Creation and Conflict
BY OLIVER EDWARDS GERMAN poetry is one of the richest parts of the national heritage, though from the wish-wash served up in The Oxford Book of German Verse it might scarcely seem to be so. Surely no other of that famous series of anthologies stands in more need of remaking by a new standard of taste. Too often in such compilations Heine 'has been presented as a devotee of the whimsical and the merely pretty, a facile repeater of phrases and fancies, a writer of 'lyrics' destined willy-nilly to become words for music. When his verses began to appear the composers abandoned Goethe and—so many jackals scenting a tastier carcass—hit on Heine like one man. Heine wrote fine poems, but it is mainly the song texts that have caught the ear of the selectors, and some of the best of the other candidates have been left to kick their heels on the side-lines.
As man and poet Heine fought a war on two fronts, chal- lenging with equal fervour democrat and aristocrat, Jew and Christian, the classical and the romantic. Like any romantic he can declare how bitterly love makes him suffer, but a typical device of his in poetry is to set up an Aunt Sally of exalted emotion and then to knock it down : I, Heinrich Heine, he seems to say, can write romantic poetry as well as the next man, but please don't imagine I take it seriously. He will create a stirring mood and destroy it. A high-flown address to the beloved, by the chilly North Sea shore, ends in a request to her for some tea laced with rum, else her divine suitor may catch the divinest of colds and a really immortal cough. Byron, too, had burst many romantic bubbles, some of which he had blown himself, and Heine, ten years his junior, had listened and learned. But he is not the first in Germany, either, to employ the Aunt Sally method. Faust, in Goethe's play, rhapsodises on the nature of deity through twenty earnest lines, till Gretchen reminds him that her pastor says much the same, only the words he uses are a little bit different.
That rejoinder is somewhat out of character for Gretchen: It might have come better from Mephistopheles, and there we have another affinity with your man. Heine is an imp who deserted to the angels, but he went on believing that virtue and genius are not always. compatible and that a good poet can be a bad lad; and in this plea pro domo he is again with Byron, not with Wordsworth' and Shelley. It is characteristic of Heine -Land it puts him outside the main stream of the gospel of the Paramountcy of Art, which flows from Blake and HOlderlin through the Munich formalists and the Pre-Raphaelite Brother- hood to Stefan George—that he is not willing to grant to poetry the foremost place among the concerns of man. That place, he says, belongs to politics and religion. Taking his cue, Mr. Rose traces, in one of his two studies,* the development of * HEINRICH HEINE: Two Studies of his Thought and Feeling. BY William Rose; (Clarendon Press, 18s.) Heine's social and political thinking, and, in the other, of his feeling as a Jew.
Mr. Rose is known to us as scholar and translator, and as the man who, in the summer of 1938, sent Yeats an essay he had written on Rilke's conception of death, with the result that the old poet, as he read it, turned in disgust from what he thought was a morbid preoccupation of Rilke's, and retorted : Cast a cold eye On life, on death.
'All creation is from conflict,' he had said elsewhere, 'whether with our own mind or with that of others.' (Perhaps one of these days Mr. Rose will tell us something about his meeting with Yeats—did it not take place within the hospitable walls of Wadham College?—which preceded the sending of the book on Rilke.) Mr. Rose builds up his Heine story by arranging logically and chronologically what he has gleaned from the writings, letters and recorded conversations. Heine's mind is always lively, but it must have been possessed of a seismographical sensitivity to enable him to forecast with such precision the apocalyptic wrath that was to come upon Europe within a century of his death. He is a Hebrew prophet in the great tradi- tion. Three thousand years ago (is it?) he would have con- tributed a spirited Book of Harry to the Old Testament, but it would have played Old Harry with the prevailing tone of that long-faced compendium and so have been e,cluded from the canon. Heine has 'the quick sure instinctive perception of the incongruous and absurd' that Matthew Arnold allowed, in an eminent degree, only to him and Lessing among Germans of genius. He is a distillation of Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn and Wieland, with enhanced poetical gift.
I dissent from the legend—Mr. Rose takes it over inciden- tally, on page 47 (it is not an essential part of his argument)— that National Socialism's assumption of power in 1933 was effected constitutionally. It was not constitutional for a political Party to maintain armed forces of its own, nor to help itself to a majority in the legislature by expelling large numbers of its constitutionally elected opponents. Yet another thing I carp at, one that is a common practice in critical works, I know, but I think it is wrong. The references Mr. Rose gives to Heine's writings are mostly to volume and page in a stated edition—it is the beautiful Walzel edition, as lovely a monument as any poet could wish for. But if the references had been to the individual works by name, readers with other editions might have been able to make use of them.
Mr. Rose's book is instructive and illuminating, and he marshals his evidence convincingly. It is hard to write English well, and those of us who, from time to time, must read much poor English and much poor German flop our way through our native language like swimmers in suits of mail. How ironic that when we write about Lessing or Heine we cannot write like them. I am sure Mr. Rose would wish to reshape such a sentence as : 'Their attempts at enlightenment could only lead in the long run to some of his co-religionists, after having rejected the Biblical miracles and the scholastic prescriptions of the Talmud and the Rabbis, becoming disciples of Hegel or Schelling or Spinoza, and the rest becoming nothing at all.' Heine says that only poets can write good prose, and Reynolds and Coleridge and Nietzsche and Russell ('.AE') agree with him. If there were a set of commandments for poets, one of them ought to be : 'Thou shalt read no bad prose, and no bad verse but thine own.' Who was it in England said, in 1940's cuckooing June : 'The way a man writes his mother-tongue is a gauge to the quality of his mind. Churchill's English is streets ahead of Hitler's German. We'll win this war.'?
Previous page
