Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine Part 1

Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine.

by Heinrich Heine.

HEINRICH HEINE.

(BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.)

Harry Heine, as he was originally named, was born in Dusseldorf on the Rhine, December 13th, 1799. His father was a well-to-do Jewish merchant; and his mother, the daughter of the famous physician and Aulic Counlor Von Geldern, was, according to her son, a "_femme distinguee_." His early childhood fell in the days of the occupation of Dusseldorf by the French revolutionary troops; and, in the opinion of his biographer Strodtmann, the influence of the French rule, thus brought directly to bear upon the formation of his character, can scarcely be exaggerated. His education was begun at the Franciscan monastery of the Jesuits at Dusseldorf, where the teachers were mostly French priests; and his religious instruction was at the same time carried on in a private Jewish school. His princ.i.p.al companions were Jewish children, and he was brought up with a rigid adherence to the Hebrew faith. Thus in the very seed-time of his mental development were simultaneously sown the germs of that Gallic liveliness and mobility which pre-eminently distinguish him among German authors, and also of his ineradicable sympathy with things Jewish, and his inveterate antagonism to the principles and results of Christianity.

As the medical profession was in those days the only one open to Jews in Germany, the boy Heine was destined for a commercial career; and in 1815 his father took him to Frankfort to establish him in a banking-house. But a brief trial proved that he was utterly unsuited to the situation, and after two months he was back again in Dusseldorf. Three years later he went to Hamburg, and made another attempt to adopt a mercantile pursuit under the auspices of his uncle, the wealthy banker Solomon Heine. The millionaire, however, was very soon convinced that the "fool of a boy" would never be fit for a counting-house, and declared himself willing to furnish his nephew with the means for a three years, course at the university, in order to obtain a doctor's degree and practice law in Hamburg. It was well-known that this would necessitate Harry's adoption of Christianity; but his proselytism did not strike those whom it most nearly concerned in the same way as it has impressed the world. So far from this being the case, he wrote in 1823 to his friend Moser: "Here the question of baptism enters; none of my family is opposed to it except myself; but this _myself_ is of a peculiar nature. With my mode of thinking, you can imagine that the mere act of baptism is indifferent to me; that even symbolically I do not consider it of any importance, and that I shall only dedicate myself more entirely to upholding the rights of my unhappy brethren. But, nevertheless, I find it beneath my dignity and a taint upon my honor, to allow myself to be baptized in order to hold office in Prussia. I understand very well the Psalmist's words: 'Good G.o.d, give me my daily bread, that I may not blaspheme thy name!'"

The uncle's offer was accepted. In 1819 Harry Heine entered the university of Bonn. During his stay in Hamburg began his unrequited pa.s.sion for a cousin who lived in that city--a pa.s.sion which inspired a large portion of his poetry, and indeed gave the keynote to his whole tone and spirit. He sings so many different versions of the same story of disappointment, that it is impossible to ascertain, with all his frank and pa.s.sionate confidences, the true course of the affair.

After a few months at Bonn, he removed to the university of Gottingen, which he left in 1822 for Berlin. There is no other period in the poet's career on which it is so pleasant to linger as on the two years of his residence in the Prussian capital. In his first prose work, the _Letters from Berlin_, published in the _Rhenish-Westphalian Indicator_, he has painted a vivid picture of the life and gayety of the city during its most brilliant season. "At the last rout I was particularly gay, I was so beside myself, that I really do not know why I did not walk on my head. If my most mortal enemy had crossed my path, I should have said to him, To-morrow we will kill each other, but to-night I will cordially cover you with kisses. _Tu es beau, tu es charmant! Tu es l'objet de ma_ _flamme je t'adore, ma belle!_ these were the words my lips repeated instinctively a hundred times; and I pressed everybody's hand, and I took off my hat gracefully to everybody, and all the men returned my civilities. Only one German youth played the boor, and railed against what he called my aping the manners of the foreign Babylon; and growled out in his old Teutonic, beer-drinking ba.s.s voice, 'At a _cherman_ masquerade, a _Cherman_ should speak _Cherman_.' Oh German youth! how thy words strike me as not only silly, but almost blasphemous at such moments, when my soul lovingly embraces the entire universe, when I would fain joyfully embrace Russians and Turks, and throw myself in tears on the breast of my brother the enslaved African!"

The doors of the most delightful, intellectual society of Germany were opened to the handsome young poet, who is described in a contemporary sketch as "beardless, blonde and pale, without any prominent feature in his face, but of so peculiar a stamp that he attracted the attention at once, and was not readily forgotten."

