. ”

“ For Heine arose early in active rebellion against a merely passive classicism; just as fiercer and more ardent cries, as from the Orient, pierce through the songs of Catullus. The mischievous Hermes was irritated by the calm and quiet activities of the aged Zeus of Weimar. And then the earnest Hebrew nature within him, liberated by Hegel's favourite thought of the divinity of man, came into play with its large revolutionary thirsts. Thus it was that he appeared before the world as the most brilliant leader of a movement of national or even world-wide emancipation. ”

“ Yet it is even because of this surface inconsistency, this psychological many-sidedness that Heine is a great poet and the one who, mirroring in his own mind the complexity that he saw without, is typically representative of the varied phases of the early nineteenth century. Heine looks at life from every conceivable aspect: he sees the gladness of life and rejoices therein; he sees the tears of life and weeps; he sees the tragedy of life and cannot control his sobs; he sees the farce of life and finds equal difficulty in controlling his laughter. ”

“ Then, in the matter of metre, he begins to study and imitate Wilhelm Müller; in his most famous poem he borrows from Clemens Brentano. He soon forms his own style, the distinguishing feature of which is extreme condensation of thought, feeling, and imagery. Heine makes everything present and living, introduces even into tranquil themes a nervous, at times dæmonic, passion, not infrequently exaggerates until he becomes grotesque, occasionally exchanges the light of day for the glaring brightness of electric light—a kind of un-naturalness which is nevertheless to be found in nature. ”

“ Heine's love poems—two-thirds of the Book of Songs—are written in the very simplest of verses, mostly quatrains of easy and seemingly inevitable structure. Heine learned the art of making them from the Magic Horn, from Uhland, and from Eichendorff, and he carried the art to the highest pitch of virtuosity. They are the forms of the German Folk-song, a fit vehicle for homely sentiments and those elemental passions which come and go like the tide in a humble heart, because the humble heart is single and yields unresistingly to their flow. ”

“ Here Heine made solid acquisitions in history, literature, and the elements of philosophy. Outside of school, he was an eager spectator, not merely of stirring events in the world of politics, but also of many a picturesque manifestation of popular life—a spectator often rather than a participant; for as a Jew he stood beyond the pale of both the German and the Roman Catholic traditions that gave and give to the cities of the Rhineland their characteristic naïve gaiety and harmless superstition. ”

“ In the case of no other of the greater German poets is it so hard to arrive at a final judgment as in that of Heinrich Heine. In his Buch der Lieder he unquestionably struck a new lyric note, not merely for Germany but for Europe. No singer before him had been so daring in the use of nature-symbolism as he, none had given such concrete and plastic expression to the spiritual forces of heart and soul; in this respect Heine was clearly the descendant of the Hebrew poets of the Old Testament. ”

“ And if it is still asked why Heine is so modern, it can only be said that these discords out of which his humour exhaled are those which we have nearly all of us known, and that he speaks with a voice that seems to arise from the depth of our own souls. ”

“ Sharp aliments, rank flavors, draining ecstasies that mingle the last drop of pleasure with pain and faintness, seemed necessary to complete the round of this man's life—of Heine the singer, Heine the man of all his time in whom the delicate blossoms of poetry were most fragrant. No poet could better deal than he with the exquisite joyances of the heart and soul ”

“ The exuberance of Heine’s heart, as has been well said, was only equalled by the dryness of his spirit; a real enthusiasm was blended with an unquenchable love of satire; “his exquisite dilettanteism made him adore the gods and goddesses of Greece at the expense even of Christianity.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ This brilliant poet, with his marvelous mastery of German lyric tones, expressed a wide range of poetic inspiration; but he loved particularly to conceive of himself as an apostle of liberty, an outpost of the revolutionary army, and none so well as he could tip the barb with biting sarcasm and satire. Heine's personality was full of seemingly inconsistent traits. He was both fanciful and rational, serious and flippant, tender and cynical, reverent and impious; and he could be at once a patriot and an alien. ”

“ Heine is described as having lived in the simplest manner, occupying three small rooms on the third floor, the ménage comprising, in addition to his wife and himself, no one but an old negress as a servant, and “Cocotte,” who has been already alluded to.
Heine is beyond question the greatest poet that has appeared in Germany since the death of Goethe. Enough has been said in the course of this brief sketch of his life to show the singular, the unprecedented character of his genius, and to illustrate that combination in his person of two separate natures that we have stated to exist. ”

“ Since Heine died, the world has had no great idealist.
As wit, Heine ranks with Voltaire, Cervantes, Swift. Of such superb ability there can be but one to a race. These four men I have mentioned represent Judea, France, Spain, and England. Heine reached two heights; wit and lyric poet. He knew how to take what was best in artistic France, intellectual Germany, and then blend them.
Brandes compares Goethe with Heine, to detriment of the latter. What he is really comparing without seeing it, is two ages of time. ”

“ At Berlin, in 1821, appeared his first volume of poems, and then he began to take his true place.
At this period Heine is described as a good-natured and gentle youth, but reserved, not caring to show his emotions. He was of middle height and slender, with rather long light brown hair (in childhood it was red, and he was called "Rother Harry") framing the pale and beardless oval face, the bright blue short-sighted eyes, the Greek nose, the high cheek-bones, the large mouth, the full—half cynical, half sensual—lips. He was not a typical German; like Goethe, he never smoked ”

“ He had plans of settling in Paris, but as he was still dependent on his uncle, the latter’s consent had to be obtained. As was to be expected, Solomon Heine did not favour the new plan, but promised to continue his support on the condition that Harry completed his course of legal study. He sent the young student for a six weeks’ holiday at Cuxhaven, which opened the poet’s eyes to the wonders of the sea; and three weeks spent subsequently at his uncle’s county seat near Hamburg were sufficient to awaken a new passion in Heine’s breast—this time for Amalie’s sister, Therese. ”