THE REBEL AND HIS VOID
Heinrich Heine. By Louis Untermeyer. (Cape. 15s.)
THERE have been a good many books on this subject of late years, and the reason is not far to seek. The political parallels between Napoleonic Germany and that of 1918-33 are striking ; the Jews were made the scapegoats then, as they are now ; Heine was a Jew and became an exile, living in Paris the kind of life to which his latter-day compatriots have been condemned, by the same political intolerance. It is curious (and depressing) tc realise how thoroughly Nazi the Burschenschaften were, even then ; how the brutal violence of Vater Jahn was the forerunner of Dr. Goebbels' hysteria.
Such was the pogrom atmosphere from which Hein 's rebellious spirit was born. But its real parents were a ‘‘,-ak father and a silly, ambitious mother : these were responsible for the various , misdirection of the poet's early life. The chief virtue of this sensible biography is that it pays due attention to the psychological complications at the root of Heine's .N% ild behaviour. He hated being a Jew, made lifelong, fiantic attempts to escape from Jewry ; yet he remained, for better and for worse, a thorough Jew from start to finish. Possessing in the highest degree the sensibility and tenacity of his race, he did not avoid their worst qualities : he was over-confident in success ; he could be odiously sycophantic, as witness his relations with Frau Varnhagen ; his alternate use and abuse of his uncle Solomon is extremely painful to watch. Again, being a Jew, he saw the maddening faults of the Germans and never ceased to inveigh against them ; yet, au plus fort de la mêlée, we find hini writing : " I know I am the most com- pletely German creature alive. I know, alas, too well, German air is to me what water is to a fish . . . Fundamentally, I love everything German more than anything in the world."
It is a mistake to speak of Heine as a Liberal. The essence of Liberalism is temperateness, and Heine was in no way temperate, at any time. Smarting under the indifference of Goethe, he writes : " And it is a real question whether the enthusiast, who gives up his life for an idea, does not live more intensely—and more fully—in a single moment than Herr von Goethe in all his seventy-six years of calm and comfortable egoism." Thus speaks a foregoer of Mussolini, with his nonsensical lion-and-sheep antinomy. Goethe has, as usual, the last word, with his brief dictum : " Heine has every gift— except love." This hits the bull's-eye, though Mr. Untermeyer does not think so. Heine spent his life frenziedly trying to love humanity—in women, in men, in the mass—and he failed all along the line. As he himself said : " I know the goal, and where it is—but I cannot reach it." This faith for which he was searching was nothing (it never is anything) else than love ; and because the rebellion, which was the form the search took, was no more than a rebellion of the divided forces within himself, it defeated its own end and merely rent the man, instead of the forces of darkness in the outside world. When, in England, Heine came up against the mass of humanity—its density, its smell—he was horrified and said so. Throughout his life, his political sorties were disastrous, because fundamentally insincere—i.e., unfounded on a reasoned digestion of the facts.
Women, again, made their own void in his life. Instinctively, they knew that his pretended adoration was only a dis- guised longing for power. Thus, he had no sort of success with " respectable " women and finally sought satisfaction in purely venal love, as Verlaine was later to do. It is one of the more disgusting ironies of fate that poor Heine, .who had tried so hard to achieve a " great " love, should have ended his life in the arms of that frightful harpy, Crescentia Mirat. As Mr. Untermeyer makes plain, there was really nothing to be said for Mathilde, as Heine called her. She was plain, stupid, mercenary and heartless ; she had not even the demonic quality of Baudelaire's Jeanne Duval ; she was nothing—a mere nuisance.
Such is the price of romanticism, in life ; but luckily there is a parallel world. Heine's poetry remains—and will remain, in spite of the Nazi attempt to pretend that it was written by " an unknown poet " (sic). Since the Elizabethan there has been no lyric poetry to touch the Buch der Lieder, for lightness, immediate loveliness, simplicity, singability. Mr. Untermeyer's analysis of the phases of Heine's poetic development is extremely lucid, and his translations of single poems are probably as good as such things could ever be. But he makes some curious remarks by the way. To say that Landor is " a long step down " from Goethe is not so much an untruth as a misstatement ; a list of " major " nineteenth-century composers ought nor to include Jensen, Ries, Rubinstein, or Sinding ; and Wordsworth and Coleridge can scarcely be said to have been " at their height " in 1827, twenty years after both had ceased doing their best work. Such eccentricities might lead one to suspect Mr. Untermeyer's judgement of being less sensible than in fact it is At the same time, I must record my opinion that Mme. Antoniria Vallentin's remains the best of the recent
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