Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 30, September, 1873

LITERATURE OF THE DAY

Scintillations from the Prose Works of Heinrich Heine. New York: Holt & Williams.

The task formerly undertaken by Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland, in adapting to our language the songs of Heine, is now well supplemented with some versions from among his prose works by another Philadelphian translator, Mr. Simon Adler Stern. Heine's prose, delicate in its pellucid brightness as any of his poetry, cannot be held too precious by the interpreter. The latter must have all his wits about him, or he will not find English at once simple enough and distinguished enough to stand for the original. To get at Heine's prose exactly in another language must be almost as hard as to get at his poetry. The principal selection made by Mr. Stern is a long rambling rhapsody called "Florentine Nights," in which the author professes to pour into the ears of a dying mistress the history of some of his former amours and exaltations, the natural jealousy of the listener going for a stimulus in the recital. His first love, however, is an idealization—a Greek statue which he visits by moonlight, as Sordello in Browning's poem does the

This weird love-ballad in prose must have taxed the translator almost as much as if it had been in rhyme; for although an interpreter of poetry undeniably has the difficulties of form to struggle with, yet there is, on the other hand, an inspiration and waft of feeling in the metre which lends him wings and helps him on. If Mr. Stern does not encumber his style with a betrayal of the difficulties he has got over—if he does not give us pedantry and double-epithets, so common in vulgar renderings from the German—he certainly shows no timidity in turning the polished familiarity of Heine's prose into our commonest vernacular. "What lots of pleasure I found on my arrival;" "for the men, lots of patience:" trivialities of expression like these are not rare in his version. If they are not quite what Heine would have written if he had been writing in English, at least the fault of familiarity is better than the fault of hardness; and these translations are never at all hard or uncomfortable. When we add that Mr. Stern gives us an index without showing what works the extracts are taken from, and that he gives us an article on Heine without any mention that we can discover of Heine's wife, we have vented about all the objections we can make to this welcome publication; and they are very few to find in a collection of hundreds of "scintillations."

The pleasures that remain for the reader are manifold: so liberally and judiciously are the extracts chosen that we get a complete exhibit of Heine's mind on nearly all the topics he occupied himself about. We have his views on French and German politicians; on French, German and English authors; on art and poetry; on his own soul and character; on religion; besides a great deal of that persiflage, the most exquisite persiflage surely that ever was heard, which flutters clear away from the regions of sense and information, yet which only a man of sense and information could have uttered.

Heine came to Paris in 1831, and saw all the sights and found everything "charming." His wit is a little cheap, perhaps, when he calls the Senate Chamber at the Luxembourg "the necropolis in which the mummies of perjury are embalmed;" at least it becomes tiresome to hear his constant disparagement of the politics which he chose to live under, and which protected him so agreeably; but he is his own keen self where he observes that the signs of the revolution of 1830, what he calls the legend of liberté, egalité, fraternité at the street-corners, had "already been wiped away." Victor Hugo, for his part, did not find it so: he says that the years 1831 and 1832 have, in relation to the revolution of July, the aspect of two mountains, where you can distinguish precipices, and that they embody "la grandeur révolutionnaire." The cooler spectator from Hamburg inspects at Paris "the giraffe, the three-legged goat, the kangaroos," without much of the vertigo of precipices, and he sees "M. de La Fayette and his white locks—at different places, however," for the latter were in a locket and the hero was in his brown wig. Elsewhere he associates "the virtuous La Fayette and James Watt the cotton-spinner." The age of industry, commerce and the Citizen-King, in fact, was not quite suited to the poet who celebrated Napoleon; yet was Heine's admiration of Napoleon not such as an epic hero would be comfortable under: "Cromwell never sank so low as to suffer a priest to anoint him emperor," he says in allusion to the coronation. He respects Napoleon as the last great aristocrat, and says the combined powers ought to have supported instead of overturned him, for his defeat precipitated the coming in of modern ideas. The prospect for the world after his death was "at the best to be bored to death by the monotony of a republic." Ardent patriots in this country need not go for sympathy to the king-scorner Heine. For the theory of a commonwealth he had small love: "That which oppresses me is the artist's and the scholar's secret dread, lest our modern civilization, the laboriously achieved result of so many centuries of effort, will be endangered I by the triumph of Communism." We have drifted into the citation of these sentiments because many conservatives think of Heine only as an irreconcilable destroyer and revolutionist, and do not care to welcome in him the basis of attachment to order which must underlie every artist's or author's love of freedom. "Soldier in the liberation of humanity" as he was, that liberation was to be the result of growth, not of destruction. As for Communism, it talks but "hunger, envy and death." It has but one faith, happiness on this earth; and the millennium it foresees is "a single shepherd and a single flock, all shorn after the same pattern, and bleating alike." Such passages are the true reflection of Heine's keen but not great mind, miserably bandied between the hopes of a republican future, that was to be the death of art and literature, and the rags of a feudal present, whose conditions sustained him while they disgusted him. If Heine fought, scratched and bit with all his might among the convulsions of the politics he was helpless to rearrange, he was equally mordant when he turned his attention to society, and perhaps more frightfully impartial. He hated the English for "their idle curiosity, bedizened awkwardness, impudent bashfulness, angular egotism, and vacant delight in all melancholy objects." As for the French, they are "les comédiens ordinaires du bon Dieu;" yet "a blaspheming Frenchman is a spectacle more pleasing to the Lord than a praying Englishman." And Germany: "Germany alone possesses those colossal fools whose caps reach unto the heavens, and delight the stars with the ringing of their bells." Thus shooting forth his tongue on every side, Heine is shown "in action" by this little cluster of "scintillations," and the whole book is the shortest definition of him possible, for it makes the saliencies of his character jut out within a close compass. It can be read in a couple of hours, and no reading of the same length in any of his complete writings would give such a notion of the most witty, perverse, tender, savage, pitiable and inexcusable of men.

