“Wie mächtig auch mein stolzer Muth sich blähe,
In deiner selig süssen, trauten Nahe
Ergreift mich oft ein demuthvolles Zagen.

* * * * *

Und immer irrte ich nach Liebe, immer
Nach Liebe, doch die Liebe fand ich nimmer,
Und kehrte um nach Hause, krank und trübe.
Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen,
Und ach! was da in deinem Aug’ geschwommen,
Das war die süsse, langgesuchte Liebe.”

He was at first destined for a mercantile life, but Nature declared too strongly against this plan.  “God knows,” he has lately said in conversation with his brother, “I would willingly have become a banker, but I could never bring myself to that pass.  I very early discerned that bankers would one day be the rulers of the world.”  So commerce was at length given up for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the University of Bonn.  He had already published some poems in the corner of a newspaper, and among them was one on Napoleon, the object of his youthful enthusiasm.  This poem, he says in a letter to St. Réné Taillandier, was written when he was only sixteen.  It is still to be found in the “Buch der Lieder” under the title “Die Grenadiere,” and it proves that even in its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly specific character.

It was apparently during this residence in Berlin that Heine united himself with the Lutheran Church.  He would willingly, like many of his friends, he tells us, have remained free from all ecclesiastical ties if the authorities there had not forbidden residence in Prussia, and especially in Berlin, to every one who did not belong to one of the positive religions recognized by the State.

“As Henry IV. once laughingly said, ‘Paris vaut bien une messe,’ so I might with reason say, ‘Berlin vaut bien une prêche;’ and I could afterward, as before, accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches of Berlin, and which was even free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle-soup without turtle.”

“On the whole, I never felt a strong enthusiasm for this philosophy, and conviction on the subject was out of question.  I never was an abstract thinker, and I accepted the synthesis of the Hegelian doctrine without demanding any proof; since its consequences flattered my vanity.  I was young and proud, and it pleased my vainglory when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my grandmother believed, the God who lives in heaven, but myself here upon earth.  This foolish pride had not in the least a pernicious influence on my feelings; on the contrary, it heightened these to the pitch of heroism.  I was at that time so lavish in generosity and self-sacrifice that I must assuredly have eclipsed the most brilliant deeds of those good bourgeois of virtue who acted merely from a sense of duty, and simply obeyed the laws of morality.”

His sketch of Hegel is irresistibly amusing; but we must warn the reader that Heine’s anecdotes are often mere devices of style by which he conveys his satire or opinions.  The reader will see that he does not neglect an opportunity of giving a sarcastic lash or two, in passing, to Meyerbeer, for whose music he has a great contempt.  The sarcasm conveyed in the substitution of reputation for music and journalists for musicians, might perhaps escape any one unfamiliar with the sly and unexpected turns of Heine’s ridicule.

It was, perhaps, in these Hamburg days that Heine paid the visit to Goethe, of which he gives us this charming little picture:

During the next few years Heine produced the most popular of all his works—those which have won him his place as the greatest of living German poets and humorists.  Between 1826 and 1829 appeared the four volumes of the “Reisebilder” (Pictures of Travel) and the “Buch der Lieder” (Book of Songs), a volume of lyrics, of which it is hard to say whether their greatest charm is the lightness and finish of their style, their vivid and original imaginativeness, or their simple, pure sensibility.  In his “Reisebilder” Heine carries us with him to the Hartz, to the isle of Norderney, to his native town Düsseldorf, to Italy, and to England, sketching scenery and character, now with the wildest, most fantastic humor, now with the finest idyllic sensibility—letting his thoughts wander from poetry to politics, from criticism to dreamy reverie, and blending fun, imagination, reflection, and satire in a sort of exquisite, ever-varying shimmer, like the hues of the opal.

