Heine, HEINRICH, the most prominent figure in German literature since Goethe and Schiller, was born of Jewish parents on 13th December 1797, in Düsseldorf-on-Rhine. His boyish heroes were Napoleon and Napoleon's stalwart grenadiers and drummers. At a Roman Catholic school in Düsseldorf he learned what it was to be jeered at and ill-treated on account of his race and creed. At sixteen he was sent to Frankfurt to learn banking, but he soon gave it up; routine work was wholly repugnant to him. Next he tried trading on his own account in Hamburg, but soon failed. About the same time he fell in love with a daughter of his rich uncle, Solomon Heine of Hamburg; and his grief at her non-requital of his passion, jealously nursed as it was, formed a stimulus to poetic creation. At length in 1819 his uncle gratified the desire of his heart by sending him to the university of Bonn. There, and subsequently at Berlin and Göttingen, he studied law, taking his doctor's degree at Göttingen in 1825. But his thoughts were more given to poetry and kindred subjects than to legal studies. At Bonn A. W. Schlegel helped him to master the technique of his art. At Berlin, in the circle over which Rahel, the wife of Varnhagen von Ense, presided, he found himself for the first time in a wholly congenial atmosphere; and the close friendship formed between them lasted till Rahel's death. In the efforts then being made in Berlin by Ganz and others to inspire the Jews with a sense of the value of European culture Heine also took an active share. In 1821 he published his first volume of Gedichte, which at once arrested the attention of the observant. After unsuccessful essays in tragedy-writing, a second collection of poems, entitled Lyrisches Intermezzo, his Sapphic love-complaint, appeared in 1823. But the general public only became aware that a new writer of the first magnitude had risen in the heavens of literature when in 1826-27 the first and second volumes of the Reisebilder came into their hands. In the latter year Heine likewise celebrated his triumph as conqueror of a new poetic province in Das Buch der Lieder, which, though consisting almost entirely of poems already published, created throughout Germany such excitement as had not been since Schiller's Räuber came out. Many of Heine's best songs are as much loved for the beautiful melodies to which they were set by Schumann and Mendelssohn as for their own intrinsic merit.
These two works are Heine's masterpieces; he never wrote anything to excel them. Nearly all his writings are of an occasional nature, either lyrical, or autobiographical, or journalistic, or polemical. But the genius in them is permanent, and in many respects of the highest quality. The great charm of his work is due to the fact that he was a superb literary artist, a consummate master of style in both verse and prose. He was essentially a lyrist; his song has the spontaneity and melody of a skylark's burst, or the quaint naïveté, the pathos, the simple sweetness of the best Volkslieder. His was a very complex and paradoxical nature: he united in himself the passionate energy of a Hebrew prophet, the sensuous feeling of a pagan Greek, and the dreamy sentimentalism of a medieval German. The simplicity of a pure child of nature is blended with the keenest wit, with an irony that is apt to grow bitterest when his lyric mood is sweetest, and a power of mocking sarcasm that cuts sharp and deep. His mastery in the art of self-torture taught him how to lash the follies and absurdities of the conventional world with the roughest raw-hide of Mephistophelean scorn. His writing is full of surprises, as capricious as the sea he loved so passionately. His intellect has the suppleness and grace and sincery strength of a highly-trained athlete, but it neither walks nor glides; it leaps, and turns and doubles with the glancing sweetness of a swallow on wing. He passes from exquisite tenderness to sardonic cynicism, from melancholy sadness to sly insidious humour, in the twinkling of an eye. Nor is sweet dreamy sentiment in him any hindrance to remarkable precision of thought. But perhaps his strangest quality is an audacity of intellect that hesitates at no utterance, that recoils from no jest on things even the most sacred. His language is terse, clear, and rich in word-pictures, mostly original, seldom glittering with the tinsel of mere conventional imagery. One of his favourite devices is to mingle the images of dreamland, unearthly and weird, with images of true poetic beauty forged from the raw ore of commonest reality. But, notwithstanding his delicate poetic sensibility, and the depth and sincerity of his feeling, his poetry had its origin in dissonance of soul; the Weltschmerz had eaten deeply into his heart. The prophet of poetic pain, he scruples not to lay bare his soul to us without reserve; we see the man just as he is, with all his beauties, with all his faults. And these last are neither few nor venial. His sensuousness often degenerates into obscenity and coarseness, his wit into vulgarity and affectation, his irony into malice and persiflage. He becomes cynical, frivolous, a mocker. Not only does he show no sense of reverence himself, he wantonly outrages the reverent feelings of his readers. And he has just 'femininity' enough in his constitution to find pleasure in spiteful personalities.