Monographs, Personal and Social. By Lord Houghton. New York: Holt & Williams.

Lord Houghton is one of those fortunate persons who seem to find without trouble the exact niches in life which Nature has designed them to fill. There probably never entered the world a man more eminently made to appreciate the best kind of "high life" which London has offered in the present century; and he has been able to avail himself of it to his heart's content. The son of a Yorkshire squire in affluent circumstances and of high character, Monckton Milnes was not spoilt by finding, as he might have done had he been the heir to a dukedom, the world at his feet; whilst at the same time all the good things were within his reach by a little of that exertion which does so much toward enhancing the enjoyment of them. From the period of his entry upon London life he displayed that anxiety to know celebrities which, though in a somewhat different way, was a marked feature of his contemporary and acquaintance, Crabb Robinson; and the story illustrative of this tendency which gained him the sobriquet of "the cool of the evening" will be always associated with the name he has since merged in a less familiar title.

Lord Houghton has now passed through some sixty London seasons, during which he has been more or less acquainted with nearly every social and literary celebrity in the English metropolis. Having regard to this circumstance, and the fact of his possessing a polished and graceful style of expressing himself, one would naturally expect a great deal from this volume of reminiscences. Nor will such expectations be entirely disappointed. The monographs are eight in number, and will be read with varying degrees of interest, according to the taste of the reader, as well as the subjects and quality of the papers. The portrait which will perhaps be the newest to American readers is that of Harriet, Lady Ashburton, wife of the second Baring who bore that title. Lady Ashburton was daughter of the earl of Sandwich, and Lord Houghton says of her: "She was an instance in which aristocracy gave of its best and showed at its best, although she may have owed little to the qualities she inherited from an irascible race and to an unaffectionate education"—a sentence reminding us of a remark in the London Times, that "with certain noble houses people are apt to associate certain qualities—with the Berkeleys, for instance, a series of disgraceful family quarrels." Lady Ashburton appears to us from this account to have been a brilliant spoilt child of fortune, who availed herself of her great social position to do and say what, had she remained Lady Harriet Montagu with the pittance of a poor nobleman's daughter, she would hardly have dared to do or say. It is one of the weak points of society in England that a woman who has rank, wealth, and ability, and contrives to surround herself with men of wit to whom she renders her house delightful, can be as hard and rude as she pleases to the world in general. Fortunately, in most cases native kindness of heart usually hurries to heal the wound that "wicked wit" may have made. This would scarcely seem to have been so with Lady Ashburton, for Lord Houghton tells us that "many who would not have cared for a quiet defeat shrank from the merriment of her victory," one of them saying, "I do not mind being knocked down, but I can't stand being danced upon afterward." Lord Houghton, however, defines this "jumping" as "a joyous sincerity that no conventionalities, high or low, could restrain—a festive nature flowing through the artificial soil of elevated life." And it must be owned that there was at least nothing petty or rancorous in a nature which showed so rare an appreciation of genius, and an equal capacity for warm and disinterested friendship.

