The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI | Page 6

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.
The truth of the foregoing observations can be tested only by an examination of the entire Book of Songs. The total effect is one of arrangement. The order of the sections is chronological; the order of the poems within the sections is logical; and some poems were altered to make them fit into the scheme. Each was originally the expression of a moment; and the peculiarity of Heine as a lyric poet is his disposition to fix a moment, however fleeting, and to utter a feeling, of however slight consequence to humanity it might at first blush seem to be. In the Journey to the Hartz he never lost an opportunity to make a point; in his lyrical confessions he suppressed no impulse to self-revelation; and seldom did his mastery of form fail to ennoble even the meanest substance.
Some of Heine's most perfect products are his smallest. Whether, however, a slight substance can be fittingly presented only in the briefest forms, or a larger matter calls for extended treatment, the method is the same, and the merit lies in the justness and suggestiveness of details. Single points, or points in juxtaposition or in succession, not the developed continuity of a line, are the means to the effect which Heine seeks. Connecting links are left to be supplied by the imagination of the reader. Even in such a narrative poem as Belshazzar the movement is _staccato_; we are invited to contemplate a series of moments; and if the subject is impiety and swift retribution, we are left to infer the fact from the evidence presented; there is neither editorial introduction nor moralizing conclusion. Similarly with The Two Grenadiers, a presentation of character in circumstance, a translation of pictorial details into terms of action and prophecy; and most strikingly in The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar, a poem of such fundamentally pictorial quality that it has been called a triptych, three depicted scenes in a little religious drama.
It is in pieces like these that we find Heine most successfully making of himself the interpreter of objects in the outside world. The number of such objects is greater than is everywhere believed--though naturally his success is surest in the case of objects congenial to him, and the variety of these is not great. Indeed, the outside world, even when he appears to treat it most objectively, proves upon closer examination to be in the vast majority of cases only a treasure-trove of symbols for the expression of his inner self. Thus, Poor Peter is the narrative of a humble youth unfortunate in love, but poor Peter's story is Heine's; otherwise, we may be sure, Heine would