1 1 1. 1 M-KRINGLA 



MKINI: 



038 



it became tli.- burial place of the Franconian 

 branch D|' ili.- HolicnzollernH. Although the mon 

 \ was siippiessed in I.V.">, the church still 



retains a large number of highly-interacting sepul- 



chral monuments anil other examples of medieval 

 Herman art. See work* hy Stillfried (1877) and 

 Muck (3 vols. 1879-80). 



See SNORRI STURJ,ASON. 



IIHiK'. II i.tMiirii, the most prominent figure 

 in Herman literature since Goethe and Schiller, 

 wax lM>rn of Jewish parents on 13th December 

 1799, in Diisseldoi f on- Rhine. HiH boyish heroes 

 were Napoleon and Napoleon's stalwart grenadiers 

 and drummers. At a Roman Catholic school in 

 Diisseldorf he learned what it was to he jeered at 

 and ill-treated on account of his race and creed. 

 At sixteen lie was sent to Frankfort to learn hank- 

 ing, 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 crea- 

 tion. 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 

 Giittingen, he studied law, taking his doctor's de- 

 gree at Giittingen 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 

 Yarnhagen 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 pub- 

 lished 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 Lyrisc/tes Intermezzo, 

 his Sapphic love-plaint, 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 Jieisebtlder came into their 

 hands. In the latter year Heine likewise celebrated 

 his triumph as conqueror of a new poetic province 

 in Das Buck der Littler, which, though consisting 

 almost entirely of poems already published, created 

 throughout Germany such excitement as had not 

 been since Schiller's lit tuber 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 in- 

 trinsic 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 

 'Meat charm of his work is due to the fact that 

 he was a superb literary artist, a consummate 

 master of style in both \er-e and prose. He was 

 essentially a lyrist ; his song has the spontaneity 

 and melody of a skylark's burst, or the quaint 

 naivet6, the pathos, the simple sweetness of the 

 best Volkslieaer. His was a very complex and 

 paradoxical nature : he united in himself the 

 passionate energy of a Hebrew prophet, the sensu- 

 011- feeling of a pagan Greek, and the dreamy 

 Bentimentalism of a medieval German. The sim- 

 plicity of a pure child of nature is blended with 



the keenest wit, with an irony that in apt to 

 grow bitterest when his lyric mood w 8wete#t, 

 and a power of mocking Hareiutm that cuts hharp 

 and deep. HIH mastery in the art of elf torture 

 taught him how to hush the follies and ahtturditiett 

 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 HO 

 passionately. His intellect has the suppleness 

 and grace and sinewy strength of a highly trained 

 athlete, but it neither walks nor glide* ; it leap-, 

 and turns and doublet* with the glancing Hwiftnew* 

 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 dream- 

 land, unearthly and weird, with images of true 

 poetic l>eauty 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 rever- 

 ence himself, he wantonly outrages the reverent 

 feelings of his readers. And he has just 'feminity' 

 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 tren- 

 chant 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 ana Heine was in- 

 clined 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. More- 

 over, he felt himself coining perilously near to 

 the doors of a German fortress-prison. No wonder 

 then that, when his enthusiasm wns roused by the 

 .Inly 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 



