This is felt even in such small poems as the one already referred to as containing the talk in the fisherman's cottage about the Ganges and Lapland.
Think too of the way in which Heine calls up the image of Napoleon before his readers. In the Two Grenadiers it has the effect of a vision. The words, "Dann reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab" ('Tis my Emperor riding, right over my grave), are like a revelation in the darkness of night, illuminated by the glitter of swords. In the equally admirable description in the Reisebilder, the vision is conjured up in the form of a recollection of childhood.
Or remember how Heine brings the image of Jesus before us. In the poem Frieden ("Peace") he sees him, robed in glittering white, striding over the waves. In Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), he paints a grey, winter morning on the Paderborn heath; when the mist rises, he sees by the side of the road, in the dawning light, a wooden crucifix with the image of the great enthusiast, who desired to save mankind, and now hangs there "as a warning to others."
"Sie haben dir übel mitgespielt,
Die Herren vom hohen Rathe."[10]
[10] A sorry trick they played thee indeed,
The lords of the council stately.
(BOWRING)
The heart-felt sadness, the bitter humour, that find expression in familiar, disparaging comment, heighten the impression of human grandeur, of solemn horror, much as this same impression is intensified when Hamlet, hearing his father's ghost under ground, calls: "Well said, old mole! Canst work i' the earth so fast?" In the flash of Heine's wit the reader sees Jesus, not now as the Prince of Peace, but as the man who scourged the desecrators of the Temple and sent fire upon earth.
The Winter 's Tale is, taken as a whole, a characteristic example of Heine's artistic procedure. All the twenty-seven divisions of the long poem are constructed on the same plan. They begin close to earth, materially, with reminiscences of travel, vulgar realistic impressions; then the writer, without warning, by unnoticeable transitions, rises to the height of passion, to powerful pathos, wild contempt, glowing admiration, destructive or constructive enthusiasm, divine madness that, as it were, rolls thunderbolt on thunderbolt; and then all sinks back once more into the grey dulness of everyday events and situations.
Heine arrives at Cologne, sups on an omelet and ham, drinks a bottle of Rhenish wine, and then saunters out into the streets. He calls the town's past days to mind: here the priests had free play, here men and books were burned at the stake; here stupidity and malice wantoned like dogs on the open street. Suddenly in the moonlight the Cathedral, the great spiritual Bastille, appears to his sight and arouses his wrath. As he saunters along, he catches sight of a figure behind him which it seems to him he ought to know. And now we glide into a perfectly new world, the world of vision. The figure follows him as if it were his shadow, stopping when he stops. He has often noticed it beside him before, when he sat late at night at his desk. Under its cloak it holds, and always has held, something that glitters strangely and that resembles an axe, an executioner's axe. This figure is the poet's lictor, who follows his master, instead of preceding him as the Roman lictor did.
In the succeeding divisions Barbarossa reveals himself in the same visionary style, coming and going twice.
Heine is an epoch-maker, not only in German lyric poetry, but in poetry in general. He introduced a new style, the combination of sentiment and humour in lyric poetry, and a new idea, the introduction of prose into poetry, either by way of foil or by way of parody. His position as epoch-maker is due to his historic position, to his having lived at the period when Romantic perversion of reality was giving way to pessimistic realism; this explains the fusion of the two elements which we find in his writings.