What wit, again, in that saying which every one has heard: “The Englishman loves liberty like his lawful wife, the Frenchman loves her like his mistress, the German loves her like his old grandmother.” But the turn Heine gives to this incomparable saying is not so well known; and it is by that turn he shows himself the born poet he is, — full of delicacy and tenderness, of inexhaustible resource, infinitely new and striking: —
“And yet, after all, no one can ever tell how things may turn out. The grumpy Englishman, in an ill-temper with his wife, is capable of some day putting a rope round her neck, and taking her to be sold at Smithfield. The inconstant Frenchman may become unfaithful to his adored mistress, and be seen fluttering about the Palais Royal after another. But the German will never quite abandon his old grandmother; he will always keep for her a nook by the chimney-corner, where she can tell her fairy stories to the listening children.”
Is it possible to touch more delicately and happily both the weakness and the strength of Germany; pedantic, simple, enslaved, free, ridiculous, admirable Germany?
And Heine’s verse, — his Lieder? Oh, the comfort, after dealing with French people of genius, irresistibly impelled to try and express themselves in verse, launching out into a deep which destiny has sown with so many rocks for them, — the comfort of coming to a man of genius, who finds in verse his freest and most perfect expression, whose voyage over the deep of poetry destiny makes smooth! After the rhythm, to us, at any rate, with the German paste in our composition, so deeply unsatisfying, of —
”Ah! que me dites-vous, et qne vous dit mon âme?
Que dit le ciel a l’aube et la flamme à la flamme?”
what a blessing to arrive at rhythms like —
”Take, oh, take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn— “
or —
”Siehst sehr sterbeblässlich aus,
Doch getrost! du bist zu Haus— “
in which one’s soul can take pleasure! The magic of Heine’s poetical form is incomparable; he chiefly uses a form of old German popular poetry, a ballad-form which has more rapidity and grace than any ballad-form of ours; he employs this form with the most exquisite lightness and ease, and yet it has at the same time the inborn fulness, pathos, and old-world charm of all true forms of popular poetry. Thus in Heine’s poetry, too, one perpetually blends the impression of French modernism and clearness, with that of German sentiment and fulness; and to give this blended impression is, as I have said, Heine’s great characteristic. To feel it, one must read him; he gives it in his form as well as in his contents, and by translation I can only reproduce it so far as his contents give it. But even the contents of many of his poems are capable of giving a certain sense of it. Here, for instance, is a poem in which he makes his profession of faith to an innocent beautiful soul, a sort of Gretchen, the child of some simple mining people having their hut among the pines at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, who reproaches him with not holding the old articles of the Christian creed: —
“Ah, my child, while I was yet a little boy, while I yet sate upon my mother’s knee, I believed in God the Father, who rules up there in Heaven, good and great;
“Who created the beautiful earth, and the beautiful men and women thereon; who ordained for sun, moon, and stars their courses.
“When I got bigger, my child, I comprehended yet a great deal more than this, and comprehended, and grew intelligent; and I believe on the Son also;
“On the beloved Son, who loved us, and revealed love to us; and, for his reward, as always happens, was crucified by the people.
“Now, when I am grown up, have read much, have travelled much, my heart swells within me, and with my whole heart I believe on the Holy Ghost.
“The greatest miracles were of his working, and still greater miracles doth he even now work; he burst in sunder the oppressor’s stronghold, and he burst in sunder the bondsman’s yoke.
“He heals old death-wounds, and renews the old right; all mankind are one race of noble equals before him.
“He chases away the evil clouds and the dark cobwebs of the brain, which have spoilt love and joy for us, which day and night have loured on us.
“A thousand knights, well harnessed, has the Holy Ghost chosen out to fulfil his will, and he has put courage into their souls.
“Their good swords flash, their bright banners wave; what, thou wouldst give much, my child, to look upon such gallant knights?
“Well, on me, my child, look! kiss me, and look boldly upon me! one of those knights of the Holy Ghost am I.”