In June 1825 he had himself baptised a Christian, exchanging his original name Harry for Christian Johann Heinrich, though he used only the last of the three. This step, which proved to be one of the most unfortunate of his life, was not taken from conviction, but simply to secure for himself the common rights of German citizenship, and to give himself a respectable standing in the world. Heine, however, by this act only alienated from him the esteem of the orthodox among his own people. His revolutionary opinions, and his trenchant and outspoken criticism of the governments of the day, always remained insuperable hindrances to his appointment to any official employment in Prussia, and even in Germany. During the years of early manhood, from 1823 onwards, he was racked by excruciating headaches, which reacted upon his temper and his mood. Then again, he lived on a strained footing with his Hamburg relatives; they were shrewd business folk, and could see no virtue in poetship, and nothing 'divine' in the poet himself—and Heine was inclined to presume upon his success. He was always greatly harassed by the unscrupulous tyranny of the public censor: his works came from the press grievously maltreated, and against this injustice he could get no remedy. Moreover, he felt himself coming perilously near to the doors of a German fortress-prison. No wonder then that, when his enthusiasm was roused by the July revolution in Paris, he turned his back upon Germany and hastened thither, going into a voluntary exile from which he never returned. But he had not been altogether idle during the six unhappy years since 1825. He had travelled to England and Italy; he had worked on the editorial staff of Cotta's newspapers in Bavaria; and, besides Das Buch der Lieder, he wrote four volumes in all of Die Reisebilder, the last two (1830-31), however, inferior to the others.
In Paris Heine, whose intellectual character and intellectual sympathies were always more French than German, soon made himself at home. He secured a patron in the minister Thiers, and consorted with the greatest writers and chief celebrities then living in Paris; and yet he often longed to return to the Philistines of Germany. For, in spite of the fact that he railed at his Jewish descent and poured scorn upon his German compatriots, he was always a German at heart and had a secret admiration for the persecuted people from whom he was sprung. Nor was this by any means the only inconsistency in his nature. Though he scoffed at religion, yet was there a deeply religious vein in his composition—the Bible was always a favourite book with him; though he was deplorably lax in his ideas and practices of morality, he was not insensible to the beauty of purity; and though he ridiculed the vagaries of the romantic school, he cherished a lingering fondness for its ideals.
The July revolution seems to have awakened in Heine the first stirrings of manly seriousness. He turned from poetry to politics, with which he had always coquetted ever since he began to write. He entered Paris glowing with the inspiration of the revolution. He assumed the rôle of a tribune of the people, a leader of the cosmopolitan democratic movement, the object of which was to effect the union of the peoples of all nations in a brotherhood of liberty and progress. It was under the inspiration of this ideal that he greeted with acclamation the socialistic doctrines of the St Simonists, at all events in so far as economics and religion were concerned. One of the chief aims of his life was to make the French and the Germans acquainted with one another's intellectual and artistic achievements. This was the ground out of which sprang the Französische Zustände (1833), a collection of papers on affairs in France, first printed in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung; De l'Allemagne (1835), the French version of Die Romantische Schule (1836)—of Germany, that is; and Philosophie und Literatur in Deutschland, forming part of the second of the four volumes of miscellaneous writings entitled Der Salon (1835-40). Heine was always an Ishmael, not only of literature but also of politics—he would fight under nobody's flag but his own; and hence, with his aristocratic instincts and refined taste, he refused to make common cause with the revolutionary fugitives from Germany who found an asylum in Paris. Yet he seems not to have been altogether above the suspicion, if not of insincerity, at least of desiring to win the crown of the political martyr without undergoing the pains of political martyrdom. At all events, his ambiguous attitude brought down upon him the spiteful enmity of his revolutionary compatriots; and their hostility was greatly embittered by the publication of Heine's ungenerous attack upon his former friend and political associate Börne (1840). Nor did he enjoy any better savour of grace from the governments of Germany because of his personal aversion to their dreaded enemies. In 1835 his writings, past and prospective together, had been condemned, along with those of the Young Germany school, by the Confederation parliament at Frankfurt, and this measure was not repealed until 1842.
