HEINRICH HEINE

(1799-1856)

INCE Horace, Heinrich Heine has had no superior as a master of lyrical expression. Among Moderns, Burns alone compares with him, and even Burns himself, though greater as a poet, is his inferior as a musician. While it would be misleading to speak of Heine as a great poet; while he is above everything a musician, he is not merely a maker of melodies, for he had an intellect of intense and incessant activity, a true "genius" of that corroding kind which eats away the life of its possessor, nourishing itself by his pain and finding its perfect expression only at the expense of his destruction. Having such genius, Heine was one of the greatest wits as well as the greatest musicians of his age. A great poet, however, must be a great thinker - the greatest of all great thinkers. In the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, we often detect momentarily the flashes of an intellect too intensely radiant to be revealed at all. The Hebrew prophet and lawgiver hidden in the cleft of the rock to catch a glimpse of the meaning of eternity as it passed him is a type of such minds, which, realizing the everlasting simplicities of the natural and supernatural world, learn to express them so that they take an enduring hold on the weakest - doing most to strengthen, to elevate, to immortalize those who are least capable of suspecting their meaning. Every great poet has this gift, and Heine did not have it. He was born for it. It was his birthright, but he forfeited it,—making through passion the "Great Renunciation." With such a physical organization as might have been fit to incarnate a seraph, he lived an animal life of unrestrained emotion and passion, until at last, chained to his "mattress grave" through years of helpless agony, he welcomed death, with a most solemn jest,-"God will forgive me: it is his business!" This, they say, was his final judgment on his own career-not impious, though it has been called so; but full of the self-contempt and self-mockery which was so characteristic of the overwhelming pride of this great fallen angel. Let no one say that he was wholly wrong! Yet if it is easy and natural for heaven to forgive most to those who suffer most, it is harder for those who are drawn to Heine by his mastery of the deepest secrets of music to forgive him for the use he makes of his power to impart to those who love him best the contagion of

his own intellectual and spiritual diseases and the pain of his own tortures. He is the poet of "Weltschmerz "— of "world weariness,» and he will allow no one who loves him too well for his music to escape it. To know his music and not to love it is scarcely possible for those who have the inner "hearing ear" for the melody of verse. Until he wrote, German was called a harsh and guttural tongue. He showed that its worst dissonances can be used as the distinctive feature of the highest harmonies of verse. In its prose or its verse, spoken by a beggar or sung by Petrarch, the Italian language is itself music-inferior in melody only to the Latin from which it was derived. But the "ballatas" and "canzones" of Tuscany are to Heine's "lieder" what sirups are to sparkling wines. Necessarily, the same ear for the music of language which dominates his verse governs Heine's prose also. It can be translated with no greater ease than the symphonies of one great musican can be converted into the musical "terminology" of some other master. The lyrics of such a poet as Heine approach the musical perfection which makes the shorter odes of Horace illustrations of the fundamental laws of music. But if Heine's melody cannot be transferred from German to English, his wit forces expression, in spite of all difficulties. His "Pictures of Travel," and other essays and sketches, might have kept his name alive, had he never written his "Lieder."

In his essays as in his songs there is much that is abnormal and diseased, but little that is commonplace, and nothing that is merely silly. At his worst, Heine is diabolical, but it is the diabolism of a great soul "cast down," but not lost. It is not only Heaven's "business" to forgive all such, but to save them - from themselves if that be possible! W. V. B.

THE

DIALOGUE ON THE THAMES

HE sallow man stood near me on the deck, as I gazed on the green shores of the Thames, while in every corner of my soul the nightingales awoke to life. "Land of Freedom!" I cried, "I greet thee! Hail to thee, Freedom, young sun of the renewed world! Those older suns, Love and Faith, are withered and cold, and can no longer light or warm us. The ancient myrtle woods, which were once all too full, are now deserted, and only timid turtledoves nestle amid the soft thickets. The old cathedrals, once piled in towering height by an arrogantly pious race, which fain would force its faith into heaven, are brittle, and their gods have ceased to believe in themselves. Those divinities are

worn out, and our age lacks the imagination to shape new. Every power of the human breast now tends to the love of Liberty, and Liberty is, perhaps, the religion of the modern age. And it is a religion not preached to the rich, but to the poor, and it has in like manner its evangelists, its martyrs, and its Iscariots!"

"Young enthusiast," said the sallow man, "you will not find what you seek. You may be in the right in believing that Liberty is a new religion which will spread itself over all the world. But as every race of old, when it received Christianity, did so according to its requirements and its peculiar character, so, at present, every country adopts from the new religion of liberty only that which is in accordance with its local needs and national character.

"The English are a domestic race, living a limited, peaceable family life, and the Englishman seeks in the circle of those connected with and pertaining to him that easy state of mind which is denied to him through his innate social incapacity. The Englishman is, therefore, contented with that liberty which secures his most personal rights and guards his body, his property, and his conjugal relations, his religion, and even his whims, in the most unconditional manner. No one is freer in his home than an Englishman, and, to use a celebrated expression, he is king and bishop between his four stakes; and there is much truth in the common saying, 'My house is my castle.'

"If the Englishman has the greatest need of personal freedom, the Frenchman, in case of need, can dispense with it, if we only grant him that portion of universal liberty known as equality. The French are not a domestic, but a social race; they are no friends to a silent tête-à-tête, which they call une conversation Anglaise; they run gossiping about from the café to the casino, and from the casino to the salons; their light champagne blood and inborn talent for company drives them to social life, whose first and last principles, yes, whose very soul is equality. The development of the social principle in France necessarily involved that of equality, and if the ground of the Revolution should be sought in the Budget, it is none the less true that its language and tone were drawn from those wits of low degree who lived in the salons of Paris, apparently on a footing of equality with the high nobless, and who were now and then reminded, it may have been by a hardly perceptible, yet not on that account less.