One has only to turn over the pages of his Romancero, — a collection of poems written in the first years of his illness, with his whole power and charm still in them, and not, like his latest poems of all, painfully touched by the air of his Matrazzen-gruft, his “mattress-grave,” — to see Heine’s width of range; the most varied figures succeed one another, — Rhampsinitus, Edith with the Swan Neck, Charles the First, Marie Antoinette, King David, a heroine of Mabille, Melisanda of Tripoli, Richard Coeur de Lion, Pedro the Cruel, Firdusi, Cortes, Dr. Döllinger; — but never does Heine attempt to be hubsch objectiv, “beautifully objective,” to become in spirit an old Egyptian, or an old Hebrew, or a Middle-Age knight, or a Spanish adventurer, or an English royalist; he always remains Heinrich Heine, a son of the nineteenth century. To give a notion of his tone, I will quote a few stanzas at the end of the Spanish Atridæ in which he describes, in the character of a visitor at the court of Henry of Transtamare at Segovia, Henry’s treatment of the children of his brother, Pedro the Cruel. Don Diego Albuquerque, his neighbor, strolls after dinner through the castle with him: —
“In the cloister-passage, which leads to the kennels where are kept the king’s hounds, that with their growling and yelping let you know a long way off where they are,
“There I saw, built into the wall, and with a strong iron grating for its outer face, a cell like a cage.
“Two human figures sate therein, two young boys; chained by the leg, they crouched in the dirty straw.
“Hardly twelve years old seemed the one, the other not much older; their faces fair and noble, but pale and wan with sickness.
“They were all in rags, almost naked; and their lean bodies showed wounds, the marks of ill-usage; both of them shivered with fever.
“They looked up at me out of the depth of their misery; ‘Who,’ I cried in horror to Don Diego, ‘are these pictures of wretchedness?’
“Don Diego seemed embarrassed; he looked round to see that no one was listening; then he gave a deep sigh; and at last, putting on the easy tone of a man of the world, he said: —
“‘These are a pair of king’s sons, who were early left orphans; the name of their father was King Pedro, the name of their mother, Maria de Padilla.
“‘After the great battle of Navarette, when Henry of Transtamare had relieved his brother, King Pedro, of the troublesome burden of the crown,
“‘And likewise of that still more troublesome burden, which is called life, then Don Henry’s victorious magnanimity had to deal with his brother’s children.
“‘He has adopted them, as an uncle should; and he has given them free quarters in his own castle.
“‘The room which he has assigned to them is certainly rather small, but then it is cool in summer, and not intolerably cold in winter.
“‘Their fare is rye-bread, which tastes as sweet as if the goddess Ceres had baked it express for her beloved Proserpine.
“‘Not unfrequently, too, he sends a scullion to them with garbanzos,and then the young gentlemen know that it is Sunday in Spain.
“‘But it is not Sunday every day, and garbanzos do not come every day; and the master of the hounds gives them the treat of his whip.
“‘For the master of the hounds, who has under his superintendence the kennels and the pack, and the nephews’ cage also,
“‘Is the unfortunate husband of that lemon-faced woman with the white ruf
f, whom we remarked to-day at dinner.
“‘And she scolds so sharp, that often her husband snatches his whip, and rushes down here, and gives it to the dogs and to the poor little boys.
“‘But his majesty has expressed his disapproval of such proceedings, and has given orders that for the future his nephews are to be treated differently from the dogs.
“‘He has determined no longer to entrust the disciplining of his nephews to a mercenary stranger, but to carry it out with his own hands.’
“Don Diego stopped abruptly; for the seneschal of the castle joined us, and politely expressed his hope that we had dined to our satisfaction.”
Observe how the irony of the whole of that, finishing with the grim innuendo of the last stanza but one, is at once truly masterly and truly modern.
