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The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. by Editor in Chief: Kuno Francke

E >> Editor in Chief: Kuno Francke >> The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI.



VOLUME VI




HEINRICH HEINE

FRANZ GRILLPARZER

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN





THE GERMAN CLASSICS

Masterpieces of German Literature

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH


Patrons' Edition

IN TWENTY VOLUMES

ILLUSTRATED


1914

CONTRIBUTORS AND TRANSLATORS

VOLUME VI




CONTENTS OF VOLUME VI


HEINRICH HEINE

The Life of Heinrich Heine. By William Guild Howard

Poems

Dedication. Translated by Sir Theodore Martin

Songs. Translators: Sir Theodore Martin, Charles Wharton Stork, T.
Brooksbank

A Lyrical Intermezzo. Translators: T. Brooksbank, Sir Theodore
Martin, J.E. Wallis, Richard Garnett, Alma Strettell, Franklin Johnson,
Charles G. Leland, Charles Wharton Stork

Sonnets. Translators: T. Brooksbank, Edgar Alfred Bowring

Poor Peter. Translated by Alma Strettell

The Two Grenadiers. Translated by W.H. Furness

Belshazzar. Translated by John Todhunter

The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar. Translated by Sir Theodore Martin

The Return Home. Translators: Sir Theodore Martin. Kate
Freiligrath-Kroeker, James Thomson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Twilight. Translated by Kate Freiligrath-Kroeker

Hail to the Sea. Translated by Kate Freiligrath-Kroeker

In the Harbor. Translated by Kate Freiligrath-Kroeker

A New Spring. Translators: Kate Freiligrath-Kroeker, Charles Wharton
Stork

Abroad. Translated by Margaret Armour

The Sphinx. Translated by Sir Theodore Martin

Germany. Translated by Margaret Armour

Enfant Perdu. Translated by Lord Houghton

The Battlefield of Hastings. Translated by Margaret Armour

The Asra. Translated by Margaret Armour

The Passion Flower. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork


Prose

The Journey to the Harz. Translated by Charles Godfrey Leland

Boyhood Days. Translated by Charles Godfrey Leland

English Fragments--Dialogue on the Thames; London; Wellington.
Translated by Charles Godfrey Leland

Lafayette. Translated by Charles Godfrey Leland

The Romantic School. Translated by Charles Godfrey Leland

The Rabbi of Bacharach. Translated by Charles Godfrey Leland


FRANZ GRILLPARZER

The Life of Franz Grillparzer. By William Guild Howard

Medea. Translated by Theodore A. Miller

The Jewess of Toledo. Translated by George Henry Danton and Annina
Periam Danton

The Poor Musician. Translated by Alfred Remy

My Journey to Weimar. Translated by Alfred Remy


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Beethoven as a Letter Writer. By Walter R. Spalding

Beethoven's Letters. Translated by J.S. Shedlock



ILLUSTRATIONS--VOLUME VI


Emperor William I at a Court Reception-Frontispiece

Heinrich Heine. By W. Krauskopf

Heinrich Heine. By E. Hader

The Lorelei Fountain in New York. By Herter

Spring's Awakening. By Ludwig von Hofmann

Flower Fantasy. By Ludwig von Hofmann

Poor Peter. By P. Grotjohann

The Two Grenadiers. By P. Grotjohann

Rocky Coast. By Ludwig von Hofmann

Play of the Waves. By Arnold Boecklin

Market Place, Goettingen

Old Imperial Palace, Goslar

The Witches' Dancing Ground

The Brocken Inn About 1830

The Falls of the Ilse

View from St. Andreasberg

Johann Wilhelm Monument, Duesseldorf

The Duke of Wellington. By d'Orsay

Bacharach on the Rhine

House in Bacharach

Franz Grillparzer

Franz Grillparzer and Kaethi Froehlich in 1823

Grillparzer's House in Spiegelgasse

Grillparzer's Room in the House of the Sisters Froehlich

Franz Grillparzer in His Sixtieth Year

The Grillparzer Monument at Vienna

Medea. By Anselm Feuerbach

Medea. From the Grillparzer Monument at Vienna

Beethoven. By Max Klinger




THE LIFE OF HEINRICH HEINE

BY WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.
Assistant Professor of German, Harvard University

I.

