Heine liked his place of exile, France. It was a Promised Land for Children of the Spirit. He hated England, because England did not possess mental flexibility. Lermontov, the Russian poet, disliked England too, and for the same reason.
In Heine there was the broad culture of Germany, lightness of the Latin, and the commanding passion of the Hebrew. The first thing I did in Paris, was to search out his grave. No one in Paris was more alive, more real, than he.
He blended the sad, serious, comic, light, in much the same way as Gogol. This too is trait of Hungarians.
There were many men of stormy revolutionary mind in Heine’s day. The spirit of Byron was abroad in the world. That which we call modernism, was breaking through prejudice.
The last time Heine went out of doors, he staggered to the Louvre, in order to look once more upon his beloved Venus. He burst into tears at the sight. I wonder if he recalled then his youth’s proud, boastful words: “I have never had but two loves: Venus, and the French Revolution!” What did he think when worn to a ghost he lay dying, and they intoned beside him the hoary desert songs of Judea?
Heine and Goethe, when they met repelled each other. How could two men be more dissimilar! Goethe was Greek; Heine, first of the moderns. The Hebrew is the only man who is ever able accurately to estimate the day in which he lives. Not geographical spaces, but centuries lay between Goethe and Heine. He is the only one who can focus, with perspective, the present.
Paris was full of commanding figures during Heine’s exile. There were Ary Scheffer, and Delacroix. Horace Vernet was exhibiting for the first time. Felix Mendelssohn, an old friend of Heine’s from Berlin, was here; Malebran, Rossini, Meyerbeer. There was a brilliant crowd of exiled Poles. Liszt and Chopin were both here. It was an engaging Paris. It has at no time been greater. And Heine was not least; slender, handsome, blond, young, reading aloud his verses in the salons of fashion, the verses whose structure he had learned from Uhland. He knew Victor Hugo, de Musset, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Beranger. 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.
Liszt said, in describing rare evenings spent at Chopin’s, when Chopin consented to play to his friends: “Heine, the saddest of humorists listened with the interest of a fellow countryman to the narrations made by Chopin of the mysterious country which haunted his ethereal fancy, and of which he, too, had explored the beautiful shores. At a word, at a glance, at a tone, Chopin and Heine could understand each other: The musician replied to questions murmured in his ear by the poet, giving in tones the most surprising revelations from unknown regions, about that glorious goddess, Genius.” Ziem used to look in upon these evenings at the home of Chopin, whenever he could tear himself away, for any length of time, from the alluring City by the Adriatic, he painted again and again.