No account of Heine is complete which does not notice the Jewish element in him. His race he treated with the same freedom with which he treated everything else, but he derived a great force from it, and no one knew this better than he himself. He has excellently pointed out how in the sixteenth century there was a double renascence, — a Hellenic renascence and a Hebrew renascence — and how both have been great powers ever since. He himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judæa; both these spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all poetry and all art, — the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sublimity. By his perfection of literary form, by his love of clearness, by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek; by his intensity, by his untamableness, by his “longing which cannot be uttered,” he is Hebrew. Yet what Hebrew ever treated the things of the Hebrews like this?— “There lives at Hamburg, in a one-roomed lodging in the Baker’s Broad Walk, a man whose name is Moses Lump; all the week he goes about in wind and rain, with his pack on his back, to earn his few shillings; but when on Friday evening he comes home, he finds the candlestick with seven candles lighted, and the table covered with a fair white cloth, and he puts away from him his pack and his cares, and he sits down to table with his squinting wife and yet more squinting daughter, and eats fish with them, fish which has been dressed in beautiful white garlic sauce, sings therewith the grandest psalms of King David, rejoices with his whole heart over the deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt, rejoices, too, that all the wicked ones who have done the children of Israel hurt, have ended by taking themselves off; that King Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, Antiochus, Titus, and all such people, are well dead, while he, Moses Lump, is yet alive, and eating fish with wife and daughter; and I can tell you, Doctor, the fish is delicate and the man is happy, he has no call to torment himself about culture, he sits contented in his religion and in his green bedgown, like Diogenes in his tub, he contemplates with satisfaction his candles, which he on no account will snuff for himself; and I can tell you, if the candles burn a little dim, and the snuffers-woman, whose business it is to snuff them, is not at hand, and Rothschild the Great were at that moment to come in, with all his brokers, bill discounters, agents, and chief clerks, with whom he conquers the world, and Rothschild were to say: ‘Moses Lump, ask of me what favor you will, and it shall be granted you’; — Doctor, I am convinced, Moses Lump would quietly answer: ‘Snuff me those candles!’ and Rothschild the Great would exclaim with admiration: ‘If I were not Rothschild, I would be Moses Lump.’”
There Heine shows us his own people by its comic side; in the poem of the Princess Sabbath he shows it to us by a more serious side. The Princess Sabbath, “the tranquil Princess, pearl and flower of all beauty, fair as the Queen of Sheba, Solomon’s bosom friend, that blue stocking from Ethiopia, who wanted to shine by her esprit, and with her wise riddles made herself in the long run a bore” (with Heine the sarcastic turn is never far off), this princess has for her betrothed a prince whom sorcery has transformed into an animal of lower race, the Prince Israel.
“A dog with the desires of a dog, he wallows all the week long in the filth and refuse of life, amidst the jeers of the boys in the street.
“But every Friday evening, at the twilight hour, suddenly the magic passes off, and the dog becomes once more a human being.
“A man with the feelings of a man, with head and heart raised aloft, in festal garb, in almost clean garb he enters the halls of his Father.
“Hail, beloved halls of my royal Father! Ye tents of Jacob, I kiss with my lips your holy door-posts!”
Still more he shows us this serious side in his beautiful poem on Jehuda ben Halevy, a poet belonging to “the great golden age of the Arabian, Old-Spanish, Jewish school of poets,” a contemporary of the troubadours: —
“He, too, — the hero whom we sing, — Jehuda ben Halevy, too, had his lady-love; but she was of a special sort.
“She was no Laura, whose eyes, mortal stars, in the cathedral on
Good Friday kindled that world-renowned flame.
“She was no chatelaine, who in the blooming glory of her youth presided at tourneys, and awarded the victor’s crown.
“No casuistess in the Gay Science was she, no lady doctrinaire, who delivered her oracles in the judgment-chamber of a Court of Love.
“She, whom the Rabbi loved, was a woe-begone poor darling, a mourning picture of desolation … and her name was Jerusalem.”
Jehuda ben Halevy, like the Crusaders, makes his pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and there, amid the ruins, sings a song of Sion which has become famous among his people: —
“That lay of pearled tears is the wide-famed Lament, which is sung in all the scattered tents of Jacob throughout the world.
“On the ninth day of the month which is called Ab, on the anniversary of
Jerusalem’s destruction by Titus Vespasianus.
“Yes, that is the song of Sion, which Jehuda ben Halevy sang with his dying breath amid the holy ruins of Jerusalem.
“Barefoot, and in penitential weeds, he sat there upon the fragment of a fallen column; down to his breast fell,
“Like a gray forest, his hair; and cast a weird shadow on the face which looked out through it, — his troubled pale face, with the spiritual eyes.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 75
