HEINE

Of the romantic poetry that flourished at the beginning of the last
century, very little has withstood the clasical reaction. Byron,
probably the greatest of the romantics, is very dead; Hugo somebody
(is it M. Clandel?) has termed _infame_; and even Musset, in spite of
_Sainte-Blaise_, is very much out of the poetic picture. Goethe, that
wise old bird, guessed at the reaction, and, after his indescretions,
left the romantic barricades severely alone, telling Eekerman in his
later years that progressive eras are objective, and that his era,
unfortunately, was subjective.


He did not make a friend of the young Jew who sent him copies of his
works and “kissed his Excellency’s blessed hand that had shown him and
the whole German people the way to Heaven.” But he did receive with
Olympian grandeur, and had the privilege of hearing the embarrassed
young man remark that the plum-trees on the road from Jena were full
of fruit. He also opined, for Matthew Arnold’s benefit, one supposes,
that Heine lacked love.

Goethe might have been a little less Olympian if he had known how much
less variable would be Heine’s fame than that of his great
contemporaries. For beneath the wild young romantic, “the soldier in
the war of liberation” as he loved to call himself was hid an
intellect as penetrating as Goethe’s own, an immense knowledge and a
fund of homely sanity.

Mr Henry Baerlein has written a book on Heine which should serve as an
excellent introduction to his work.* [* _Heine, the Strange Guest, by
Henry Baerlein. Bles. 12/6 net.] One can scarcely imagine a dull book
about Heine, and when to a good account of the man is added a great
portion of the Heine canon, both in prose and verse, one has as much as
one can hope to get of that brilliant creature.

Heine was born into the Napoleonic era when men’s dreams were vast and
pure; he grew up in devout hero-worship of Napoleon and devout horror
of Napoleon’s enemies, the English. But Heine, a good European in many
ways, was also a Jew, and the alertness, the cynicism, the distrust of
ideals, that is the heritage of an oppressed people was always there
to tighten up his mental processes. “The Two Grenadiers,” his most
famous song, is the European Heine; his own story of how as a boy he
would insist on translating _Die Glaube_, not as _la religion_, but as
_le credit_, is Heine the Jew, who knew what dreams of universal
brotherhood come to in practice.


He was the perfect idealist and the perfect cynic. He was fascinated
by Catholicism, but whenever his emotional nature was being rocked to
rest on the bosom of the Church his penetrating intellect awoke and
began to taunt it for its weakness. His intellect, the Jewish strain
in him, he maintained as Cuchullin his charioteer, merely to mock him
when his arm grew weary in the fight. He harries himself all through
the pages of the _Italian Journey_, gently reproving the irreverent
young Irishwoman who accompanied him for her lack of devotion, but in
a moment he is describing a girl who had become obsessed by religion
and who took the poet’s kiss absent-mindedly, murmuring another man’s
name. And the poet rejoices, thinking how Cardinals and priests alike
would rave if only they knew of this theft of church property!

But if he mocked at Catholicism, he did at least love it as much as he
hated it. England, the home of the Philistine, England that had
dispossed the beloved Napoleon of his Empire, he had no love for. He
raved at London “full of fogs and Englishmen and mad; the little
anecdote (one of the most perfect ever told) of how, lonely and
miserable, he fled to the docks to see foreign ships come in. Passing
through the crowds he saw a oarty of coloured seamen who were coming
ashor, and in the moment all the magic of the East rose before him,
the eternal sunlight, the Ganges, the lotus flowers. Overcome with
emotion, he rushed up to themflinging out his arms in and embrace,
cried “Mahomet!” And they, their eyes lighting with enthusiasm,
responded “Napoleon!” “England,” he wrote despairingly, “a land the
Ocean would long ago have swallowed up only that if would have injured
his stomach.” He could not understand how the Irish could live at so
short a remove from these English, with their cold, foggy wits, “the
ethereal Irish who should have, flourished upon the soil of India.”

