"Himmlisch war's, wenn ich bezwang
Meine sündige Begier;
Aber wenn's mir nicht gelang,
Hatt' ich doch ein gross Plaisir."[14]
[14] 'Twas heavenly joy to overcome
Each sinful wish and thought;
But when I couldn't, truth to tell,
That, too, much pleasure brought.
What we are most struck by in the poems of this division is the author's double gift of song and painting. Along with the capacity for producing those outbursts of mixed passion, which sound like the unaffected heart-cry of modern humanity, he here reveals a special talent for painting, for producing figures by means of light and shade and colour, without outline.
There is the scene in the lonely parsonage, with the disunited, despairing family (Der bleiche, herbstliche Halbmond). The son is determined to be a highway robber, the daughter has made up her mind to sell herself to the Count. With all its vividness, however, this scene is not one of the best. There is too much old-fashioned Romanticism in the idea of the dead father in his black robes standing outside, knocking at the window. The next poem, Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter, is a most masterly production. We see the little old woman hobbling across the street with her lantern late on the dark and stormy evening, to make purchases for her tall, beautiful daughter, who is lying in the arm-chair at home, blinking sleepily at the light, her golden locks falling over her sweet face—it is like an old Dutch painting.
Still finer is the group of eight poems which was the result of his stay at Cuxhaven. Wir sassen am Fischerhause is a little marvel of artistic ability—that talk with the girls, sitting outside the fisherman's hut, in which far-off India and Ultima Thule are described in a few words: "By the Ganges all is brightness and fragrance, giant trees blossom, and beautiful, tranquil men and women kneel to the lotus flowers. In Lapland the people are dirty and small; their heads are flat and their mouths are wide; they cower round the fire, roast fish, and screech and scream."
Then there are merry poems, treating of light characters like the girl whom he searches for through the whole town and finds in a fashionable hotel, and the girl in whose heart the blue hussars are quartered.
And lastly, there are single epigrammatic verses, which every one now knows by heart, but which, at the time they appeared, gave great offence and made enemies for their author. Especially noteworthy is the famous:
"Selten habt ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich euch,
Nur wenn wir im Koth uns fanden,
So verstanden wir uns gleich."[15]
[15] Little by thee comprehended,
Little knew I thee, good brother;
When we in the mud descended
Soon we understood each other.
(LELAND.)
It is incomprehensible that this verse should ever have been regarded as a confession of unclean instincts. It only applies to those who find their way straight to any exceptionable or indecent passage in a book, as the sow finds her way to the mire, and stops there. That it never occurred to Heine that he was making any admission of having desired to appeal to his reader's sensual instincts or cynic tendencies is best proved by the poem which immediately follows on the lines in question, the one beginning: