Heinrich Heine[[1009]] did many wonderful and many delightful things; but though he certainly did many things more delightful, I do not know that he ever did anything more wonderful than in making Die Romantische Schule persuade divers folk that he, the author of the Nord-See in his morning, the author of Bimini when the night had almost fallen, was anything but a Romantic himself. This curious achievement shows the dangers that wait upon those who peruse his criticism. If they cannot remember that a man very frequently blasphemes, in jest or temper, what he loves and adores, if they have not graven on their souls Lamb’s lines which culminate in
“Not that she is truly so”—
they had much better not read Heine at all. For he will lead them into many foolish and hurtful errors, and direct them, as by his own account he actually did certain poor people in his impish days, to the sign of the Stone Jug as the most comfortable and respectable hotel in Göttingen.[[1010]]
In the Romantische Schule, and elsewhere.
To put at once out of controversy what ought never to have been in it, let any one compare the famous passage or passages in The Romantic School[[1011]] about the Schlegels, with all their fantastic and contemptuous satire, and the serious passage about them in the much less well-known article on Menzel.[[1012]] Nay, let any man accustomed to sift evidence compare the more serious part of the “Romantic School” passages themselves with the less serious ones, and he will not have much doubt left on the manner. Heine was not only one of those persons who “cannot get enough fighting,” but one of those who always prefer the most fantastic, the most unconventional, I fear one must in some cases say the most unsportsmanlike, tactics and methods. He would have liked the savate better than the formal rules of the English ring, with their pruderies about hitting below the belt and using your feet: and I think his favourite weapon would have been that ingenious Irish implement the Gae-Bulg, with which the great Cuchullain slew somebody else nearly as great whose name abides not with me—a short, many-barbed harpoon which you kicked from between your toes upwards, into the under and unprotected part of the opponent’s stomach. The Middle Ages were actually the most representative times of Christian literature: and had been made even too much of as such by the school he was attacking. This offended his Judaism, that equally passionate and unpractical form of religion. He knew—it is one of his great critical deliverances—that if the Romantic is not always the mediæval, the mediæval is almost always the Romantic. And so at times there was no mercy for mediævalism and Romanticism. At other times he went and wrote, or had already written, Don Ramiro and Das Liedchen von der Reue, and Mein süsses Lieb, wenn du im Grab, and Die alten bösen Lieder, and Ich bin die Prinzessin Ilse, and the best things in the Nord-See itself, and the nineteenth chapter of Atta Troll, and nearly the whole of the Romancero, and Bimini!
The qualities and delights of it.
With such a man the critical letter killeth, unless you crush the snake on the wound, and, as the scientific people say now (justifying, like all real new wisdom, the wisdom of old), set free the antidote which the snake’s own blood contains for its own safety against its venom. Never was any so liberal of this antidote, without even the trouble of crushing, so easy to charm, so self-charming, as Heine. As he says himself,[[1013]] “the laughter sticks in his throat,” too often and too evidently: and all but the dullest ears should hear the sob that chokes it. But, unfortunately, there are ears in this world that are dull of hearing; there are even several of them. And for these, as a critic, Heine is not.[[1014]]
For others he is perhaps the chief, and certainly one of the earliest, of those who have discovered that the Goddess of Criticism is really all the different Muses in turn, and that she can be Thalia as well as Clio. There is still an idea that the critic ought to be very serious: and this Heine certainly was not—at least consecutively—while he was not even quite master of his own seriousness when he had it. There is, for an Englishman, no more agreeable spectacle of the kind than the delightful struggle of Shakespeareolatry and Anglophobia in Shakespeare’s Mädchen und Frauen.[[1015]] All the Victor Hugo passages[[1016]] should be carefully compared, remembering of course that the half of Hugo had not been told to Heine. So should all the Goethe pieces,[[1017]] remembering, again, the interview, when the younger poet could find nothing to say to the elder but that the wayside plums between Jena and Weimar were good. Read him on Hoffmann and Novalis,[[1018]] and remember that it is not exactly everybody—not even every Heine (if indeed there could be more Heines than one)—that can appreciate Novalis and Hoffmann together. In fact read him everywhere: but whenever you begin to read him, remember two little sentences of his, and if you cannot understand and enjoy them, shut the book. The one is that[[1019]] about the orange-trees at Sans-Souci whereof “every one has its number, like a contributor to Brockhaus’s Konversationsblatte.” The other is the pronouncement that “without the Will of the Lord no sparrow falls from the housetop, and Government-Councillor Karl Streckfuss makes no verse.” These will serve as useful tuning-forks, and they are not difficult to carry about and use.