He travelled in England and Italy; finally he took up his abode in
Paris, where he lived with a Parisian cocotte whom he afterwards
married, he taught her the one German sentence that she knew: _Ich
bin eine wilde katze” “I am a wild cat.” On Mondays he beat her for
her offences of the week. When he was ill and could no longer rise
from his bed he used to say: “I am no longer able to beat you.”

Mr. Baerlein gives an excellent account of that terrible martyrdom of
the poet when for eight years he lay in his "mattress-grave," as he
called it, suffering so acutely that even his best friends had to give
up visiting him. Yet no description can do justice to the
extraordinary bravery of the man; his unfailing sanity, his unflagging
wit, in the most terrible suffering. The maid carried him to his bath
each morning; he was lighter than a moonbeam, as he said. His legs had
turned to cottonwool. He could only see by lifting and holding the
eyelid up. But Mr. Baerlein's reports do provide us with the material
for forming an image of the real Heine, the Heine whom Arnold failed
to appreciate. If Heine had been only the extravagant Bohemian of the
legend, or even the brilliant, cold figure that Arnold painted, his
end would have been a different one.

He tried to conceal from his mother the facts about his illness, and
when she wrote to tell him that she thanked God each day for
preserving his health, he only said, "And God accepts that with no
prick of conscience!" God, “the great aristophanes of Heaven”—though
lacking in originality, Heine thought—was the butt of the most savage
witticisms. He seems to have been attracted by the idea of be-

coming a Catholic: the [...]
love and pity were alwasy before his mind; but this
only served to set the Jewish Heine off again; the God
of the Scriptures was too good a mark. Yes he said
ironically, he wasrecanting,  “poems which savour in
the [least] of opposition to God I have with anxious zeal
committed to the flames. It is better the verses
should burn than the maker of them.”


And again: “I have always had a prejudice in
favour of Catholicism owing to the charm of Scheli-
meyer, my professor. He would deliver the [discourse]
of a freethinker and the next day celebrate Mass. And
so, because Catholicism and Free Thought were joined
together in my mind, the Catholic rites were always to
me something beautiful, a dear memory of my youth. ...”

When the end was near, Heine’s wife, a good Catholic, brought a priest
to his bedside. The priest began by asking how Heine would face his
God. “_Il me pardonnera_,” said Heine cooly, “_c’est son metier._” “He
will forgive me; it’s His job.” And when the priest persisted he went
on: “I do not know of any people who believed in immortality more than
the Celts; one could borrow money from them and settle to repay in the
next world. They ought to be and example to pious usurers.”

  Sinn e an file go fann
  Nuair a thuiteann an peann as a laimb

said O’Sullivan. “The poet is weak indeed whe the pen falls from his
hand.” But Heine had no longer breath for a last joke.


His poetry has never been as popular in Germany as that of his great
fellow-ccountrymen Goethe and Shakespeare. I have heard that in one
anthology he is represented by only a singel lyric, _Nacht liegt auf
den fremden Wegen_. His style is very unTutonic; deft and subtle and
capricious. There is, for instance, the wonderful _Nordseebilder_,
which contains the finest sea-poetry ever written, and the bitter
poems that he wrote upon his death-bed, both translated, sometimes
very well translated, by Mr. Baerlein. But Heine, Germany’s greatest
stylist, remains always untranslatable in essence. There is but one
way in which he can be translated, and that is through music, for even
the worst translation of the “Lorelei,” the “Two Grenadiers,” or _Ich
grolle nicht_ when it is sung to the familiar music, recaptures
something of that nostalgia that is Heine’s most characteristic note;
that yearning for things far away that made him dream of Napoleon, of
the Madonna of Kevlaar, the Ganges, the lotus flowers of the East, and
the little maiden of the Hartz mountains to whom he spoke of himself
as “A Knight of the Holy Ghost.”

FRANK O’CONNOR
Irish Statesman, 1929-03-23, pp.53-54.