The history of German literature makes mention of few men more
self-centered and at the same time more unreserved than Heinrich
Heine. It may be said that everything which Heine wrote gives us, and
was intended to give us, first of all some new impression of the
writer; so that after a perusal of his works we know him in all his
strength and weakness, as we can know only an amiable and
communicative egotist; moreover, besides losing no opportunity for
self-expression, both in and out of season, Heine published a good
deal of frankly autobiographical matter, and wrote memoirs, only
fragments of which have come down to us, but of which more than has
yet appeared will perhaps ultimately be made accessible. Heine's life,
then, is to us for the most part an open book. Nevertheless, there are
many obscure passages in it, and there remain many questions not to be
answered with certainty, the first of which is as to the date of his
birth. His own statements on this subject are contradictory, and the
original records are lost. But it seems probable that he was born on
the thirteenth of December, 1797, the eldest child of Jewish parents
recently domiciled at Duesseldorf on the Rhine.

The parentage, the place, and the time were almost equally significant
aspects of the constellation under which young Harry Heine--for so he
was first named--began his earthly career. He was born a Jew in a
German city which, with a brief interruption, was for the first
sixteen years of his life administered by the French. The citizens of
Duesseldorf in general had little reason, except for high taxes and the
hardships incident to conscription in the French armies, to complain
of the foreign dominion. Their trade flourished, they were given
better laws, and the machinery of justice was made much less
cumbersome than it had been before. But especially the Jews hailed the
French as deliverers; for now for the first time they were relieved of
political disabilities and were placed upon a footing of equality with
the gentile population. To Jew and gentile alike the military
achievements of the French were a source of satisfaction and
admiration; and when the Emperor of the French himself came to town,
as Heine saw him do in 1810, we can easily understand how the
enthusiasm of the boy surrounded the person of Napoleon, and the idea
that he was supposed to represent, with a glamor that never lost its
fascination for the man. To Heine, Napoleon was the incarnation of the
French Revolution, the glorious new-comer who took by storm the
intrenched strongholds of hereditary privilege, the dauntless leader
in whose army every common soldier carried a field marshal's baton in
his knapsack. If later we find Heine mercilessly assailing the
repressive and reactionary aristocracy of Germany, we shall not
lightly accuse him of lack of patriotism. He could not be expected to
hold dear institutions of which he felt only the burden, without a
share in the sentiment which gives stability even to institutions that
have outlived their usefulness. Nor shall we call him a traitor for
loving the French, a people to whom his people owed so much, and to
whom he was spiritually akin.

French influences, almost as early as Hebrew or German, were among the
formative forces brought to bear upon the quick-witted but not
precocious boy. Heine's parents were orthodox, but by no means bigoted
Jews. We read with amazement that one of the plans of the mother,
ambitious for her firstborn, was to make of him a Roman Catholic
priest. The boy's father, Samson Heine, was a rather unsuccessful
member of a family which in other representatives--particularly
Samson's brother Salomon in Hamburg--attained to wealth and prominence
in the world of finance.

[Illustration: W. KRAUSKOPF HEINRICH HEINE After a Drawing in the
Possession of Mr. Carl Meinert in Dessau]

Samson Heine seems to have been too easy-going, self-indulgent, and
ostentatious, to have made the most of the talents that he
unquestionably had. Among his foibles was a certain fondness for the
pageantry of war, and he was in all his glory as an officer of the
local militia. To his son Gustav he transmitted real military
capacity, which led to a distinguished career and a patent of nobility
in the Austrian service. Harry Heine inherited his father's more
amiable but less strenuous qualities. Inquisitive and alert, he was
rather impulsive than determined, and his practical mother had her
trials in directing him toward preparation for a life work, the
particular field of which neither she nor he could readily choose.
Peira, or Betty, Heine was a stronger character than her husband; and
in her family, several members of which had taken high rank as
physicians, there had prevailed a higher degree of intellectual
culture than the Heines had attained to. She not only managed the
household with prudence and energy, but also took the chief care of
the education of the children. To both parents Harry Heine paid the
homage of true filial affection; and of the happiness of the home
life, _The Book Le Grand_ and a number of poems bear unmistakable
witness. The poem "My child, we were two children" gives a true
account of Harry and his sister Charlotte at play.

In Duesseldorf, Heine's formal education culminated in attendance in
the upper classes of a Lyceum, organized upon the model of a French
Lycee and with a corps of teachers recruited chiefly from the ranks of
the Roman Catholic clergy. The spirit of the institution was
rationalistic and the discipline wholesome. Here Heine made solid
acquisitions in history, literature, and the elements of philosophy.
Outside of school, he was an eager spectator, not merely of stirring
events in the world of politics, but also of many a picturesque
manifestation of popular life--a spectator often rather than a
participant; for as a Jew he stood beyond the pale of both the German
and the Roman Catholic traditions that gave and give to the cities of
the Rhineland their characteristic naive gaiety and harmless
superstition. Such a poem as _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ would be
amazing as coming from an unbeliever, did we not see in it evidence of
the poet's capacity for perfect sympathetic adoption of the spirit of
his early environment. The same is true of many another poetic
expression of simple faith, whether in Christianity or in the
mythology of German folk-lore.

Interest in medieval Catholicism and in folk-lore is one of the most
prominent traits in the Romantic movement, which reached its
culmination during the boyhood of Heine. The history of Heine's
connection with this movement is foreshadowed by the circumstances of
his first contact with it. He tells us that the first book he ever
read was _Don Quixote_ (in the translation by Tieck). At about the
same time he read _Gulliver's Travels_, the tales of noble robbers
written by Goethe's brother-in-law, Vulpius, the wildly fantastic
stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Schiller's _Robbers_; but also Uhland's
ballads, and the songs collected by Arnim and Brentano in _The Boy's
Magic Horn_. That is to say: At the time when in school a critical and
skeptical mind was being developed in him by descendants of the age of
enlightenment, his private reading led him for the most part into the
region of romanticism in its most exaggerated form. At the time,
furthermore, when he took healthy romantic interest in the picturesque
Dusseldorf life, his imagination was morbidly stimulated by furtive
visits to a woman reputed to be a witch, and to her niece, the
daughter of a hangman. His earliest poems, the _Dream Pictures_,
belong in an atmosphere charged with witchery, crime, and the
irresponsibility of nightmare. This coincidence of incompatible
tendencies will later be seen to account for much of the mystery in
Heine's problematic character.

It having been decided, perhaps because the downfall of Napoleon shut
the door of all other opportunity, that Heine should embark upon a
mercantile career, he was given a brief apprenticeship, in 1815 at
Frankfurt, in the following years at Hamburg, under the immediate
patronage of his uncle Salomon who, in 1818, even established the
young poet in a dry goods business of his own. The only result of
these experiments was the demonstration of Heine's total inaptitude
for commercial pursuits. But the uncle was magnanimous and offered his
nephew the means necessary for a university course in law, with a view
to subsequent practice in Hamburg. Accordingly, after some brushing up
of Latin at home, Heine in the fall of 1819 was matriculated as a
student at the University of Bonn.

In spite of failure to accomplish his immediate purpose, Heine had not
sojourned in vain at Hamburg. He had gained the good will of an
opulent uncle whose bounty he continued almost uninterruptedly to
enjoy to the end of his days. But in a purpose that lay much nearer to
his heart he had failed lamentably; for, always sensitive to the
charms of the other sex, Heine had conceived an overpowering passion
for his cousin Amalie, the daughter of Salomon, only to meet with
scornful rebuffs at the hands of the coquettish and worldly-minded
heiress. There is no reason to suppose that Amalie ever took her
cousin's advances seriously. Her father certainly did not so take
them. On the other hand, there is equally little reason to doubt the
sincerity and depth of Heine's feelings, first of unfounded hope, then
of persistent despair that pursued him in the midst of other
occupations and even in the fleeting joys of other loves. The most
touching poems included among the _Youthful Sorrows_ of his first
volume were inspired by Amalie Heine.

At Bonn Heine was a diligent student. Though never a roysterer, he
took part in various extra-academic enterprises, was a member of the
_Burschenschaft_, that democratic-patriotic organization so gravely
suspected by the reactionary governments, and made many friends. He
duly studied history and law; he heard Ernst Moritz Arndt interpret
the _Germania_ of Tacitus; but more especially did he profit by
official and personal relations with A.W. Schlegel, who taught Heine
what he himself knew best, namely, the secret of literary form and the
art of metrical expression.

The fall of 1820 saw Heine at Goettingen, the Hanoverian university to
which, shortly before, the Americans Ticknor and Everett had repaired
and at which in that very year Bancroft had attained his degree of
doctor of philosophy. Here, however, Heine was repelled by the
aristocratic exclusiveness of the Hanoverian squires who gave the tone
to student society, as well as by the mummified dryness of the
professors. In marked contrast to the patriotic and romantic spirit of
Bonn he noted here with amazement that the distinguished Germanist
Benecke lectured on the _Nibelungenlied_ to an auditory of nine. His
own residence was destined this time to be brief; for serious quarrels
coming to the ear of the faculty, he was, on January 23, 1821,
advised to withdraw; and in April he enrolled himself as a student at
the University of Berlin.

The next three years were filled with manifold activities. As a
student Heine was deeply impressed by the absolute philosophy
expounded by Hegel; as a Jew he lent a willing hand to the endeavors
of an association recently founded for the amelioration of the social
and political condition of the Hebrews; in the drawing room of Rahel
Levin, now the wife of Varnhagen von Ense, he came in touch with
gifted men and women who were ardent admirers of Goethe, and some of
whom, a quarter of a century before, had befriended Friedrich
Schlegel; and in the subterranean restaurant of Lutter and Wegener he
joined in the revels of Hoffmann, Grabbe, and other eccentric
geniuses. Heine now began to be known as a man of letters. After
having, from 1817 on, printed occasional poems in newspapers and
magazines, he published in December, 1821 (with the date 1822), his
first volume, entitled simply _Poems_; he wrote newspaper articles on
Berlin and on Poland, which he visited in the summer of 1822; and in
the spring of 1823 he published _Tragedies together with a Lyrical
Intermezzo_--two very romantic and undramatic plays in verse,
separated in the volume by a short series of lyrical poems.

Meanwhile Amalie Heine had been married and Harry's parents had moved
to Lueneburg. Regret for the loss of Amalie soon gave way to a new
passion for a very young girl, whose identity remains uncertain, but
who was probably Amalie's little sister Therese. In any case, Heine
met the new love on the occasion of a visit to Lueneburg and Hamburg in
the spring of 1823, and was haunted by her image during the summer
spent at Cuxhaven. Here Heine first saw the sea. In less exalted moods
he dallied with fisher maidens; he did not forget Amalie; but the
youthful grace and purity of Therese dominate most of the poems of
this summer. The return from the watering place gave Heine the title
_The Return Home_ for this collection of pieces which, when published
in 1826, was dedicated to Frau Varnhagen von Ense.

Uncle Salomon, to whom the _Tragedies_ had been affectionately
inscribed, was not displeased with the growing literary reputation of
his nephew. But he saw no sense in the idea that Heine already
entertained of settling in Paris. He insisted that the young man
should complete his studies; and so, in January, 1824, Heine once more
betook himself to Goettingen, where on the twenty-first of July, 1825,
he was duly promoted _Doctor utriusque Juris_. In the summer of 1824
he made the trip through the Hartz mountains which served as the basis
of _The Journey to the Hartz_; immediately before his promotion he
submitted to baptism in the Lutheran church as Christian Johann
Heinrich Heine.

