HEINRICH HEINE

From 'Portraits and Studies'

About no recent poet has so much been said and sung as about Heinrich Heine. The youngest writer, who for the first time tries his pen, does not neglect to sketch with uncertain outlines the portrait of this poet; and the oldest sour-tempered professor of literature, who turns his back upon the efforts of the present with the most distinguished disapproval, lets fall on the picture a few rays of light, in order to prove the degeneration of modern literature in the Mephistophelean features of this its chief. Heine's songs are everywhere at home. They are to be found upon the music rack of the piano, in the school-books, in the slender libraries of minor officers and young clerks. However difficult it may be to compile an editio castigata of his poems, every age, every generation has selected from among them that which has delighted it. Citations from Heine, winged words in verse and prose, buzz through the air of the century like a swarm of insects: splendid butterflies with gayly glistening wings, beautiful day moths and ghostly night moths, tormenting gnats, and bees armed with evil stings. Heine's works are canonical books for the intellectual, who season their judgments with citations from this poet, model their conversation on his style, interpret him, expand the germ cell of his wit to a whole fabric of clever developments. Even if he is not a companion on the way through life, like great German poets, and smaller Brahmins who for every day of our house-and-life calendar give us an aphorism on the road, there are nevertheless, in the lives of most modern men, moods with which Heine's verse harmonize with wondrous sympathy; moments in which the intimacy with this poet is greater than the friendship, even if this be of longer duration, with our classic poets.

It is apparently idle to attempt to say anything new of so much discussed a singer of modern times, since testimony favorable and unfavorable has been drained to exhaustion by friend and foe. Who does not know Heine,—or rather, who does not believe that he knows him? for, as is immediately to be added, acquaintance with this poet extends really only to a few of his songs, and to the complete picture which is delivered over ready-made from one history of literature into another. Nothing, however, is more perilous and more fatal than literary tradition! Not merely decrees and laws pass along by inheritance, like a constitutional infirmity, but literary judgments too. They form at last a subject of instruction like any other; a dead piece of furniture in the spiritual housekeeping, which, like everything that has been learned, is set as completed to one side. We know enough of this sort of fixed pictures, which at last pass along onward as the fixed ideas of a whole epoch, until a later unprejudiced investigation dissolves this rigid-grown wisdom, sets it to flowing, and forms out of a new mixture of its elements a new and more truthful portrait.

It is not to be affirmed however that Heine's picture, as it stands fixed and finished in the literature and the opinion of the present, is mistaken and withdrawn. It is dead, like every picture; there is lacking the living, changing play of features. We have of Heine only one picture before us; of our great poets several. Goethe in his "storm and stress," in Frankfurt, Strassburg, and Wetzlar,—the ardent lover of a Friedrike of Sesenheim, the handsome, joyous youth, is different in our minds from the stiff and formal Weimar minister; the youthful Apollo different from the Olympic Jupiter. There lies a young development between, that we feel and are curious to know. It is similar with Schiller. The poet of the 'Robbers' with its motto In tyrannos, the fugitive from the military school; and the Jena professor, the Weimar court councilor who wrote 'The Homage of the Arts,'—are two different portraits.

But Heine is to our view always the same, always the representative of humor with "a laughing tear" in his escutcheon, always the poetic anomaly, coquetting with his pain and scoffing it away. Young or old, well or ill, we do not know him different.

And yet this poet too had a development, upon which at different times different influences worked....

The first epoch in this course of development may be called the "youthful"; the 'Travel Pictures' and the lyrics contained in it form its brilliant conclusion. This is no storm-and-stress period in the way that, as Schiller and Goethe passed through it, completed works first issued under its clarifying influence. On the contrary, it is characteristic of Heine that we have to thank this youthful epoch for his best and most peculiarly national poems. The wantonness and the sorrows of this youth, in their piquant mixture, created these songs permeated by the breath of original talent, whose physiognomy, more than all that follow later, bears the mark of the kind and manner peculiar to Heine, and which for a long time exercised in our literature through a countless host of imitators an almost epidemic effect. But these lyric pearls, which in their purity and their crystalline polish are a lasting adornment of his poet's crown, and belong to the lyric treasures of our national literature, were also gathered in his first youthful epoch, when he still dived down into the depths of life in the diving-bell of romanticism.

Although Heinrich Heine asserted of himself that he belonged to the "first men of the century," since he was born in the middle of New Year's night, 1800, more exact investigation has nevertheless shown that truth is here sacrificed to a witticism. Heine is still a child of the eighteenth century, by whose most predominant thoughts his work too is influenced, and with whose European coryphæus, Voltaire, he has an undeniable relationship. He was born, as Strodtmann proves, on the 13th of December, 1799, in Düsseldorf, His father was a plain cloth-merchant; his mother, of the family Von Geldern, the daughter of a physician of repute. The opinion, however, that Heine was the fruit of a Jewish-Christian marriage, is erroneous. The family Von Geldern belonged to the orthodox Jewish confession. One of its early members, according to family tradition, although he was a Jew, had received the patent of nobility from one of the prince electors of Jülich-Kleve-Berg, on account of a service accorded him. As, moreover, Schiller's and Goethe's mothers worked upon their sons an appreciable educational influence, so was this also the case with Heine's mother, who is described as a pupil of Rousseau and an adorer of Goethe's elegies, and thus reached far out beyond the measure of the bourgeois conditions in which she lived....