I hear the trot, the hooves beat near,
The dark rider comes to fetch me here—
He tears me away, from Mathilde I must part,
Oh, the thought will burst my heart!
This is a different poetry from the one whose success is proven in the account books. For Heine’s influence derives from the Book of Songs, not the Romancero, and if you want to judge the accomplishments by the man, you have to open the former, not the latter. Death concentrates, death clears away the trifling underworld-weariness81 and lends pathos to the cynicism. Heine’s witticisms, so often just the dissonance of an unlyrical perspective, produce a higher harmony here. Compressed by its extinction, his wit finds more powerful fusions; and tasteless items such as “Get thee to a nunnery, dear child, or get thee a shave” become rarer.82 The mot traditionally ascribed to him, “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier,”83 is perhaps, in its much-admired triteness, an invention of those who wanted Heine to remain true to his style to the end. But it suits the whole not badly. Both in belief and unbelief, Heine can’t rid himself of the imagery of commerce. Love itself says to the god of songs that “it demands guarantees,” and the god asks how many kisses Love will advance him against his golden lyre. And meanwhile Heine’s cynicism, this stale potpie of wit and woe, has become rather pleasing to the German palate, though the palate may not want to admit it. Compared with Offenbach, in whose orchestra the thousand-year misery is ringed by a dance of eternal delight, this ridiculer of misery looks like a trained Asra next to a born Bluebeard—to the kind that kills when it loves.84
… What does the lonely tear want?85 What does a humor want which smiles through tears because both the strength to cry and the strength to laugh are lacking? But the “brilliance of language” isn’t lacking, and it runs in the family. And it’s uncanny how few people notice that it comes from chopped liver, and how many have spread it all over their household bread. Their noses are stuffed, their eyes are blind, but their ears are wide open to every hit song.86 And so, thanks to Heine, the feuilleton has evolved to the highest level of perfection. There’s nothing to be done with an original, but copies can always be improved. When the imitators of Heine began to fear that somebody would expose them, all they had to do was become forgers of Heine, and they could go into mass production under his name. They take up a lot of space in the literature of Heine. But the experts who succeeded in exposing the fraud aren’t expert enough to realize that to expose the thief is to have exposed the owner.87 He himself broke into the house with a skeleton key, leaving the door open behind him. He set a bad example for his successors. He taught them the trick. And the farther the trick spread, the more delicious it became. Thus the pieties of journalism demand that every editorial masthead today include at least a bedbug from Heine’s “mattress grave.” Every Sunday it creeps flatly through the columns and stinks the art out of our noses! But to be tricked out of a real life in this way is entertaining to us. In times that had time, art gave us one to resolve. In times that have the Times, form and content are split apart for faster understanding. Because we have no time, writers are obliged to say in many words what could have been succinctly put. So Heine really is the forerunner of modern nervous systems, praised by artists who fail to notice that the philistines have tolerated him a lot better than he tolerated philistines. For the philistines relent in their hatred of Heine when they take his poetry into account, while the artists take Heine’s hatred of philistines into account in order to rescue his personality. And so, eternally relevant because of a misunderstanding, he vindicates the pretty coinage “cosmopolite,” in which the cosmos reconciled itself to politics. Detlev von Liliencron had a merely provincial outlook. But it seems to me that he was more cosmic in Schleswig-Holstein than Heine was in the cosmos. In the end, the people who never came out of their province will go farther than the people who never came into one.88
What attracted Nietzsche to Heine—he had delusions of smallness when, in Ecce Homo, he wrote that his and Heine’s names would go down together through the centuries—must have been that hatred of Germany which embraces every ally it can find. But when you hold up the lazzarone as a cultural ideal alongside the German constable, there certainly seems to be nothing more German than such idealism, which takes a plagiarizing romanticism for something to be aspired to.89 The intellectual problem of Heine, this refresher of German air, certainly should not be overlooked alongside the artistic problem of Heine: indeed, it runs alongside. And yet here, once, some oxygen was let into the room of Germany, and after a momentary improvement it tainted the air. That someone with nothing to say is better off saying it understandably: this perception was the relief for which Germany thanks its Heine after those difficult times when the people with something to say were all incomprehensible. And this undeniable piece of social progress has been attributed to art, since Germans are unshakable in their opinion that language is the means of expression common to both writers and speakers. With all due respect to Heine’s enlightening achievement, he wasn’t so great a satirist as to be deemed unworthy of a monument.90 In fact, he was such a small satirist that the stupidity of his times has descended on posterity. Granted, this posterity builds itself the monument that it refuses to give him. But truly it also builds itself the one it wants for him. And if it doesn’t follow through with its monument, it at least leaves its calling card on Heine’s grave and reassures itself of its piety in the newspaper. As long as the secret balloting about his immortality continues, his immortality will continue, and when a nation of fraternity brothers has a problem, it won’t be making an end of it so soon. But the cultural subcommittee is manned by the Karpeleses and the Bartelses, and whichever way the decision finally falls, it won’t prove anything for the Mind.91 The squalid all-in-due-courseness of this debate, the perennial timeliness of antiquated perspectives, is the perfect emblem for a literary phenomenon in which nothing is eternal but the personality type, which runs through time from nowhere. This type, who amazes his contemporaries by having more talent on their level than they do, has inflicted grievous damage on the art of language, which everyone who speaks believes he can understand.92 We no longer recognize the personalities, and the personalities envy the technicians.93 If Nietzsche admires Heine’s technique, then he is given the lie by every sentence he himself ever wrote. Except one: “You have attained mastery when you neither err nor hesitate in the execution.”94 The converse of this shallow insight is the artist’s business. His achievement is scruples. He seizes, but, after seizing, he hesitates. Heine was a go-getter of the language; never did he cast his eyes down before her. Here is how his credo reads: “The axiom that we may know the character of an author from his style is not unconditionally correct; it is applicable merely to that mass of authors who depend upon momentary inspirations to guide their pens, and who obey the word more than they command it. With artistes, this axiom is inadmissible, for these are masters of the word, they manipulate it to whatever end they please, coin it according to their whim, write objectively, and their character does not betray itself in their style.” And that’s what he was: a talent, because no character; except he confused the artistes with the journalists.95 As for the mass of authors who obey the word, they are unfortunately very few. These are the artists. Talent is what the others have: for it is a character defect. Here Heine utters his unconditional truth; he needs it against Börne. But since he writes objectively and, as a master of the word, manipulates it to whatever end he pleases, the opposite suits him against Platen. In Platen, “unlike the true