SINCE Horace, Heinrich Heine has had no superior as a master of lyrical expression. Among Moderns, Burns alone compares with him, and even Burns himself, though greater as a poet, is his inferior as a musician. While it would be misleading to speak of Heine as a great poet; while he is above everything a musician, he is not merely a maker of melodies, for he had an intellect of intense and incessant activity,—a true “genius” of that corroding kind which eats away the life of its possessor, nourishing itself by his pain and finding its perfect expression only at the expense of his destruction. Having such genius, Heine was one of the greatest wits as well as the greatest musicians of his age. A great poet, however, must be a great thinker—the greatest of all great thinkers. In the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, we often detect momentarily the flashes of an intellect too intensely radiant to be revealed at all. The Hebrew prophet and lawgiver hidden in the cleft of the rock to catch a glimpse of the meaning of eternity as it passed him is a type of such minds, which, realizing the everlasting simplicities of the natural and supernatural world, learn to express them so that they take an enduring hold on the weakest—doing most to strengthen, to elevate, to immortalize those who are least capable of suspecting their meaning. Every great poet has this gift, and Heine did not have it. He was born for it. It was his birthright, but he forfeited it,—making through passion the “Great Renunciation.” With such a physical organization as might have been fit to incarnate a seraph, he lived an animal life of unrestrained emotion and passion, until at last, chained to his “mattress grave” through years of helpless agony, he welcomed death, with a most solemn jest,—“God will forgive me: it is his business!” This, they say, was his final judgment on his own career—not impious, though it has been called so; but full of the self-contempt and self-mockery which was so characteristic of the overwhelming pride of this great fallen angel. Let no one say that he was wholly wrong! Yet if it is easy and natural for heaven to forgive most to those who suffer most, it is harder for those who are drawn to Heine by his mastery of the deepest secrets of music to forgive him for the use he makes of his power to impart to those who love him best the contagion of his own intellectual and spiritual diseases and the pain of his own tortures. He is the poet of “Weltschmerz”—of “world weariness,” and he will allow no one who loves him too well for his music to escape it. To know his music and not to love it is scarcely possible for those who have the inner “hearing ear” for the melody of verse. Until he wrote, German was called a harsh and guttural tongue. He showed that its worst dissonances can be used as the distinctive feature of the highest harmonies of verse. In its prose or its verse, spoken by a beggar or sung by Petrarch, the Italian language is itself music—inferior in melody only to the Latin from which it was derived. But the “ballatas” and “canzones” of Tuscany are to Heine’s “lieder” what sirups are to sparkling wines. Necessarily, the same ear for the music of language which dominates his verse governs Heine’s prose also. It can be translated with no greater ease than the symphonies of one great musician can be converted into the musical “terminology” of some other master. The lyrics of such a poet as Heine approach the musical perfection which makes the shorter odes of Horace illustrations of the fundamental laws of music. But if Heine’s melody cannot be transferred from German to English, his wit forces expression, in spite of all difficulties. His “Pictures of Travel,” and other essays and sketches, might have kept his name alive, had he never written his “Lieder.”

  In his essays as in his songs there is much that is abnormal and diseased, but little that is commonplace, and nothing that is merely silly. At his worst, Heine is diabolical, but it is the diabolism of a great soul “cast down,” but not lost. It is not only Heaven’s “business” to forgive all such, but to save them—from themselves if that be possible!