Heine’s journey to England did not at all heighten his regard for the English.  He calls our language the “hiss of egoism (Zischlaute des Egoismus); and his ridicule of English awkwardness is as merciless as—English ridicule of German awkwardness.  His antipathy toward us seems to have grown in intensity, like many of his other antipathies; and in his “Vermischte Schriften” he is more bitter than ever.  Let us quote one of his philippics, since bitters are understood to be wholesome:

On his return from England Heine was employed at Munich in editing the Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen, but in 1830 he was again in the north, and the news of the July Revolution surprised him on the island of Heligoland.  He has given us a graphic picture of his democratic enthusiasm in those days in some letters, apparently written from Heligoland, which he has inserted in his book on Börne.  We quote some passages, not only for their biographic interest as showing a phase of Heine’s mental history, but because they are a specimen of his power in that kind of dithyrambic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily becomes ridiculous:

“On the very first days of my arrival in Paris I observed that things wore, in reality, quite different colors from those which had been shed on them, when in perspective, by the light of my enthusiasm.  The silver locks which I saw fluttering so majestically on the shoulders of Lafayette, the hero of two worlds, were metamorphosed into a brown perruque, which made a pitiable covering for a narrow skull.  And even the dog Medor, which I visited in the Court of the Louvre, and which, encamped under tricolored flags and trophies, very quietly allowed himself to be fed—he was not at all the right dog, but quite an ordinary brute, who assumed to himself merits not his own, as often happens with the French; and, like many others, he made a profit out of the glory of the Revolution. . . .  He was pampered and patronized, perhaps promoted to the highest posts, while the true Medor, some days after the battle, modestly slunk out of sight, like the true people who created the Revolution.”

That it was not merely interest in French politics which sent Heine to Paris in 1831, but also a perception that German air was not friendly to sympathizers in July revolutions, is humorously intimated in the “Geständnisse.”

“To the disgust which, in intercourse with Börne, I was in danger of feeling toward those who surrounded him, was added the annoyance I felt from his perpetual talk about politics.  Nothing but political argument, and again political argument, even at table, where he managed to hunt me out.  At dinner, when I so gladly forget all the vexations of the world, he spoiled the best dishes for me by his patriotic gall, which he poured as a bitter sauce over everything.  Calf’s feet, à la maître d’hôtel, then my innocent bonne bouche, he completely spoiled for me by Job’s tidings from Germany, which he scraped together out of the most unreliable newspapers.  And then his accursed remarks, which spoiled one’s appetite! . . . This was a sort of table-talk which did not greatly exhilarate me, and I avenged myself by affecting an excessive, almost impassioned indifference for the object of Börne’s enthusiasm.  For example, Börne was indignant that immediately on my arrival in Paris I had nothing better to do than to write for German papers a long account of the Exhibition of Pictures.  I omit all discussion as to whether that interest in Art which induced me to undertake this work was so utterly irreconcilable with the revolutionary interests of the day; but Börne saw in it a proof of my indifference toward the sacred cause of humanity, and I could in my turn spoil the taste of his patriotic sauerkraut for him by talking all dinner-time of nothing but pictures, of Robert’s ‘Reapers,’ Horace Vernet’s ‘Judith,’ and Scheffer’s ‘Faust.’ . . . That I never thought it worth while to discuss my political principles with him it is needless to say; and once when he declared that he had found a contradiction in my writings, I satisfied myself with the ironical answer, ‘You are mistaken, mon cher; such contradictions never occur in my works, for always before I begin to write, I read over the statement of my political principles in my previous writings, that I may not contradict myself, and that no one may be able to reproach me with apostasy from my liberal principles.’”

