The same complexity of nature that made Heine an artist made him a humorist. But it was a more complicated complexity now, a cosmic game between the real world and the ideal world; he could go no further. The young Catullus of 1825, with his fiery passions crushed in the wine-press of life and yielding such divine ambrosia, soon lost his faith in passion. The militant soldier in the liberation-war of humanity of 1835 soon ceased to flourish his sword. It was only with the full development of his humour, when his spinal cord began to fail and he had taken up his position as a spectator of life, that Heine attained the only sort of unity possible to him—the unity that comes of a recognised and accepted lack of unity. In the lambent flames of this unequalled humour he bathed all the things he counted dearest; to its service he brought the secret of his poet's nature, the secret of speaking with a voice that every heart leaps up to answer. It is scarcely the humour of Aristophanes, though it is a greater force, even in moulding our political and social ideals, than Börne knew; it is oftener a modern development of the humour of the mad king and the fool in Lear—that humour which is the last concentrated word of the human organism under the lash of Fate.
And if it is still asked why Heine is so modern, it can only be said that these discords out of which his humour exhaled are those which we have nearly all of us known, and that he speaks with a voice that seems to arise from the depth of our own souls. He represents our period of transition; he gazed, from what[Pgxx] appeared the vulgar Pisgah of his day, behind on an Eden that was for ever closed, before on a promised land he should never enter. While with clear sight he announced things to come, the music of the past floated up to him; he brooded wistfully over the vision of the old Olympian gods, dying, amid faint music of cymbals and flutes, forsaken, in the mediæval wilderness; he heard strange sounds of psaltries and harps, the psalms of Israel, the voice of Princess Sabbath, sounding across the remote waters of Babylon.—In a few years this significance of Heine will be lost; that it is not yet lost the eagerness with which his books are read and translated sufficiently testifies.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
HEINE'S PROSE WORKS.
REISEBILDER.
IDEAS, OR THE BOOK LE GRAND.
[The Ideas, of which the chief portion is here presented, was published in 1826 in the second volume of the Reisebilder, or Travel-Pictures. The German title has been retained, as Heine himself retained it in the French translation. The translation here given is founded on Mr. Leland's; it has been carefully revised.]
CHAPTER I.
She was lovable, and he loved her. But he was not lovable, and she
did not love him.—Old Play.