Heine chose for himself the sword of the soldier rather than the poet's laurel, but he chose to fight alone, and the nineteenth century is not the age nor its society the field for single-handed combat. That he seems to have felt this himself, one of his latest poems from the Romancero will show. I give it in Lord Houghton's admirable translation: it is called
ENFANT PERDU.
In Freedom's war of "Thirty Years" and more A lonely outpost have I held in vain, With no triumphant hope or prize in store, Without a thought to see my home again.
I watched both day and night: I could not sleep Like my well-tented comrades far behind, Though near enough to let their snoring keep A friend awake if e'er to doze inclined.
And thus, when solitude my spirits shook, Or fear—for all but fools know fear sometimes— To rouse myself and them I piped, and took A gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes.
Yes, there I stood, my musket always ready, And when some sneaking rascal showed his head My eye was vigilant, my aim was steady, And gave his brains an extra dose of lead.
But war and justice have far different laws, And worthless acts are often done right well: The rascals' shots were better than their cause, And I was hit—and hit again, and fell!
That outpost is abandoned: while the one Lies in the dust, the rest in troops depart. Unconquered, I have done what could be done, With sword unbroken and with broken heart.
This little poem represents rather pathetically, and in a certain sense the limitations of Heine's genius; for it is impossible not to feel that his genius never found its highest expression—that confined within a narrower channel its force would have been irresistible where now it is only brilliantly dispersive. It seems as if literature in its proper sense had lost something by Heine's personal enlistment in all the conflicts of his day—as if the man of ideas had tried to approach too closely and too curiously to the realities of life, and had only succeeded in bringing into glaring prominence the irreconcilable nature of the forces at work in the world and in ourselves; and never was reconcilement less possible between the real and the ideal than at the time of which we speak. This is the meaning of the Weltschmerz and the maladie du siècle of which we hear so much, and everything seemed to conspire to render Heine its chief representative.
But a negative judgment is not enough for a final estimate of Heinrich Heine. Much of his service to literature and to mankind was of a very positive character. As a man of letters he created a prose style unequalled in clearness and brilliancy by anything previously known in German literature—Goethe's prose is ponderous in comparison—and its influence will be felt long after certain of its mannerisms have passed into oblivion. His wit is destined to immortality by reason of the serious purpose that underlies it. It has a spontaneity which no wit exercised merely for its own ends can ever have. Those who call Heine frivolous and a mocker, simply because he can jest at serious things, can only know him very superficially or else must be ignorant of the real part which humor has to play in the world. Perhaps there never was a writer who shook himself so free of all conventionalities of style. His very mannerisms—and his writings abound in them—have a spontaneity about them, and only become affectations in the innumerable imitations which cluster around all his literary productions. This is his service to literature: his service to posterity was as great. He did some goodly service in the "War of Liberation of humanity," if in no other way, by setting the example of a man who could speak unflinchingly for principles at a time when such utterance was not easy.