The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 06. Коллектив авторов

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      Moreover, Heine's health was undermined. In the latter thirties he suffered often from headaches and afflictions of the eyes; in the middle of the forties paralysis of the spinal cord began to manifest itself; and for the last ten years of his life he was a hopelessly stricken invalid, finally doomed for five years to that "mattress grave" which his fortitude no less than his woeful humor has pathetically glorified. His wife cared for him dutifully, he was visited by many distinguished men of letters, and in 1855 a ministering angel came to him in the person of Elise von Krinitz ("Camille Selden") whom he called "Die Mouche" and for whom he wrote his last poem, The Passion Flower, a kind of apology for his life.

      Meantime contentions, tribulations, and a wasting frame seemed only to sharpen the wits of the indomitable warrior. New Songs (1844) contains, along with negligible cynical pieces, a number of love songs no whit inferior to those of the Book of Songs, romances, and scorching political satires. The Romanzero (1851) is not unfairly represented by such a masterpiece as The Battlefield of Hastings. And from this last period we have two quasi-epic poems: Atta Troll (1847; written in 1842) and Germany (1844), the fruit of the first of Heine's two trips across the Rhine.

      Historically and poetically, Atta Troll is one of the most remarkable of Heine's works. He calls it Das letzte freie Waldlied der Romantik ("The last free forest-song of romanticism.") Having for its principal scene the most romantic spot in Europe, the valley of Roncesvaux, and for its principal character a dancing bear, the impersonation of those good characters and talentless men who, in the early forties, endeavored to translate the prose of Young Germany into poetry, the poem flies to the merriest, maddest height of romanticism in order by the aid of magic to kill the bear and therewith the vogue of poetry degraded to practical purposes. Heine knew whereof he spoke; for he had himself been a mad romanticist, a Young German, and a political poet; and he was a true prophet; for, though he did not himself enter the promised land, he lived to see, in the more refined romanticism of the Munich School and the poetic realism of Hebbel and Ludwig, the dawn of a new day in the history of German literature.

      Heine did not enter the promised land. Neither can we truthfully say that he saw it as it was destined to be. His eye was on the present, and in the present he more clearly discerned what ought not to be than what gave promise of a better future. In the war for the liberation of humanity he professed to be, and he was, a brave soldier; but he lacked the soldier's prime requisite, discipline. He never took a city, because he could not rule his spirit. Democracy was inscribed upon his banner, sympathy for the disenfranchised bound him to it, but not that charity which seeketh not her own, nor the loyalty that abides the day when imperfection shall become perfection. Sarcasm was his weapon, ridicule his plan of campaign, and destruction his only accomplishment.

      We shall not say that the things destroyed by Heine deserved a better fate. We shall not think of him either as a leader or as a follower in a great national movement. He was not the one man of his generation through whom the national consciousness, even national discontent, found expression; he was the man whose self-expressions aroused the widest interest and touched the tenderest chords. To be called perhaps an alien, and certainly no monumental German character, Heine nevertheless made use, with consummate artistry, of the fulness of German culture at a time when many of the after-born staggered under the weight of a heritage greater than they could bear.

      HEINRICH HEINE

      DEDICATION1 (1822)

      SONGS (1822)