The daughter of Elise von Hohenhausen, the translator of Byron, has given us a charming sketch of her mother's Thursday evening receptions, which Heine regularly attended, and where he read aloud the unpublished ma.n.u.scripts of his _Lyrical Intermezzo_, and his tragidies, _Almansor_ and _Ratcliffe_. "He was obliged to submit,"

writes Mlle. von Hohenhausen, "to many a harsh criticism, to much severe censure; above all, he was subjected to a great deal of chaffing about his poetic sentimentality, which a few years later awakened so warm a response in the hearts of German youth. The poem, ending, _Zu deinen sussen Fussen_ ('At thy sweet feet'), met with such laughing opposition, that he omitted it from the published edition.

Opinions of his talents were various; a small minority had any suspicion of his future undisputed poetical fame. Elise von Hohenhausen, who gave him the name of the German Byron, met with many contradictions. This recognition, however, a.s.sured her an imperishable grat.i.tude on Heine's part."

Not only his social and intellectual faculties found abundant stimulus in this bracing atmosphere, but his moral convictions were directed and strengthened by the philosophy and personal influence of Hegel, and his sympathies with his own race were aroused to enthusiastic activity by the intelligent Jews who were at that time laboring in Berlin for the advancement of their oppressed brethren. In 1819 had been formed the "Society for the Culture and Improvement of the Jews,"

which, though centered in Berlin, counted members all over Prussia, as well as in Vienna, Copenhagen, and New York. Heine joined it in 1822, and became one of its most influential members. In the educational establishment of the _Verein_, he gave for several months three hours of historical instruction a week. He frankly confessed that he, the "born enemy of all positive religions," was no enthusiast for the Hebrew faith, but he was none the less eager to proclaim himself an enthusiast for the rights of the Jews and their civil equality.

During his brief visit to Frankfort, he had had personal experience of the degrading conditions to which his people were subjected.

The contrast between his choice of residence for twenty-five years in Paris, and the tenacity with which Goethe clung to his home, is not as strongly marked as the contrast between the relative positions in Frankfort of these two men. Goethe, the grandson of the honored chief-magistrate, surrounded in his cheerful burgher-life, as Carlyle says, by "kind plenty, secure affection, manifold excitement and instruction," might well cherish golden memories of his native city.

For him, the gloomy _Judenga.s.se_, which he occasionally pa.s.sed, where "squalid, painful Hebrews were banished to scour old clothes," was but a dark spot that only heightened the prevailing brightness of the picture. But to this wretched by-way was relegated that other beauty-enamored, artist-soul, Heine, when he dared set foot in the imperial Free Town. Here must he be locked in like a wild beast, with his miserable brethren every Sunday afternoon. And if the restrictions were a little less barbarous in other parts of Germany, yet how shall we characterize a national policy which closed to such a man as Heine every career that could give free play to his genius, and offered him the choice between money changing and medicine?

It was not till he had exhausted every means of endeavoring to secure a remission of the humiliating decree that he consented to the public act of apostasy, and was baptized in the summer of 1825 in the Lutheran parsonage of Heiligenstadt with the name of Johann Christian Heinrich. During the period of his earnest labors for Judaism, he had buried himself with fervid zeal in the lore of his race, and had conceived the idea of a prose-legend, the _Rabbi of Bacharach_, ill.u.s.trating the persecutions of his people during the middle ages.

Accounts vary as to the fate of this work; some affirm that the ma.n.u.script was destroyed in a fire at Hamburg, and others that the three chapters which the world possesses are all that were ever completed. Heine, one of the most subjective of poets, treats this theme in a purely objective manner. He does not allow himself a word of comment, much less of condemnation concerning the outrages he depicts. He paints the scene as an artist, not as the pa.s.sionate fellow-sufferer and avenger that he is. But what subtle eloquence lurks in that restrained cry of horror and indignation which never breaks forth, and yet which we feel through every line, gathering itself up like thunder on the horizon for a terrific outbreak at the end!

Would that we could hear the explosion burst at last! We long for it throughout as the climax and the necessary result of the lowering electric influences of the story, and we lay aside the never-to-be completed fragment with the oppression of a nightmare. But a note of such tremendous power as Heine had struck in this romance, required for its prolonged sustention a singleness of purpose and an exaltation of belief in its efficacy and truth, which he no longer possessed after his renunciation of Judaism. He was no longer at one with himself, for no sooner was the irrevocable step taken than it was bitterly repented, not as a recantation of his principles--for as such, no one who follows the development of his mind can regard it,--but as an unworthy concession to tyrannic injustice. How sensitive he remained in respect to the whole question is proved most conspicuously by his refraining on all occasions from signing his Christian name, Heinrich. Even his works he caused to appear under the name of H. Heine, and was once extremely angry with his publisher for allowing by mistake the full name to be printed.