“I was never Börne’s friend, nor was I ever his enemy.  The displeasure which he could often excite in me was never very important, and he atoned for it sufficiently by the cold silence which I opposed to all his accusations and raillery.  While he lived I wrote not a line against him, I never thought about him, I ignored him completely; and that enraged him beyond measure.  If I now speak of him, I do so neither out of enthusiasm nor out of uneasiness; I am conscious of the coolest impartiality.  I write here neither an apology nor a critique, and as in painting the man I go on my own observation, the image I present of him ought perhaps to be regarded as a real portrait.  And such a monument is due to him—to the great wrestler who, in the arena of our political games, wrestled so courageously, and earned, if not the laurel, certainly the crown of oak leaves.  I give an image with his true features, without idealization—the more like him the more honorable for his memory.  He was neither a genius nor a hero; he was no Olympian god.  He was a man, a denizen of this earth; he was a good writer and a great patriot. . . . Beautiful, delicious peace, which I feel at this moment in the depths of my soul!  Thou rewardest me sufficiently for everything I have done and for everything I have despised. . . . I shall defend myself neither from the reproach of indifference nor from the suspicion of venality.  I have for years, during the life of the insinuator, held such self-justification unworthy of me; now even decency demands silence.  That would be a frightful spectacle!—polemics between Death and Exile!  Dost thou stretch out to me a beseeching hand from the grave?  Without rancor I reach mine toward thee. . . . See how noble it is and pure!  It was never soiled by pressing the hands of the mob, any more than by the impure gold of the people’s enemy.  In reality thou hast never injured me. . . . In all thy insinuations there is not a louis d’or’s worth of truth.”

“That statement of time and place was entirely correct.  I was actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was, moreover, a Jesuit church, namely, St. Sulpice; and I then went through a religious act.  But this act was no odious abjuration, but a very innocent conjugation; that is to say, my marriage, already performed, according to the civil law there received the ecclesiastical consecration, because my wife, whose family are staunch Catholics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough without such a ceremony.  And I would on no account cause this beloved being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views.”

For sixteen years—from 1831 to 1847—Heine lived that rapid concentrated life which is known only in Paris; but then, alas! stole on the “days of darkness,” and they were to be many.  In 1847 he felt the approach of the terrible spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed in acute suffering.  The last time he went out of doors, he tells us, was in May, 1848:

“With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal.  At her feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me.  The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time disconsolately, as if she would say, Dost thou not see, then, that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?”

“Do I really exist?  My body is so shrunken that I am hardly anything but a voice; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave of the magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in Brittany, under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames toward heaven.  Alas!  I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that moves their branches, brother Merlin, for no green leaf rustles about my mattress-grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but the rolling of vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strumming.  A grave without repose, death without the privileges of the dead, who have no debts to pay, and need write neither letters nor books—that is a piteous condition.  Long ago the measure has been taken for my coffin and for my necrology, but I die so slowly that the process is tedious for me as well as my friends.  But patience: everything has an end.  You will one day find the booth closed where the puppet-show of my humor has so often delighted you.”

This sounds like a serious statement.  But what shall we say to a convert who plays with his newly-acquired belief in a future life, as Heine does in the very next page?  He says to his reader:

In his “Geständnisse,” the retractation of former opinions and profession of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony that repels our sympathy and baffles our psychology.  Yet what strange, deep pathos is mingled with the audacity of the following passage!

“What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged nurse are pressing Spanish flies behind my ears?  What avails it me, that all the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me?  Alas!  Shiraz is two thousand miles from the Rue d’Amsterdam, where, in the wearisome loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it be, perhaps, the perfume of warmed towels.  Alas!  God’s satire weighs heavily on me.  The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little, earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath him in humor, in colossal mockery.”

For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence with which Heine professes his theoretical reverence as pathological, as the diseased exhibition of a predominant tendency urged into anomalous action by the pressure of pain and mental privation—as a delirium of wit starved of its proper nourishment.  It is not for us to condemn, who have never had the same burden laid on us; it is not for pigmies at their ease to criticise the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock.

In political matters Heine, like all men whose intellect and taste predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat.  By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted “trimmer.”  He has no sympathy, as he says, with “that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from the top of a mast into the sea, crying, “I die for General Jackson!”

“But thou liest, Brutus, thou liest, Cassius, and thou, too, liest, Asinius, in maintaining that my ridicule attacks those ideas which are the precious acquisition of Humanity, and for which I myself have so striven and suffered.  No! for the very reason that those ideas constantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, he is the more irresistibly overcome by laughter when he sees how rudely, awkwardly, and clumsily those ideas are seized and mirrored in the contracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mirrors which have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in them becomes a caricature, and excites our laughter.  But we laugh then only at the caricature, not at the god.”

