Hence, too, it comes that the most characteristic domain in the province of his art is the domain of chiaroscuro, a chiaroscuro akin to Rembrandt's.
To make the central objects stand out from the shadow or half-darkness in which they are concealed; to make light, natural light, produce a ghostly, supernatural effect by conjuring it forth from a sea of dark shadow-waves, bringing it flickering or flaring out of half-darkness; to make darkness penetrable, half-darkness transparent—this is Rembrandt's art.
Heine's, which is closely related, consists in gradually, imperceptibly, conjuring forth out of the world of reality, and back into it again, a perfectly modern, fantastic dreamworld.
At times the vision is in a full blaze of light, and the reality hidden in black darkness; but presently the vision fades, and the reality gradually emerges into the light.
[XV]
HEINE AND GOETHE
It has already been mentioned that Heine, when a student in Bonn, conceived an enthusiastic admiration for the founder of the Romantic school. A. W. Schlegel's personality was as attractive to him as his teaching. In Schlegel, Heine admired the man who had guided German poetry from artificiality to truth. He was dazzled, too, by the fashionable professor's aristocratic bearing, his knowledge of the world, his acquaintance with the good society and famous people of the day.
He was also touched by the kindly interest which Schlegel showed in himself and his first literary efforts. It was to Schlegel that he was indebted for his early initiation into the secrets of metrical art, and for something more valuable still, confidence in his own powers and his future.
In Heine's first prose article, that on Romanticism, written in 1820, he expresses his gratitude and makes his Romantic confession of faith in the same breath. He protests against the idea of Romanticism being "a mixture of Spanish enamel, Scotch mists, and Italian jingle"; no, Romantic poetry ought not to be obscure and vague; its images may be as plastic in contour as those of classic poetry. "Hence it is," he writes, "that our two greatest Romanticists, Goethe and A. W. Schlegel, are at the same time our greatest plastic artists." And he names Goethe's Faust and Schlegel's Rome in the same breath, as models of plastic outline, concluding pathetically: "O, that those who love to call themselves Schlegelians would lay this to heart!" This passage should be noted by those whose only knowledge of Heine's connection with Schlegel is derived from the low attack on the latter's private life in Die Romantische Schule. It was to A. W. Schlegel, moreover, that Heine addressed his three first sonnets. In the earliest he thanks him for his personal kindness, and declares his own great indebtedness to him; in the second he extols him for the service which he has rendered to German poetry by banishing that caricature in hoop and patches which in his day figured as the Muse; in the third he praises him for his introduction of English, Spanish, early German, Italian, and Indian poetry into modern German literature. The tone is enthusiastic: