What he has written on Italy and France and Germany constitutes the best criticism in literature, and his Fragments on England are almost as penetrating. I have here a personal confession to make. I knew that Heine had only been in England for a few weeks as a young man, and so, half- English as I was, I thought I could afford to neglect what he had written about it. When I went to New York in November, 1914, I was asked to lecture at the German Club, and I selected Heine as my theme; but the committee wanted me to speak on England as well, to say what I really thought of it, so I talked on England for some time. At the end of the evening, a man came over to me and said, 'You never quoted the English Fragments of Heine, and yet you repeated almost word for word things he had said about the English people.'
'How extraordinary,' I exclaimed, 'to tell you the truth, I never read the English Fragments, but I will read them at once.'
I found that I had almost used Heine's very words; that my point of view on England and English faults was all but the same as his; but, though he saw all the weaknesses of the people with astonishing clearness and put them in a high light, some of the virtues of that strange folk seemed to have escaped him: for the true Englishman has a deep love for what is fair and large and kindly; he allows himself to maltreat Ireland for hundreds of years, but when his sin is brought home to him, he will give the Irish their freedom in a kindly and generous spirit. After the Civil War in America, eight or nine states contracted debts to England, but England has never called them in nor insisted on repayment; surely there is something nobly generous in such a people. Besides, their high poetry and astounding love of physical beauty should have endeared them to Heine. But Heine's view of English limitations and surface faults is astoundingly acute. It taught me that there was a strange likeness of view between us, and of judgment. Time and again I had been struck by some half-truth pungently expressed, only to find on wider reading that he had seen the other half just as clearly. Much of the piquancy of his writing comes from this peculiarity of his. I went on to read him completely; and the more I read, the more I grew to love and admire him.
The Germans always talk of Goethe and Schiller as their greatest, just as the English foolishly talk of Shakespeare and Milton, without realizing that in Hyperion Keats has written far better blank verse than anything ever reached by Milton. And in the same way Heine is a greater poet and a greater prose writer, too, than Schiller, who, like Milton, was rather a rhetorician than a master-singer. Both nations accept the Immortal reluctantly, but console themselves with what is related to them and commonplace.
I love Heine perhaps even more than Goethe, though I recognize that he is inferior to Goethe in philosophic range and deep-thoughted wisdom; he was almost as great a lyric poet as Goethe himself, though Goethe's best lyrics are the finest in all literature-and a far better prose writer. Besides, Goethe was in love with the conventional, whereas Heine was a born rebel, the first, indeed, to voice the revolt of the modern man against all the outworn and irrational forbiddings and prohibitions of our ordinary life.
And how lovable Heine was, and how human-charming, and what a friend of man! Can one ever forget the poem he wrote when Karl Heine, heir of old Solomon Heine, his banker-uncle, who had always allowed him five or six thousand francs a year, wrote to him that he heard he was writing his life and so wished to warn him that if he wrote anything derogatory of the Heines, he would immediately cut off his allowance.
Heine had already written three volumes of what would have been the most interesting autobiography in the world, but how could he continue it if it were to cost his beloved wife the little pension of five thousand francs a year, which would ensure his dear one comparative comfort after his death?
For sweet love's sake, Heine burnt his autobiography and wrote this poem on the incident:
Wer ein Herz hat und im Herzen
Liebe tragt, ist uberwunden
Schon zur Halfte und so lieg' ich
Jetzt geknebelt und gebunden.
Wenn ich sterbe wird die Zunge
Ausgerissen meiner Leiche
Denn sie furchten redend kam' ich
Wieder aus dem Schattenreiche.
Stumm verfaulen wird der Todte
In der Graft und nie verraten
Werd' ich die auf mir verobten
Lacherlichen Freveltaten.
Was there ever a greater poem written as comment on an actual occurrence?
With rare understanding Heine called himself the best of all the humorists; he is that, and something more, wittier even than Shakespeare, while Goethe, to judge by the scene in Auerbach's Keller in Faust, had hardly more humor than a pancake. It is Heine's humor that gilds all his books and makes them unforgettable-a possession of mankind forever. Who can ever forget the verses in the poem entitled Deutschland, which he calls 'A Winter's Tale,' in which he has set forth our modern creed better than anybody else:
Bin neues Lied, ein besseres Lied,
O Freunde, will ich euch dichten:
Wir wollen hier auf Erden schon
Das Himmelreich errichten.
Wir wollen auf Erden glucklich sein,
Und wollen nicht mehr darben;
Verschlemmen soil nicht der faule Bauch, Was fleissige Hande erwarben.
Es wachst hiernieden Brot genug
Fur alle Menschenkinder,
Auch Rosen und Myrten, Schonheit und Lust, Und Zuckererbsen nicht minder.
Ja, Zuckererbsen fur jedermann,
Sobald die Schoten platzen!
Den Himtnel uberlassen wir
Den Engeln und den Spatzen.
Here for the first time is the modern gospel, complete in essentials and unforgettable in humor. It is indeed 'a new song and a better song' that Heine sings to us: 'the resolve to found the Kingdom of Heaven here in this world.'
'We want to be happy on this earth,' he says, 'and no longer suffer want or allow the lazy belly to consume what industrious hands have created.'
'There's enough bread for all the children of men,' he cries, 'and roses and myrtles and beauty and passion besides: ay, and sweet peas to boot-yes, sweet peas for all, and with full content we can leave Heaven to the angels and sparrows.'
I would rather have written those four verses than all Schiller.
And in his history of religion, Heine has written our modern faith in prose even more perfectly than in his poetry:
The happier and more beautiful generations who are produced through free choice of love and who come to blossom in a religion of joy will smile sorrowfully over us, their poor ancestors who stupidly controlled ourselves instead of enjoying all the pleasures of this beautiful life, and by denying and killing our passions and desires made ourselves into pale ghosts of real men and women. Yes, I say it boldly, our descendants will be more beautiful and far happier than we are.
This, too, is the heart of my belief and of my hope for the future of mankind, and I have preached it even more boldly than Heine or Whitman and have been punished for it even more savagely.
How wise Heine was and far-sighted!
Think of what he wrote to a friend about Alsace-Lorraine thirty years before the war of 1870 and seventy-five years before the Great War:
I am the friend of the French, as I am the friend of all men who are good and reasonable. Rest quiet, I will never give up the Rhine to the French, and that for the very simple reason that the Rhine belongs to me. Yea, it belongs to me, through inalienable right of birth. I am of the free Rhine, the still freer son; my cradle stood on its banks, and I do not see why the Rhine should belong to any other than the children of the soil.
Alsace and Lorraine can I truly not so lightly incorporate with Germany as you are in the habit of doing, since the people in these countries are deeply attached to France, on account of the rights which they won at the great