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.  His song has a wide compass of notes; he can take us to the shores of the Northern Sea and thrill us by the sombre sublimity of his pictures and dreamy fancies; he can draw forth our tears by the voice he gives to our own sorrows, or to the sorrows of “Poor Peter;” he can throw a cold shudder over us by a mysterious legend, a ghost story, or a still more ghastly rendering of hard reality; he can charm us by a quiet idyl, shake us with laughter at his overflowing fun, or give us a piquant sensation of surprise by the ingenuity of his transitions from the lofty to the ludicrous.  This last power is not, indeed, essentially poetical; but only a poet can use it with the same success as Heine, for only a poet can poise our emotion and expectation at such a height as to give effect to the sudden fall.  Heine’s greatest power as a poet lies in his simple pathos, in the ever-varied but always natural expression he has given to the tender emotions.  We may perhaps indicate this phase of his genius by referring to Wordsworth’s beautiful little poem, “She dwelt among the untrodden ways;” the conclusion—

“She dwelt alone, and few could know
   When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh!
   The difference to me”—

But for this very reason Heine touches our hearts more strongly; his songs are all music and feeling—they are like birds that not only enchant us with their delicious notes, but nestle against us with their soft breasts, and make us feel the agitated beating of their hearts.  He indicates a whole sad history in a single quatrain; there is not an image in it, not a thought; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a “big round tear”—it is pure feeling, breathed in pure music:

The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine’s prose writings are the “Reisebilder.”  The comparison with Sterne is inevitable here; but Heine does not suffer from it, for if he falls below Sterne in raciness of humor, he is far above him in poetic sensibility and in reach and variety of thought.  Heine’s humor is never persistent, it never flows on long in easy gayety and drollery; where it is not swelled by the tide of poetic feeling, it is continually dashing down the precipice of a witticism.  It is not broad and unctuous; it is aërial and sprite-like, a momentary resting-place between his poetry and his wit.  In the “Reisebilder” he runs through the whole gamut of his powers, and gives us every hue of thought, from the wildly droll and fantastic to the sombre and the terrible.  Here is a passage almost Dantesque in conception:

“Alas! one ought in truth to write against no one in this world.  Each of us is sick enough in this great lazaretto, and many a polemical writing reminds me involuntarily of a revolting quarrel, in a little hospital at Cracow, of which I chanced to be a witness, and where it was horrible to hear how the patients mockingly reproached each other with their infirmities: how one who was wasted by consumption jeered at another who was bloated by dropsy; how one laughed at another’s cancer in the nose, and this one again at his neighbor’s locked-jaw or squint, until at last the delirious fever-patient sprang out of bed and tore away the coverings from the wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was to be seen but hideous misery and mutilation.”

“Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew, with drops of blood on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great cross laid on his shoulders; and he threw the cross on the high table of the gods, so that the golden cups tottered, and the gods became dumb and pale, and grew ever paler, till they at last melted away into vapor.”

The richest specimens of Heine’s wit are perhaps to be found in the works which have appeared since the “Reisebilder.”  The years, if they have intensified his satirical bitterness, have also given his wit a finer edge and polish.  His sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slily allusive, that they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not very acute; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors of style, there can hardly be any wit more irresistible than Heine’s.  We may measure its force by the degree in which it has subdued the German language to its purposes, and made that language brilliant in spite of a long hereditary transmission of dulness.  As one of the most harmless examples of his satire, take this on a man who has certainly had his share of adulation:

The following “symbolical myth” about Louis Philippe is very characteristic of Heine’s manner:

One more quotation, and it must be our last:

“Oh the women!  We must forgive them much, for they love much—and many.  Their hate is properly only love turned inside out.  Sometimes they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they can in this way gratify another man.  When they write, they have always one eye on the paper and the other on a man; and this is true of all authoresses, except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who has only one eye.”