GERMANY AND HEINE.
"THE Spirit of the World," said Matthew Arnold in his poem on "Ileine's Grave," "beholding the absurdi- ties of men," let for one brief moment a sardonic smile play on his face, and "that smile was Heine." An excellent epigrammatic characterisation, like so many of Arnold's, but also, like his, only partially true. If, without irreverence, we can think of the Divine Being as not only grieved at man's wickedness, but amused at his folly (and the Hebrew prophets could so think), doubtless few writers since literature began have been better able to hint at that side of the Infinite Mind than Heine. But the present volume before us, the "Bach der Lieder," just issued by Messrs. J. M. Dent and Co. in the original German, reminds us of the many-sidedness of Heine's nature. This brilliant mocker could be tender as a child, this wonderful force in European literature could dissolve in hot tears. Arnold, misunderstanding a reference of Goethe's, seemed to think that Heine lacked the spirit of love. It was an error, as truly so as to make the charge against Goethe himself,—and we know that that charge has been made. Here, in this little volume, are songs of sorrow and yearning, songs of romance from one who knew not a little of the intricate labyrinths of the heart, lyrics, songs of Nature from the Harz and by the North Sea. The subtle intertwining of human emotion and of sentiments born of the idealising of Nature is as striking as in the poetry of Shelley.
Heine was as truly a wunder-kind and a welt-kind as Goethe. These two are the great cosmopolitan .intellectual forces. cif Germany. Leasing, the true founder of Modern German litera- ture, though so well acquainted with French and English work, was national. So was Schiller, so were the lesser lights, Klop- stock, Gellert, Korner, Uhland. But Goethe and Heine, like Shakespeare and Moliere, belong to mankind, and can never be enclosed in any national ring-fence. Still, they were German, one wholly, the other in part, and the conditions of German life under which each was born helped to make him what he was, while in turn each bequeathed to Germany a rich legacy. While Goethe came from the old, peaceful Germany of the eighteenth century, classical, somewhat frigid, but with a new sentimentalism, to burst out in the sturm und drang passion, simple, and even poor, but with a rich historical tradition and a great Gothic inheritance, Heine was of the nineteenth century, with its vehement democratic energy, its spirit of rebellion, its sceptical questioning strangely blended with spiritual yearning after faith and peace. Prophet and poet of intellectual and political liberty, champion of modern ideal, we might even say; revolte, Heine could yet stand in rapture before the sculptured portals of Rheims Cathedral and declare that no such noble embodiment of human aspiration could be born but in an age of faith. How, curiously fascinating were the seemingly unassimilable elements which yet were blended in this man's personality. The keen intellect of the Jew with the tender sentiment of the Teuton; the fierce contempt for all the absurdities of the old European lumber-house of worn- out antiquities ; the intense convictions of the modern democrat with the high intellectual scorn for the mediocrity and bourgeois instincts which democracy has up to the present evolved,—all these conflicting tendencies were fighting within the perplexed soul and diseased body of this extraorainary man during the troubled fever of his earthly life. Had Byron been endowed with greater intellectual power he would have been perhaps the nearest analogue of Heine in our own literary history. But Byron, es Goethe said, was a mere child when it came to reflection. Heine felt with -the intense passion of Byron, but he had a power of intellectual analyeis, a capacity for viewing the world, which Byron, with all his genius, sincerity, and strength, never knew.
If we dissociate Heine from literature pure and simple, and connect him with the world-movement of his time, we must think of him as the unique figure around whom cluster the hopes, fears, aspirations of 1848, just as we must think of his brilliant compatriot Lassalle as the pioneer of the more mate- rial and practical democracy of a later era. It is justly urged against the movement of 1848 that it was crude, premature, sentimental, and in some respects anarchic. But that "brief but bright awakening," as Mr. Bryce calls it, must not be altogether judged by the clumsy tests of mere political analysis. It was a movement of the insurgent human spirit even more than a political movement, it was idealistic, and in the thought of many of its votaries, religious. To Heine it was essentially so, and he was its intellectual interpreter to Germany. Rightly or wrongly, he saw a new Germany, a new Europe, not that which Bismarckian diplomacy has created, but a kingdom of the spirit. Surely something of that old prophetic insight of his Hebrew ancestors had fallen on him. His politics were ideal. He loved the people, but the people to him, as to all who share his spirit, was also ideal. For the actual mob he had no love, he could not surround it with an aureole. "If a King shook my hand I would cut it off," said an uncompromising democrat to Heine. "And I," replied the poet, "if King Mob shook my hand—I should wash it!' He shared with Byron, Shelley, and Lamennais the bright vision of an ideal democracy, scarcely of this earth ; and in that he truly represented the German Democratic movement of 1848, with its high aims, its inspired dreams, its hope and enthu- aiasm—and its wide removal from the actual situation. Heine is the watermark to which German idealism in prac- tical affairs rose, while he himself not only represented, but inspired, that idealism.
From the literary point of view Heine may be said to have imparted entirely new elements to German literature, and elements of the highest value. Apart from Goethe's writings, German literature before Heine lacked brilliancy, esprit, the note of high and rare distinction. It was solid, interesting, in many ways noble, in every respect useful for the German people. in, the stage. of Kveyrth they had reached. Baas Goethe said to Eckermann, it was homely, provincial; it had scarcely attained recognition in the high court of European literary arbitrament. Goethe and Heine changed all that, and in a few powerful strides German literature took its place as a spiritual force admitted by mankind. What music their songs have inspired! How their poems have stimulated the mind, satisfied the esthetic sense, and touched the heart! If we get from Heine the sardonic spirit referred to by Arnold, we also get that untranslatable stimmung which the German feels in the purple twilight under the mystery of the stars. If on one side the elfish spirit of satire is predominant, on the other side we scent the most delicate spiritual perfume, we feel the deep underlying religions instinct of the "Knight of the Holy Spirit." To this German-Hebrew mind was revealed not a little of the inner essence of Christianity as well as the ancient spirit of Greek art. Heine, in fact, -lived as few have done, in many worlds, at many ages, and he was thus able to inspire the German world of letters with a new element of world-feeling which it hardly knew before. The general European debt to him is great, the specific German debt almost incalculable.
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