HEINE
There can be little doubt that nothing has been more injurious to Heine's general reputation than his indiscreet loquacity on sexual subjects. Whole groups of his poems are in ill repute on this account; those, for instance, which compose the collection Verschiedene (Various), most of which have been unjustly condemned, although there are certainly some which are anything but sublime in their theme or refined in their treatment of it. In Der Gott und die Bajadere ("The God and the Bayadere") Goethe had shown how even a very equivocal subject can be ennobled by sublimity of style. And even when, as in the Venetian epigrams, he treats of Bayaderes who are certainly not purified by love, and dwells upon the poet's relations with them, the antique metre in itself produces the effect of distance, and we are not offended by any objectionable word. These few epigrams, too, lie almost buried in the mass of Goethe's writings. Moreover, in reading them, we feel that he is the man whom nature created in order that she might learn from him what she is like in her entirety.
With Heine, communicativeness on the subject of his relations with the other sex occupies too important a place, and is not always in good taste. It gains him ten readers for one whom it alienates, but it sometimes happens that the one thus lost was worth more than the ten gained.
And yet this frankness is, in a manner, his strength. It need not have been so personal, but it is quite indispensable in one who desires to compass not only the tragic, but also the comic hemisphere. And in this quality, and in his many shameless personal attacks, he resembles the greatest comic poet of all times.
Towards the end of his Winter's Tale, immediately after the wanton passage in which he smells out the future of Germany by putting his head down the opening of Charlemagne's night-throne, he declares that the noblest of the Graces have tuned the strings of his lyre, and that this lyre is the same which was sounded in days gone by, by his father, "the late Aristophanes, the favourite of the Muses," He adds that in his last chapter he has attempted to imitate The Birds, "the best of father's dramas."
He thus, we observe, prided himself on artistic descent from the greatest comic poet of ancient Greece.
For a moment we are taken aback. Other German poets, such as Platen and Prutz, have imitated the form of the Aristophanic comedy, its trimeters, choruses, parabases, the whole of that irregular and yet regular form of art built up by the Greek comic school; but Heine never even made an attempt to master this poetical form, or any other. It is characteristic of him that, persevering and conscientious as he was in ensuring the telling precision of the single metrical or prose expression (I never saw a manuscript with so many corrections as that of his Atta Troll, in the Royal Library of Berlin), it was impossible for him to submit to the artistic restriction of any of the great poetic forms. It tallies with this, that in his longer works the plan of the whole is quite vague, but every single line has been gone through again and again.
There is probably no exaggeration in saying that he never, in his capacity as an artist, set himself a task and carried it out.
Once only he attempted to write a long, connected prose work, a romance or novel. Whether, as some maintain, the greater part of the manuscript was destroyed by a fire, or whether, as I for one believe, the work was never completed, the fact remains that all we have of it is a fragment. And even this fragment, Der Rabbi von Bacharach, is, when carefully examined, nothing but a very much antedated transcription of Heine's own private experiences.
Nor did he ever attempt a severely connected metrical composition. His only long poems, Atta Troll and Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), are irregular, whimsical fantasies, soap-bubbles rocked upon cobweb tissue of the brain, only connected by a uniformity of tone and design.