In contrast with this chapter is the one on the Berrys, which is full of interesting details in regard to those remarkable women, and reveals a pathetic history hardly to have been expected in connection with the amusing gossip that has hitherto clustered around their names.

But by far the most interesting paper is that on Heinrich Heine. A letter from an English lady whom Heine had known and petted in her childhood, and who visited the poet in his last days, when he himself, wasted by disease, "seemed no bigger than a child under the sheet that covered him," gives what is perhaps the most lifelike picture we have ever had of a nature that seems equally to court and to baffle comprehension. Lord Houghton has little to add, on this subject, from his personal recollections; but his comments upon it evince perhaps as close a study and sagacious criticism, if not as much subtlety of thought, as Matthew Arnold's famous essay. The following passage, for example, sums up very felicitously the social aspect of Germany, and its influence on Heine: "The poem of 'Deutschland' is the one of his works where his humor runs over into the coarsest satire, and the malice can only be excused by the remembrance that he too had been exposed to some of the evil influences of a servile condition. Among these may no doubt be reckoned the position of a man of commercial origin and literary occupation in his relation to the upper order of society in the northern parts of Germany. …Here there remained, and after all the events of the last year there still remains, sufficient element of discontent to justify the recorded expression of a philosophic German statesman, that 'in Prussia the war of classes had still to be fought out.'"

Of the other papers in the volume, those on Humboldt, Landor and Sydney Smith, though readable, contain little to supplement the biographies and correspondence that have long been before the world; while the one on "Suleiman Pasha" (Colonel Selves) suggests a doubt whether Lord Houghton has always taken pains to sift the information he has so eagerly accumulated. When we find him stating that the siege of Lyons occurred under the Directory—which it preceded by a year or two; that his hero, then seven years old, "grew up," entered the navy, was present at the battle of Trafalgar (1805), and, subsequently enlisted "in the Army of Italy, then flushed with triumph, but glad to receive young and vigorous recruits"—language indicating the campaign of 1796-97; that "soon after his enrollment in the regiment it became necessary to instruct the cavalry soldiers in infantry practice, and young Selves' knowledge of the exercise [acquired apparently on shipboard] was of the greatest use and brought him into general notice"—making him, we may infer, a special favorite of Bonaparte;—we can easily believe that these things were related, as he tells us they were, "with epic simplicity," and may even conclude that some other qualities of the epic would to more cautious ears have been equally perceptible in the narration. Of a like character, we suspect, is the statement that Selves, being on the staff of Grouchy on the day of Waterloo, "urgently represented to that general the propriety of joining the main body of the army as soon as the Prussians, whom he had been sent to intercept, were out of sight." Lord Houghton has evidently not read the best and most recent criticisms on the Waterloo campaign, but he should at least have known that Grouchy was sent, not to intercept, but to follow the Prussians in their retreat from Ligny, and that, if he lost sight of them, it was because, instead of falling back on their own line of communication, as Napoleon had expected them to do, they turned off to effect a junction with the English army.

Key to North American Birds: containing a concise account of every species of living and fossil bird at present known from the continent north of the Mexican and United States boundary. Illustrated by six steel plates and upward of two hundred and fifty wood-cuts. By Elliott Coues, Assistant Surgeon United States Army. Salem: Naturalists' Agency.

Modern Diabolism, commonly called Modern Spiritualism, with New Theories of Light, Heat, Electricity and Sound. By M.J. Williamson. New York: James Miller.

The True Method of Representation in Large Constituencies. By C.C.P. Clarke of Oswego, N.Y. New York: Baker & Godwin.

On the Eve: A Tale. By Ivan S. Turgénieff. Translated from the Russian by C.E. Turner. New York: Holt & Williams.

The Prophecies of Isaiah: A New and Critical Translation. By Franz Delitzsch, D.D. Philadelphia: The Lutheran Bookstore.

Harry Coverdale's Courtship and Marriage. By Frank E. Smedley. Illustrated. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Afoot and Alone: A Walk from Sea to Sea by the Southern Route. Illustrated. Hartford: Columbian Book Company. Illustrated. Hartford: Columbian Book Company.

1

[The rule, more correctly stated, is, that "sir" is never used except to indicate a difference of age or position so great as to forbid familiarity or to be incompatible with social equality. It may be employed by the elder in addressing the younger, and by the superior in addressing the inferior, as well as vice versa. Hence the saying, in English society, that only princes and servants are spoken to as "sir."]