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; to him, but not to his credulous audience. He wasn’t simply taken along through life as an early accompanist of everyday lyrical experiences, he was also always, by virtue of his intellectualism, passed along by people’s youthful idiocy to their more enlightened selves. And they want to be enlightened about everything, just not about Heine, and even if they awaken from his dreams they still have his wit.
This wit, however, in verse and prose, is an asthmatic cur. Heine isn’t capable of driving his humor to the height of pathos and chasing it down from there. He trots it out, but he can’t make it jump. “Just Wait!” is the title of a poem.
Because I flash with such success
You think at thundering I can’t excel!
But you’re all wrong, for I possess
A talent for thundering as well.
Dreadful it will stand the test,
When come the proper day and hour;
You shall hear my voice at last,
The thunderous word, the weather’s power.
The wild storm on that day will cleave
Full many an oak tree tall,
Full many a palace wall will heave
And many a steeple fall!
These are empty promises. After all, what does Heine say about Platen?
In words, a splendid deed
That you intend to do someday!—