Heine, as we see, has disdained all explanations. We enjoy the marvellous conciseness of these monumental words, this power as it were of hewing out the speech in stone. But what, on closer investigation, is the spiritual substance of the poem? Not much more than a laconic combination of the words love and death. It is the same combination that is to be found in all Heine's youthful poems, in the shape of love and suffering, love and poison, love and suicide—in Alfred de Musset, too, there is the same stereotyped coupling of l'amour and la mort.
Here, as in general with Heine, the expression is epigrammatic, therefore quite simple.
We have now sufficient material before us to give us a certain insight into the formation of Heine's poetic style. It will be interesting to study it finished and fully developed.
We may start from the last-mentioned poem with its epigrammatic point. It is characteristic of Heine that neither here nor elsewhere does he deeply concern himself with the true inwardness of a feeling; he only, as a rule, points and sharpens the expression of it. This is the case even with the feeling of love, which he has treated more frequently than any other. And it is characteristic of his want of the power to put himself in another's place, that it has only been possible for him to give expression to masculine love; he has never put a passionate utterance of feeling into the mouth of a woman.
Nothing would have been more impossible for Heine than to write such a poem as Goethe's famous:
"Freudvoll und leidvoll,
Gedankenvoll sein,
Langen und bangen
In schwebender Pein,
Himmelhoch jauchzend,
Zum Tode betrübt,
Glücklich allein
Ist die Seele die liebt."[12]
[12] Gladness
And sadness
And pensiveness blending;
Yearning
And burning
In torment ne'er ending;
Sad unto death,
Proudly soaring above,
Happy alone
Is the soul that doth love.
(BOWRING)
For this is the living delineation of a woman's heart, this is the very inner life of love, its pulsation, its oscillation between bliss and woe. The epigrammatic quality of Heine's style alone would make such an unfolding of the emotional life impossible. And there is the same concentration when he narrates an event. It is a condensation without parallel in poetry; he produces his effect by making the briefest possible statement or suggestion. As an example of this take the lines:
"Es war ein alter König,
Sein Herz war schwer, sein Haupt war grau;
Der arme, alte König
Er nahm eine junge Frau.
Es war ein schöner Page,
Blond war sein Haupt, leicht war sein Sinn,
Er trug die seid'ne Schleppe
Der jungen Königin."[13]
[13] There was an aged monarch,
His heart was sad, his head was grey;
This foolish, fond old monarch
A young wife took one day.
There was a handsome page, too,
Fair was his hair and light his mien;
The silken train he carried
Of the beautiful young queen.