Although Heine loved liberty with his whole soul, and lived and suffered for it, it seems never to have been anything more to him than a romantic ideal. The truth is he stood on the continental watershed of two wholly different Weltanschauungen ('world-conceptions'), the old world of romantic feudalism and the new world of scientific inquiry and individual freedom. He had nothing but scorn for the tyrannous era of priestcraft and aristocracy, and nothing but sarcasm and ridicule for the inert mass of commonplace Philistines, with their intellectual apathy and self-satisfied somnolence. Respecting the future he cherished the most sanguine hopes. He foresaw in imagination the glorious regeneration of the peoples; and Germany was, he believed, the agent of promise destined to effect this great change. Nor must it be imputed to him for blame that he never grasped the problem of the practical realisation of his ideal, that he never thought of the means and forms by and in which this romanticism of the revolution of progress was to be converted into the concrete realism of accomplished fact. For, though he criticised the past and projected his hopes into the future, his heart was knit to the past with the tenderest associations of feeling, and his sceptical intellect would not allow him to remain blind to the imperfections of his propitious dreams. It need not therefore excite surprise to find traces of the sentimental declaimer in Heine's war-song of liberty, despite his evident earnestness in the cause. For, after all, his love for humanity was beyond all suspicion warm and deep, and his zeal for intellectual freedom unquestionably sincere.
His last years, from 1844 onwards, were years of great pain and suffering. His book on Börne provoked a kind of hornet's nest about his ears. On the eve of a duel, which it ultimately cost him, he married in due legal form Mathilde Mirat, a Paris grisette, with whom he had been living some years in free love. Then came his uncle Solomon's death, and a quarrel with the family, because of their refusal to continue the annuity he had received from his uncle from the year he settled in Paris. A compromise was effected early in 1847: the payment of the annuity was resumed, Heine pledging himself not to publish anything reflecting on the family. For this reason his Memoiren, which he anticipated would be his greatest work, was withheld from publication. The fate of the manuscript is a mystery. Heine speaks of having destroyed it. Yet it is both asserted and denied that it passed into the possession of his brother Gustav. At all events the fragmentary Memoiren published in 1884 can scarcely be part of the original work; it is in all probability a portion of the new version begun by Heine. The revolution of 1848, unlike that of 1830, failed to awaken any enthusiasm in him. Since 1837 his eyes had caused him much pain, and since 1844 he had been confined to his bed by spinal paralysis. He lingered on in excruciating pain, borne with heroic patience and endurance, until 17th February 1856. But no amount or intensity of bodily suffering could break his spirit or impair his creative power; he jested and wrote to the last. During these years he published Neue Gedichte and Deutschland, a satirical political poem, in 1844; Atta Troll, the 'swan-song of romanticism,' in 1847; a collection of poems, Romancero, in 1851; and three volumes of Vermischte Schriften, in 1854.
Complete editions of Heine's works have been edited by Strodtmann (21 vols. 1861-66), Karpeles (12 vols. 1885 and 9 vols. 1886-87), and Elster (5 vols. 1887), and in French by himself, assisted by Gérard de Nerval and others (14 vols. 1852 et seq.). The best biographies of Heine are those by Proell (1886) and Strodtmann (3d ed. 2 vols. 1884). See also Heines Autobiographie (a mosaic) by Karpeles (1888), and Lives by W. Sharp (1888) and Stigand (1875). Heine's poetry has a fatal fascination for translators. Versions have been essayed by
Ackerlos (1854), Wallis (1856), Bowring (1859), Lord Lytton, Sir Theodore Martin (1879), J. Geikie (1887), and others. Heine's works have been translated by Leland (vol. i. 1891), and parts of the prose by Stern (1873), Snodgrass (1882), Storr (1887), Havelock Ellis (1888), R. McClintock (1890), &c. Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos, extracts from Heine's prose, translated by Snodgrass (1879; 2d ed. 1888), may also be consulted.