Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/661

HEINE 627 Romanzero (1851) and Neueste GedicJite (1853-54), as well as for the various pieces posthumously published in //. Heine s Letzte Gedichte und Gedanken. It was from his "mattress-grave" too that the dying man put forth his Gestdudnisse or Confessions, the psychological interest of which is very great, whatever their claim to trustworthiness may b3. Heine bore the misery of his protracted death-bed with fortitude, nay, with cheerfulness, assiduously attended by his wife Mathilde, and towards the end by that mysterious lady whom he called " Die Mouche," and who was, it now appears, a Madame Krinitz ; and there are many anecdotes on record of his bearing in the midst of his trials and heavier trials seldom fell to the lot of man which go far to prove that he possessed a healthy fond gaillard, for which his writings are scarcely likely to gain him credit. 11 j died on the 17th February 1856 in Paris, in the Hue d Amstariam, and lies buried in the cemetery of Mont- rnartre. We have called Heine "poet and journalist"; but his reput ition has, naturally enough, now come to rest almost exclusively upon his poetry, and above all upon his songs the Buck der Lieder having passed through upwards of twenty-five editions. This great popularity may no do abt (and espe3ially in foreign countries) be attributable, to a certain extent, to the singular good fortune which has wedded to very many of these songs the music of such composers as Schumann and Mendelssohn. But still, when all delusions upon this score are made, and the true view of the matter probably is that the poet and his composers are mutually obliged, the fact remains that Heine is one of the great song-writers of the world, not unworthy of a place beside Burns and Beranger. although far less mascu line and passionate than the one, and far less jovial and debonair than the other. The intense individualism which prevented him from ever becoming a literary artist in any other department his dramas and essays in fiction are worthless stood him in excellent stead in the lyric field, was a positive and essential strength indeed, for, after all, a song to appaal to men s hearts must be an utterance of personal experience. And this condition is amply fulfilled in the Bach der Lieder, the greater portion of which was the direct outcome of a sentiment entertained by the poet for one of his cousins a sentiment, by the way, which has been alluded to by German writers as a mere Cousinen- sch warmer ei, while others (not Germans) have affirmed that all Heine s bitterness and cynicism in after life arose from its having remained unrequited. On the whole, Heine as a song-writer is a fit descendant of Walther von der Vogel- weide and those old Minnesanger who of yore assembled in the halls of princes, and recounted their sorrows and their joys of those nameless bards, too, who sang the Volkslieder ; and when all his other writings are forgotten, he will be remembered by such imperishable gems as " Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne;" " Auf Flugeln des Gesanges ;" and " Du bist wie eine Blume." There is much, too, of great beauty in many of his ballads and narrative pieces ; witness among others, "Spanische Atriden," "Die Prinzessin Sab bat," "Jehuda-ben-Halevy," "Boses Getraume" a piece of the most exquisite pathos and simplicity and " Die Insel Bimini." But too often, no matter how sweet a chord is strusk at the beginning, a dissonance creeps in, to end in a crashing discord, and the outraged reader starts like one who should suddenly see Romeo and Juliet fall to grimacing and squeaking like Punch and Judy. Heine s confession that poetry was no more than his " holy plaything" would have been entitled to our unqualified acceptance had he omitted the adjective. But when we turn to his prose-writings to his "journal ism," that is to say, for, as we have remarked, almost all his prose falls under this category, in its widest acceptation we see the man Heine indeed, not perhaps, as he was ambitious of being regarded by posterity, in the full panoply of a " soldier of human emancipation," but at any rate as no contemptible assailant of obscurantism and philistinism. Beside such a redoubtable champion of the catholic reason of mankind as Lessing "of the ponderous battle-axe," he looks somewhat smal!, it is true, and his rapier somewhat gim- crack. But ridicule will often reach whither heavier weapons cannot, and pierce the elephantine hide of pedantry and dulness, after these have been attacked in vain by battering- rams ; and Heine was a master of it. The worst is that in unscrupulous hands and no one was more unscrupulous than he it may be turned to illegitimate uses, and come to be indulged in finally for its own sake. How easily Heine became the slave of his propensity in this direc tion may be seen in the two works which seem his best and most characteristic writings, notwithstanding Zur GescMchte der Religion und Philosophic in Deutschland and Die Romantische Schule. Both these abound in the most irreverent passages, especially the former, wherein such philosophers as Kant, Fichte, and Schelling scarcely serve a higher purpose than to be used as pegs whereon the writer may hang his jests. And admirable these are. Nothing can be better, for instance, than his account of how Kant (who is parenthetically described as a man whom Nature intended to sell coffee and sugar across a counter) came to postulate a Deity in his practical, after having exploded that idea in his theoretical, system. He did this, says Heine (most adroitly hitting one of the chief opprobria, scientifi cally regarded, of the critical philosophy), for the sake of his old man-servant Lampe, who looked so dismally at the conclusions of the Pure Reason that the philosopher was moved to compassion ! The Romantische Schule, being concerned for the most part with its author s contem poraries, is far more virulent than the treatise just men tioned, but equally happy ; and it aimed a death-blow at a school which rivalled the wildest and most licentious ravings of a Monk Lewis and the most stilted horrors of an Ann Radcliff. And here it may be said, in connexion with the attack upon Schlegel occurring in this essay, that Heine s onslaughts were always open and above-board, unmerciful and sometimes grossly brutal as they were. He was a literary swashbuckler, it may be (though that term is singularly inapplicable to one who wrote in such a style), but he was neither a literary assassin nor a literary ghoul. Even his attack upon Borne was really aimed, as we have said, at men who were alive to resent it ; and it was resented, though from a strange quarter. Borne s widow s husband challenged Heine, and the latter was slightly wounded in the encounter. Of the Reisebilder, Heine s most voluminous and best- known prose work, and that which originally gave him fame, small space remains to speak. But if we except its first and third books, it has been greatly overrated. It is easy to understand the popularity it acquired upon its first appearance, falling as it did like a breath of genuine life upon a land well-nigh asphyxiated by high art and the " Hiibsch-Objectiv " but nowadays, notwithstanding its undoubted mirth-provoking qualities, it chiefly serves to point out the gulf which was fixed between its author and him who took the Sentimental Journey. The most that can be said for it is that Sterne might have written it had he been a German Jew. The best edition of Heine s works is that published by Hoffmann and Campe, Heinrich Heine s Sammtliche Werke, 20 vols., Ham burg, 1865. Another edition has appeared in America, Ilcinrich Heine s Sammtliche Werke, in 7 vols. Heinrich Heine s Lcben, by Adolph Strodtmann, Berlin, 1870, is the only Life of Heine entitled to consideration, although the pleasure of reading it is certainly marred by its length. A biography of the poet has also appeared

in England, Life and Opinions of Heinrich Heine, by W. Stigand,