The collection of poems in prose and verse known as the _Reisebilder_, embraced several years of Heine's literary activity, and represent widely-varying phases of his intellectual development. We need only turn to the volumes themselves to guess how bitter an experience must have filled the gap between the buoyant stream of sunny inspiration that ripples through the _Harz-Reise_, and the fierce spirit of vindictive malice which prompted Heine, six years later, to conclude his third and last volume with his unseemly diatribe against Count Platen. Notwithstanding their inequalities, the _Reisebilder_ remain one of the surest props of Heine's fame. So clear and perfect an utterance is sufficiently rare in all languages; but it becomes little short of a miracle when, as in this case, the medium of its transmission is German prose, a vehicle so bulky and unwieldy that no one before Heine had dared to enlist it in the service of airy phantasy, delicate humor and sparkling wit.

During the summer of 1830, while he was loitering at Helgoland, he was roused to feverish excitement by the news of the July Revolution. He inveighed against the n.o.bility in a preface to a pamphlet, called _Kahldorf on the n.o.bility_, which largely increased the number of his powerful enemies. The literary censors.h.i.+p had long mutilated his prose writings, besides materially diminis.h.i.+ng his legitimate income by prohibiting the sale of many of his works. He now began to fear that his personal liberty would be restricted as summarily as his literary activity; and in May, 1831, he took up his residence in Paris. He perfected himself in the French language, and by his brilliant essays on French art, German philosophy, and the Romantic School, soon acquired the reputation of one of the best prose writers of France, and the "wittiest Frenchman since Voltaire." He became deeply interested in the doctrine of St. Simonism, then at its culminating point in Paris. Its central idea of the rehabilitation of the flesh, and the sacredness of labor, found an enthusiastic champion in him who had so long denounced the impracticable spiritualism of Christianity.

He, the logical clear-headed sceptic in all matters pertaining to existing systems and creeds, seems possessed with the credulity of a child in regard to every scheme of human regeneration, or shall we call it the exaltation of the Jew, for whom the Messiah has not yet arrived, but is none the less confidently and hourly expected?

Embittered by repeated disappointments, by his enforced exile, by a nervous disease which had afflicted him from his youth, and was now fast gaining upon him, and by the impending shadow of actual want, Heine's tone now a.s.sumes a concentrated acridity, and his poetry acquires a reckless audacity of theme and treatment. His _Neue Lieder_, addressed to notorious Parisian women, were regarded as an insult to decency. In literary merit many of them vie with the best of his earlier songs; but the daring defiance of public opinion displayed in the choice of subject excluded all other criticism than that of indignation and rebuke. There is but a single ray to lighten the gathering gloom of Heine's life at this period. In a letter dated, April 11th, 1835, occurs his first mention of his _liaison_ with the grisette Mathilde Crescence Mirat, who afterwards became his wife.

This uneducated, simple-hearted, affectionate child-wife inspired in the poet, weary of intellectual strife, a love as tender and constant as it had been sudden and pa.s.sionate. A variety of circ.u.mstances having combined to reduce Heine to extreme want, he had recourse to a step which has been very severely censured. He applied for and received from the French government a pension from the fund set aside for "all those who by their zeal for the cause of the Revolution had more or less compromised themselves at home or abroad." Now that the particulars of the case are so well known, it would be superfluous to add any words of justification; it can only excite our sympathy for the haughty poet doomed to drain so bitter a cup. He was pressed to take the oath of naturalization, but he had too painful experience of the renunciation of his birthright ever to consent to a repet.i.tion of his error. He would not forfeit the right to have inscribed upon his tomb-stone: "Here lies a German poet."

In 1844 his uncle Solomon died; and, as there was no stipulation in the banker's will that the yearly allowance hitherto granted to Heinrich should continue, the oldest heir Karl announced that this would altogether cease. This very cousin Karl had been nursed by Heine at the risk of his own life during the cholera-plague of 1832 in Paris. The grief and excitement caused by his kinsman's ingrat.i.tude fearfully accelerated the progress of the malady which had long been gaining upon the poet, and which proved to be a softening of the spinal cord. One eye was paralyzed, he lost the sense of taste, and complained that everything he ate was like clay. His physicians agreed that he had few weeks to live, and he felt that he was dying, little divining that the agony was to be prolonged for ten horrible years. It is unnecessary to dwell upon these years of darkness, in which Heine, shriveled to the proportions of a child, languished upon his "mattress-grave" in Paris. His patient resignation, his indomitable will, his sweetness and gayety of temper, and his unimpaired vigor and fertility of intellect, are too fresh in the memory of many living witnesses, and have been too frequently and recently described to make it needful here to enlarge upon them. In the crucial hour he proved no recreant to the convictions for which he had battled and bled during a lifetime. Of the report that his illness had materially modified his religious opinions, he has left a complete and emphatic denial. "I must expressly contradict the rumor that I have retreated to the threshold of any sort of church, or that I have reposed upon its bosom. No! My religious views and convictions have remained free from all churchdom; no belfry chime has allured me, no altar taper has dazzled me. I have trifled with no symbol, and have not utterly renounced my reason. I have forsworn nothing--not even my old pagan-G.o.ds, from whom it is true I have parted, but parted in love and friends.h.i.+p."