Submission is the right word for this conversion. It was an act of
expediency such as other ambitious men found unavoidable in those
days; but Heine performed it in a spirit of bitterness caused not so
much by a sense of apostasy as by contempt for the conventional
Christianity that he now embraced. There can be no sharper contrast
than that presented by such a poem as _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ and
sundry satirical pieces not included in this volume.

Two vacations at Norderney, where Heine renewed and deepened
acquaintance with his beloved North Sea, not very resolute attempts to
take up the practice of law in Hamburg, a trip to London, vain hopes
of a professorship in Munich, a sojourn in Italy, vacillations between
Hamburg, Berlin, and the North Sea, complete the narrative of Heine's
movements to the end of the first period of his life. He was now Heine
the writer: poet, journalist, and novelist. _The Journey to the
Hartz_, first published in a magazine, _Der Gesellschafter_, in
January and February, 1826, was issued in May of that year by Campe in
Hamburg, as the first volume of _Pictures of Travel_, beginning with
the poems of _The Return Home_ and concluding with the first group of
hymns to the North Sea, written at Norderney in the previous year.
_Pictures of Travel II_, issued in 1827, consisted of the second cycle
of poems on the _North Sea_, an account in prose of life on the
island, entitled _Norderney, The Book Le Grand_, to which epigrams by
Immermann were appended, and extracts from _Letters from Berlin_
published in 1822. _Pictures of Travel III_ (1830) began with
experiences in Italy, but degenerated into a provoked but ruthless
attack upon Platen. _Pictures of Travel IV_ (1831) included _English
Fragments_, the record of Heine's observations in London, and _The
City of Lucca_, a supplementary chapter on Italy. In October, 1827,
Heine collected under the title _Book of Songs_ nearly all of his
poems written up to that time.

The first period in Heine's life closes with the year 1831. The
Parisian revolution of July, 1830, had turned the eyes of all Europe
toward the land in which political experiments are made for the
benefit of mankind. Many a German was attracted thither, and not
without reason Heine hoped to find there a more promising field for
the employment of his talents than with all his wanderings he had
discovered in Germany. Toward the end of May, 1831, he arrived in
Paris, and Paris was thenceforth his home until his death on the
seventeenth of February, 1856.

II

In the preface to the second edition of the _Book of Songs_, written
at Paris in 1837, Heine confessed that for some time past he had felt
a certain repugnance to versification; that the poems therewith
offered for the second time to the public were the product of a time
when, in contrast to the present, the flame of truth had rather heated
than clarified his mind; and expressed the hope that his recent
political, theological, and philosophical writings--all springing from
the same idea and intention as the poems--might atone for any weakness
in the poems. Heine wrote poetry after 1831, and he wrote prose before
1831; but in a general way what he says of his two periods is correct:
before his emigration he was primarily a poet, and afterwards
primarily a critic, journalist, and popular historian. In his first
period he wrote chiefly about his own experiences; in his second,
chiefly about affairs past and present in which he was interested.

As to the works of the first period, we might hesitate to say whether
the _Pictures of Travel_ or the _Book of Songs_ were the more
characteristic product. In whichever way our judgment finally
inclined, we should declare that the _Pictures of Travel_ were
essentially prosified poems and that the poems were, in their
collected form, versified _Pictures of Travel_; and that both,
moreover, were dominated, as the writings after 1831 were dominated,
by a romantically tinged longing for individual liberty.

