The Kraus Project. Jonathan Franzen

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СКАЧАТЬ technician skilled at pleasure and sorrow, a speedy outfitter of stock moods. When Goethe shares in—and shares with us—the “silence on every peak,” he does it with such intensely felt kinship that the silence can be heard as an intimation.59 But if a pine tree in the North stands on a barren peak and dreams of a palm tree in the Orient, it is an exceptional courtesy of Nature to oblige Heine’s yearning allegorically. Seeing an artful fake like this in the show window of a confectioner or a feuilletonist might put you in a good mood if you’re an artist yourself. But does that make its manufacturer one?60 Even the plain outline of a perception of Nature, from which barely visible threads spin themselves out toward the soul, seems to me more lyrical than the dressing-up of ready-made moods, because it presupposes empathy. In this sense, Goethe’s “Stillness and Sea” is lyric poetry, as are Liliencron’s lines: “A river babbles its happy way across the land, a field of ripe rye gathers in the west, then Nature leans her head upon her hand and, weary from her work, takes rest.” Deeper moods arise from a reflecting heathscape on a summer morning than from reflective palms and pine trees; for here Nature rests her head upon her hand, while there Heinrich Heine pressed his hand to his cheek … You’re ashamed that between fears and tears there ever existed such slick intercourse that went by the name of poetry; you’re almost ashamed of the polemics. But you should open the Book of Songs and try reading the right-hand and the left-hand pages higgledy-piggledy, interchanging the lines. You won’t be disappointed, if you’re not disappointed with Heine. And those who are already disappointed will, for the first time, not be. “The little birds, they chirped so fine / Glad lovesongs did my heart entwine.” That can stand right or left. “In those darling little eyes of thine”: this need not simply rhyme with “My dear darling’s mouth as red as wine” and “blue little violets of thine eyes sublime” or, again, with “thine little red-rosy cheeks divine”; at every point the plea could stand: “Dear little darling, rest thy little hand upon this heart of mine,” and nowhere in this dear little chamber of poesy would the transposition of mine and thine be felt as a disturbance. On the other hand, Heine’s entire “Lorelei,” say, could not be substituted for Goethe’s “Fisher,” even though the only seeming difference is that the Lorelei influences the boatman from above, whereas the watery woman influences the fisher from below. Truly, Heinean verse is operetta lyrics, which even good music isn’t ruined by. Meilhac and Halévy’s lines wouldn’t be out of place in the Book of Songs:

      I am thine

      Thou art mine

      What heavenly luck is ours

      A pair of doves

      So much in love

      Cannot be found beneath the stars.

      This is exactly the sort of shallowness that, in combination with Offenbach’s music, generates genuine emotive value or takes on deeper satirical significance.61 Offenbach is music, but Heine is merely the words for it. And I don’t believe that a real poet wrote the lines:

      And when I wailed to you about my pain,

      You all just yawned in mute disdain;

      Yet when I set it out in lyrical phrases,

      You couldn’t wait to sing my praises.

      But it’s an epigram; and it perfectly captures the mass appeal of Heine’s love poetry, in which the little songs are merely the ornament of big sorrows, not their naturally inevitable expression. The same mass appeal by which the poet Heine feels so rewarded. This is a poet who writes, in one of his prefaces, that his publishers have shown the most gratifying faith in his genius by means of the large first printings they’re wont to make of his work, and who points proudly to the account books in which the popularity of his poetry stands registered. This pride is as little surprising as that popularity. How, indeed, could lyrical work in which ideas are candied, rather than crystallized, fail to be greeted with universal satisfaction? At no point before, say, his deathbed poetry did verse become for Heine such a creative necessity that it had to be verse; and these rhymes are papillotes, not butterflies: paper ruffles often folded for no other reason than to demonstrate a fold. “I could have said all of that very well in good prose,” an amazed Heine writes after setting a preface in verse, and he continues: “But when one reads through the old poems again to polish them up with a view to republication, one is unexpectedly surprised by the jingling routine of the rhyme and meter…” It is indeed nothing but a journalism that scans: that keeps the reader minutely informed about his moods. Heine is always and overplainly informative. Sometimes he says it with blue flowers from someone else’s garden, sometimes directly. If the factual poem “The Holy Three Kings” had been written by a poet, it would be a poem. “The little ox bellowed, the little child screamed, and the three holy kings did sing.” This would be the mood of factuality. In Heine’s hands, though, it’s merely a dispatch. This becomes quite clear in a passage of the “Vitzliputzli”:62

      One hundred sixty Spaniards

      Met their death that day;

      More than eighty others

      Were taken by the Indians.

      Seriously wounded, too, were many

      Who only later died.

      Nearly a dozen horses were lost,

      Some killed, some captured.

      According to our local correspondent. And, as with the factuality, so with the feeling, so with the irony: nothing immediate, everything utterly graspable with that second hand that can grasp nothing but the material. In the petting of mood, in the tickling of wit.

      But the gates made my darling

      Slip silent to a rendezvous;

      A fool is always willing

      When a foolish girl is too.

      This joke isn’t made by any real cynic whose love has given him the slip. And no poet calls these words to a girl who is moved by the sunset she is watching:

      My girl, now don’t you frown,

      This happens all the time;

      In front here it goes down

      And comes back up from behind.

      Not out of respect for the girl; out of respect for the sunset.63 Heine’s cynicism is at the same level as the girl’s sentimentality. And as his own sentimentality. And when, greatly moved, he says of himself, “there I wove my tender Rhymes out of Balm and Moonlight,” you may well want to be as cynical as he is and ask him—Herr Heine, now, don’t you frown—whether he didn’t perhaps mean to write “there I wove my tender Rhymes for Balm & Moonlight,” and whether this might not be the very publishing house to whose account books he was just referring.64 Poetry and satire—the phenomenon of their alliance becomes comprehensible: neither of them is there, they meet on the surface, not in the depths. This tear has no salt, and this salt doesn’t salt. When Heine—what is the phrase?—“punctures the mood with a joke,” I have the impression that he wants to sprinkle salt on the tail of the pretty bird: an old experiment; the bird still flutters away.65 With Heine, the illusion succeeds, if not the experiment. You can prove the contrary to him; СКАЧАТЬ