"I am no longer a divine biped," he wrote. "I am no longer the freest German after Goethe, as Ruge named me in healthier days. I am no longer the great hero No. 2, who was compared with the grape-crowned Dionysius, whilst my colleague No. 1 enjoyed the t.i.tle of a Grand Ducal Wlimarian Jupiter. I am no longer a joyous, somewhat corpulent h.e.l.lenist, laughing cheerfully down upon the melancholy Nazarenes. I am now a poor fatally-ill Jew, an emaciated picture of woe, an unhappy man."

Thus side by side flowed on the continuous streams of that wit and pathos which he poured forth inexhaustibly to the very end. No word of complaint or impatience ever pa.s.sed his lips; on the contrary, with his old, irresistible humor, his fancy played about his own privations and sufferings, and tried to alleviate for his devoted wife and friends the pain of the heart-rending spectacle. His delicate consideration prompted him to spare his venerable mother all knowledge of his illness. He wrote to her every month in his customary cheerful way; and, in sending her the latest volumes of his poetry, he caused a separate copy always to be printed, from which all allusions to his malady were expunged. "For that matter," he said, "that any son could be as wretched and miserable as I, no mother would believe."

Alas! if he had known how much more eloquent and n.o.ble a refutation his life would afford than his mistaken pa.s.sionate response to the imputations of his enemies! Is this patient martyr the man of whom Borne wrote: "with his sybarite nature, the fall of a rose-leaf can disturb Heine's slumber. He whom all asperities fatigue, whom all discords trouble, let such a one neither move nor think--let him go to bed and shut his eyes."

Only in his last poems, which were not to be published till after his death, has Heine given free vent to the bitterness of his anguish.

During the long sleepless night when he lay writhing with pain or exhausted by previous paroxysms, his mind, preternaturally clear and vigorous, conceived the glowing fantasies of the _Romancero_, or the Job-like lamentations of the _Lazarus_ poems. This mental exercise was his protection against insanity: and the thought of his cherished wife, he affirmed, was his only safeguard against the delirious desire to seize the morphine bottle by his side, and with one draught put an end to his agony. On the night of the 16th of February, 1856, came the long-craved release--and on the 20th of February without ma.s.s or "Kaddish," according to his express wish, he was buried in the cemetery of Montmartre.

EARLY POEMS.

SONNETS TO MY MOTHER, B. HEINE, _nee_ VON GELDERN.

I.

I have been wont to bear my forehead high-- My stubborn temper yields with no good grace.

The king himself might look me in the face, And yet I would not downward cast mine eye.

But I confess, dear mother, openly, However proud my haughty spirit swell, When I within thy blessed presence dwell, Oft am I smit with shy humility.

Is it thy soul, with secret influence, Thy lofty soul piercing all shows of sense, Which soareth, heaven-born, to heaven again?

Or springs it from sad memories that tell How many a time I caused thy dear heart pain, Thy gentle heart, that loveth me so well!

II.

In fond delusion once I left thy side; Unto the wide world's end I fain would fare, To see if I might find Love anywhere, And lovingly embrace Love as a bride.

Love sought I in all paths, at every gate; Oft and again outstretching suppliant palms, I begged in vain of Love the slightest alms, But the world laughed and offered me cold hate.

Forever I aspired towards Love, forever Towards Love, and ne'ertheless I found Love never,-- And sick at heart, homeward my steps did move.

And lo! thou comest forth to welcome me; And that which in thy swimming eyes I see, That is the precious, the long-looked-for Love.

THE SPHINX.

This is the old enchanted wood, Sweet lime trees scent the wind; The glamor of the moon has cast A spell upon my mind.

Onward I walk, and as I walk-- Hark to that high, soft strain!

That is the nightingale, she sings, Of love and of love's pain.

She sings of love and of love's pain, Of laughter and of tears.

So plaintive her carol, so joyous her sobs, I dream of forgotten years.

Onward I walk, and as I walk, There stands before mine eyes A castle proud on an open lawn, Whose gables high uprise.

With cas.e.m.e.nts closed, and everywhere Sad silence in court and halls, It seemed as though mute death abode Within those barren walls.

Before the doorway crouched a sphinx, Half horror and half grace; With a lion's body, a lion's claws, And a woman's breast and face.

A woman fair! The marble glance Spake wild desire and guile.