The title _Pictures of Travel_, to which Heine gave so definite a
connotation, is not in itself a true index to the multifarious
contents of the series of traveler's notes, any more than the volumes
taken each by itself were units. Pages of verse followed pages of
prose; and in the _Journey to the Hartz_, verse interspersed in prose
emphasizes the lyrical character of the composition. Heine does indeed
give pictures of some of the scenes that he visits; but he also
narrates his passage from point to point; and at every point he sets
forth his recollections, his thoughts, his dreams, his personal
reaction upon any idea that comes into his head; so that the
substance, especially of the _Journey to the Hartz_, is less what was
to be seen in the Hartz than what was suggested to a very lively
imagination; and we admire the agility with which the writer jumps
from place to place quite as much as the suppleness with which he can
at will unconditionally subject himself to the genius of a single
locality. For Heine is capable of writing straightforward descriptive
prose, as well-ordered and as matter-of-fact as a narrative of
Kleist's. But the world of reality, where everything has an assignable
reason for its being and doing, is not the world into which he most
delights to conduct us. This world, on the contrary, is that in which
the water "murmurs and rustles so wonderfully, the birds pour forth
broken love-sick strains, the trees whisper as if with a thousand
maidens' tongues, the odd mountain flowers peep up at us as if with a
thousand maidens' eyes, stretching out to us their curious, broad,
drolly scalloped leaves; the sunrays flash here and there in sport,
the herbs, as though endowed with reason, are telling one another
their green legends, all seems enchanted"--in other words, a
wonderland disturbed by no doubts on the part of a rationalistic
Alice. And a further secret of this fascinating, though in the long
run exasperating style, is the sublime audacity with which Heine
dances now on one foot and now on the other, leaving you at every
moment in amused perplexity, whether you shall next find him standing
firmly on mother earth or bounding upward to recline on the clouds.

"A mixture of description of nature, wit, poetry, and observation a la
Washington Irving" Heine himself called the _Journey to the Hartz_.
The novelty lay in the mixture, and in the fact that though the
ingredients are, so to speak, potentized in the highest degree, they
are brought to nearly perfect congruence and fusion by the
irresistible solvent of the second named. The _Journey to the Hartz_
is a work of wit, in the present sense, and in the older sense of
that word. It is a product of superior intelligence--not a _Sketch
Book_, but a single canvas with an infinitude of details; not a
_Sentimental Journey_--although Heine can outdo Sterne in
sentimentality, he too persistently outdoes him also in satire--the
work, fragmentary and outwardly formless, is in essence thoroughly
informed by a two-fold purpose: to ridicule pedantry and philistinism,
and to extol nature and the life of those uncorrupted by the world.

A similar unity is unmistakable in the _Book of Songs_. It would be
difficult to find another volume of poems so cunningly composed. If we
examine the book in its most obvious aspect, we find it beginning with
_Youthful Sorrows_ and ending with hymns to the North Sea; passing,
that is to say, from the most subjective to the most objective of
Heine's poetic expressions. The first of the _Youthful Sorrows_ are
_Dream Pictures_, crude and grotesque imitations of an inferior
romantic _genre_; the _North Sea Pictures_ are magnificent attempts in
highly original form to catch the elusive moods of a great natural
element which before Heine had played but little part in German
poetry. From the _Dream Pictures_ we proceed to _Songs_ (a very simple
love story told in forms as nearly conventional as Heine ever used),
to _Romances_ which, with the notable exception of _The Two
Grenadiers_ and _Belshazzar_, are relatively feeble attempts at the
objectivation of personal suffering; and thence to _Sonnets_, direct
communications to particular persons. Thereupon follow the _Lyrical
Intermezzo_ and the _Return Home_, each with a prologue and an
epilogue, and with several series of pieces which, like the _Songs_
above mentioned, are printed without titles and are successive
sentences or paragraphs in the poet's own love story. This he tells
over and over again, without monotony, because the story gains in
significance as the lover gains in experience, because each time he
finds for it a new set of symbols, and because the symbols become more
and more objective as the poet's horizon broadens. Then come a few
pieces of religious content (culminating in _The Pilgrimage to
Kevlaar_), the poems in the _Journey to the Hartz_ (the most striking
of which are animated by the poetry of folk-lore)--these poems clearly
transitional to the poetry of the ocean which Heine wrote with such
vigor in the two cycles on the North Sea. The movement is a steady
climax.