who scorned the vision of roses and myrtles and sugar-plums all round, say to this? Börne answered, "I can be indulgent to the games of children, indulgent to the passions of a youth, but when on the bloody day of battle a boy who is chasing butterflies gets between my legs; when at the day of our greatest need, and we are calling aloud on God, the young coxcomb beside us in the church sees only the pretty girls, and winks and flirts—then, in spite of all our philosophy and humanity, we may well grow angry. … Heine, with his sybaritic nature, is so effeminate that the fall of a roseleaf disturbs his sleep; how, then, should he[Pgxix] rest comfortably on the knotty bed of freedom? Where is there any beauty without a fault? Where is there any good thing without its ridiculous side? Nature is seldom a poet and never rhymes; let him whom her rhymeless prose cannot please turn to poetry!" Börne was right; Heine was not the man to plan a successful revolution, or defend a barricade, or edit a popular democratic newspaper, or represent adequately a radical constituency—all this was true. Let us be thankful that it was true; Börnes are ever with us, and we are grateful: there is but one Heine.
The same complexity of nature that made Heine an artist made him a humorist. But it was a more complicated complexity now, a cosmic game between the real world and the ideal world; he could go no further. The young Catullus of 1825, with his fiery passions crushed in the wine-press of life and yielding such divine ambrosia, soon lost his faith in passion. The militant soldier in the liberation-war of humanity of 1835 soon ceased to flourish his sword. It was only with the full development of his humour, when his spinal cord began to fail and he had taken up his position as a spectator of life, that Heine attained the only sort of unity possible to him—the unity that comes of a recognised and accepted lack of unity. In the lambent flames of this unequalled humour he bathed all the things he counted dearest; to its service he brought the secret of his poet's nature, the secret of speaking with a voice that every heart leaps up to answer. It is scarcely the humour of Aristophanes, though it is a greater force, even in moulding our political and social ideals, than Börne knew; it is oftener a modern development of the humour of the mad king and the fool in Lear—that humour which is the last concentrated word of the human organism under the lash of Fate.
And if it is still asked why Heine is so modern, it can only be said that these discords out of which his humour exhaled are those which we have nearly all of us known, and that he speaks with a voice that seems to arise from the depth of our own souls. He represents our period of transition; he gazed, from what[Pgxx] appeared the vulgar Pisgah of his day, behind on an Eden that was for ever closed, before on a promised land he should never enter. While with clear sight he announced things to come, the music of the past floated up to him; he brooded wistfully over the vision of the old Olympian gods, dying, amid faint music of cymbals and flutes, forsaken, in the mediæval wilderness; he heard strange sounds of psaltries and harps, the psalms of Israel, the voice of Princess Sabbath, sounding across the remote waters of Babylon.—In a few years this significance of Heine will be lost; that it is not yet lost the eagerness with which his books are read and translated sufficiently testifies.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
HEINE'S PROSE WORKS.
REISEBILDER.
IDEAS, OR THE BOOK LE GRAND.
[The Ideas, of which the chief portion is here presented, was published in 1826 in the second volume of the Reisebilder, or Travel-Pictures. The German title has been retained, as Heine himself retained it in the French translation. The translation here given is founded on Mr. Leland's; it has been carefully revised.]
CHAPTER I.
She was lovable, and he loved her. But he was not lovable, and she
did not love him.—Old Play.
MADAME, do you know the old play? It is quite an extraordinary play, only a little too melancholy. I once played the leading part in it myself, so that all the ladies wept; only one did not weep, not even a single tear, and that was the point of the play, the whole catastrophe.
Oh, that single tear! it still torments my thoughts. When Satan wishes to ruin my soul, he hums in my ear a ballad of that unwept tear, a deadly song with a more deadly tune. Ah! such a tune is only heard in Hell!
You can readily form an idea, Madame, of what life is like in Heaven, the more readily as you are married. There people amuse themselves altogether superbly, every sort of entertainment is provided, and one lives in mere desire and delight. One eats from morning to night, and the cookery is as good as Jagor's; roast geese fly round with gravy-boats in their bills, and feel flattered if any one eats them; tarts gleaming with butter grow wild like sunflowers; everywhere there are brooks of bouillon and champagne, everywhere trees on which napkins flutter, and you eat and wipe your lips and eat again without injury to your stomach; you sing psalms, or flirt and joke with the dear, delicate little angels, or take a walk on the green Hallelujah-Meadow, and your white flowing garments fit very comfortably, and nothing disturbs the feeling of blessedness, no pain, no vexation—even when one accidentally treads on another's corns and exclaims, "Excusez!" he smiles as if enraptured, and assures, "Thy foot, brother, did not hurt in the least, quite au contraire, a deeper thrill of heavenly rapture shoots through my heart!"
But of Hell, Madame, you have no idea. Of all the devils you know, perhaps, only the little Amor, the pretty Croupier of Hell, Beelzebub, and you know him only from Don Juan, and doubtless think that for such a betrayer of innocence Hell can never be made hot enough, though our praiseworthy theatre directors spend upon him as much flame, fiery rain, powder, and colophonium as any Christian could desire in Hell.
But things in Hell look much worse than our theatre directors know, or they would not bring out so many bad plays. For in Hell it is infernally hot, and when I was there, in the dog-days, it was past endurance. Madame, you can have no idea of Hell! We have very few official returns from that place. Still, it is rank calumny to say that down there all the poor souls are compelled to read, the whole day long, all the dull sermons that are printed on earth. Bad as Hell is, it has not come to that; Satan will never invent such refinements of torture. On the other hand, Dante's description is too mild on the whole, too poetic. Hell appeared to me like a great kitchen, with an endlessly long stove, on which stood three rows of iron pots, and in these sat the damned, and were cooked. In one row were placed Christian sinners, and, incredible as it may seem, their number was anything but small, and the devils poked the fire up under them with especial good-will. In the next row were Jews, who continually screamed and cried, and were occasionally mocked by the fiends, which sometimes seemed very amusing, as, for instance, when a fat, wheezy old pawnbroker complained of the heat, and a little devil poured several buckets of cold water on his head, that he might realise what a refreshing benefit baptism was. In the third row sat the heathen, who, like the Jews, could take no part in salvation, and must burn forever. I heard one of these, as a burly devil put fresh coals under his kettle, cry out from his pot, "Spare me! I was Socrates, the wisest of mortals. I taught Truth and Justice, and sacrificed my life for Virtue." But the stupid, burly devil went on with his work, and grumbled, "Oh, shut up, there! All heathens must burn, and we can't make an exception for the sake of a single man." I assure you, Madame, the heat was terrible, with such a screaming, sighing, groaning, quacking, grunting, squealing—and through all these terrible sounds rang distinctly the deadly tune of the song of the unwept tear.
