As far as nature was concerned, Goethe seemed to have exhausted everything. His love for every living thing, his feeling of kinship with animals and plants, his persuasion that the human being is one with all other beings, his intuition of the unity that underlies perpetual change of form—this gift of resolving all nature into feeling was his earliest characteristic. It was soon superseded, or rather supplemented, by his capacity for observing and reproducing natural scenes without any ascription of his own feelings to them. He studies nature, becomes an observer and investigator, and finally, thanks to the steadily increasing profundity of his observation, in combination with his genial intuition, an epoch-making discoverer in two great domains of natural science. We see him pass through all the phases of a great mind in its relation to nature—the emotional, the religious-pantheistic, the poetic-scientific—and see him in the end lay such exclusive stress upon material impressions that he thrusts all that is psychical from him as merely disturbing. His views become more and more positive and realistic. In his essay on granite he writes: "I do not fear the reproach of its being a spirit of contradiction that has led me from the observation and delineation of the human heart, that youngest, most multiform, most mobile, most changeable part of creation, that which it is easiest to unsettle and to shake, to the observation of nature's oldest, firmest, deepest, most immovable son"[18] —namely, granite.
[18] Goethe: Werke, xxxiii. 164.
In what domain was it still possible for a German poet to display fresh, original understanding of nature? From the human heart to granite Goethe had embraced them all.
There was one left. Goethe had never sung the sea. He saw it for the first time when he was nearly forty, in Venice, from the Lido. "I heard a loud noise," he writes; "it was the sea, and I soon saw it, rolling high waves up the beach, as it drew back. It was midday and ebb-tide. At last, then, I have seen the sea also with my own eyes." A little further on we come upon the short sentence: "Yes, the sea is a wonderful sight." In the Fifth Act of the Second Part of Faust, where the sea and navigation are touched on, it is less the sea itself that is in question than the rescuing of land from it and the making of canals. This was all that Goethe had written about the sea.
In Heine's North Sea poems we hear, for the first time in German poetry, the roar of the ocean, with all its freshness and in all its might. Here for the first time we have shells in the sand beneath our feet, and sea-gulls in the air above us. The sea is painted in storm and calm, from the shore and from the ship, by day and by night, with the peace that at times lies over it, and with the madness of the hurricane; we have the sweet day-dreams to which it gives rise, and also the sea-sickness; there arise from its depths and there hover over its expanse a whole company of mythic figures, old and new, old that have been metamorphosed into new, a world of gods and goddesses, Tritons and Oceanides, at times pathetic, more frequently burlesque. And yet there is comparatively little description; it is the poet's own memories, griefs, and hopes that fill these poems. And it is his intense longing to be able to breathe freely that breaks forth in the famous cry with which the ten thousand Greeks, after their long and terrible march, hailed the element that spoke to them of home: "Thalatta! Thalatta!—I salute thee, O eternal sea!"
Amongst these poems are some of Heine's most beautiful and unforgettable. First there is the humorously frivolous idyll Die Nacht am Strande ("Night by the Seashore"); the poet's visit to the pretty fisherman's daughter, with the masterly description of her appearance, as she sits bending over the fire:
"Dass die flackernd rothen Lichter
Zauberlieblich wiederstrahlen
Auf das glühende Antlitz,
Auf die zarte, weisse Schulter,
Die rührend hervorlauscht
Aus dem groben, grauen Hemde,
Und auf die kleine, sorgsame Hand,
Die das Unterröckchen fester bindet
Um die feine Hüfte."[19]
[19] Till the flashing, ruddy flame-rays
Shine again in magic lustre
On her glowing countenance,
On the soft and snow-white shoulder
Which so touchingly peers out
From its coarse grey linen covering,
And on the busy little hand
Which is fastening the garment
That conceals her slender limbs.
(Adapted from LELAND.)
Then we come on a poem which is unique in its lyric vigour, Erklärung ("Declaration"), to that Agnes whose name the poet would fain write on the dark vault of heaven with the highest fir of Norway, dipped in the crater of Etna. And there is also the little, reflective poem Fragen ("Questions"), admirable in its pregnant brevity, which gives us an idea of the mood in which Heine conceived the foolhardy idea of writing a "Faust," after Goethe, a plan which he actually did not hesitate to mention to Goethe himself, when he visited him in Weimar. In some of these North Sea poems, and that even when he is belittling and sneering at himself, there is a repellent tone of self-satisfaction. Amongst those which are quite free from it, must be mentioned that masterly piece of pure humour, Im Hafen ("In Harbour"), the immortal fantasy of the Town Cellar of Bremen, in which Heine, whose sobriety was almost equivalent to total abstinence, gives us a most irresistible picture of a clever man's merry carouse.