HEINE, HEINRICH (1797-1856), German poet and jour nalist, was born at Dusseldorf, of Jewish parents, on the 13th of December 1797. He was the eldest of four children, and received his education, first in private schools, then in the Lyceum of his native town. When he left school in 1815, an attempt was made to engage him in business in Frankfort, but without success. In the following year his uncle, Solomon Heine, a wealthy banker in Hamburg, took him into his office. A passion for his cousin Amalie Heine seems to have made the young man more contented with his lot in Hamburg, and his success was such that his uncle decided to set him up in business for himself. But in a very few months the firm of "Harry Heine & Co." was insolvent. His uncle now generously provided him with money to enable him to study at a university, with the view to entering the legal profes sion, and in the spring of 1819 Heine became a student at Bonn. During his stay there he devoted himself rather to the study of literature and history than to that of law. In the autumn of 182o Heine left Bonn for Gottingen, where he proposed to devote himself more assiduously to professional studies, but in Febru ary of the following year he challenged to a pistol duel a fellow student who had insulted him, and was, in consequence, rusticated for six months. The pedantic atmosphere of the university of Gottingen was, however, little to his taste; the news of his cousin's marriage unsettled him still more ; and he was glad of the oppor tunity to seek distraction in Berlin.
In the Prussian capital a new world opened up to him ; a very different life from that of Gottingen was stirring in the new uni versity there. He was also fortunate in having access to the chief literary circles of the capital; he was on terms of intimacy with Varnhagen von Ense and his wife, the celebrated Rahel, and made the acquaintance of leading men of letters like Fouque and Chamisso. Under such favourable circumstances his own gifts were soon displayed. He contributed poems to the Berliner Gesellscha f ter, some of which were subsequently incorporated in the Bach der Lieder, and in December 1821 a little volume came from the press entitled Gedichte. He was also employed at this time as correspondent of a Rhenish newspaper, as well as in completing his tragedies Almansor and William Ratcliff, were published in 1823. Heine had plans of settling in but as he was still dependent on his uncle, the latter's consent had to be obtained. As was to be expected, Solomon Heine did not favour the new plan, but promised to continue his support on the condition that Harry completed his course of legal study. He sent the young student for a six weeks' holiday at Cuxhaven, which opened the poet's eyes to the wonders of the sea; and three weeks spent subsequently at his uncle's county seat near Ham burg were sufficient to awaken a new passion—this time for Amalie's sister, Therese. In January 1824 Heine returned to Gottingen, where, with the exception of a visit to Berlin and the excursion to the Hartz mountains in the autumn of 1824, which is immortalized in the first volume of the Reisebilder, he remained until his graduation in the summer of the following year. A few weeks before obtaining his degree, he took a step which he had long meditated: he formally embraced Christianity. This "act of apostasy," was actuated by practical considerations. The summer months which followed his examination Heine spent by his beloved sea in the island of Norderney. The question of his future now became pressing, and for a time he seriously con sidered the plan of settling as a solicitor in Hamburg, and hoped to marry his cousin Therese. Meanwhile he had made arrange ments for the publication of Die Harzreise, which appeared in May 1826. The success of the book was instantaneous. Its lyric outbursts and flashes of wit ; its rapid changes from grave to gay ; its flexibility of thought and style, came as a revelation to its generation. It was followed in 1827 by the most famous of all Heine's works, the Buch der Lieder.
In the spring of the following year Heine paid a long planned visit to England, where he was impressed by the free and vigor ous public life, by the size and bustle of London; above all, he was filled with admiration for Canning. But the picture had also its reverse; the sordidly commercial spirit of English life and brutal egotism of the ordinary Englishman, grated on Heine's sensitive nature; he missed the finer literary and artistic tastes of the continent and was repelled by the austerity of English religious sentiment and observance. Unfortunately the latter as pects of English life left a deeper mark on his memory than the bright side. In October Cotta, the well-known publisher, offered Heine—the second volume of whose Reisebilder and the Buch der Lieder had meanwhile appeared—the joint-editorship of the Neue allgemeine politisclie Annalen. He gladly accepted the offer and betook himself to Munich. Heine did his best to adapt himself to the new surroundings. But the stings of the Reisebilder were not so easily forgotten ; the clerical party in particular did not leave him long in peace. In July 1828, he left Munich for Italy, where he remained until the following November, a holiday which provided material for the third and part of the fourth volumes of the Reisebilder. In the beginning of 1829 Heine took up his abode in Berlin, where he resumed old acquaintanceships; in sum mer he was again at the sea, and in autumn he returned to Ham burg, where he virtually remained until May 1831. These years were not a happy period of the poet's life; his efforts to obtain a position, apart from that which he owed to his literary work, met with rebuffs on every side; his relations with his uncle were unsatisfactory, and for a time he was seriously ill. When in 183o the news of the July Revolution in the streets of Paris reached him, Heine hailed it as the beginning of a new era of freedom, and his thoughts reverted once more to his early plan of settling in Paris. All through the following winter the plan ripened, and in May 1831 he finally said farewell to his native land.
Heine's first impressions of Paris were jubilantly favourable. He was soon on friendly terms with many of the notabilities of the capital; and there was every prospect of a congenial and lucrative journalistic activity as correspondent for German news papers. Two series of his articles were subsequently collected and published under the titles Franzosische Zustande (183 2) and Lutezia (written 1840-1843, published in the V ermischte Sc liri f ten, 1854). In December 1835, however, the German Bund, incited by W. Menzel's attacks on "Young Germany," issued its notorious decree, forbidding the publication of any writings by the mem bers of that coterie; the name of Heine headed the list. This was the beginning of a series of literary feuds in which Heine was, from now on, involved ; and they curtailed considerably his sources of income. His uncle, it is true, had allowed him 4,000 francs a year when he settled in Paris, but at this moment he was not on the best of terms with his Hamburg relatives. In these circumstances he was induced to apply to the French gov ernment for support from a fund formed for the benefit of "po litical refugees" who were willing to place themselves at the service of France. From 1836 or 1837 until the Revolution of 1848 Heine was in receipt of 4,800 francs annually from this source.
In October 1834 Heine made the acquaintance of a young Frenchwoman, Eugenie Mirat, a saleswoman in a boot-shop in Paris. Although ill-educated, vain and extravagant, she inspired the poet with a deep and lasting affection, and in 1841, on the eve of a duel in which he was involved, he made her his wife. Her death occurred in 1883. His relations with her helped to weaken his ties with Germany; he only revisited it twice, in the autumn of 1843 and the summer of 1847. In 1845 appeared the first unmistakable signs of the terrible spinal disease, which, for eight years, from the spring of 1848 till his death, condemned him to a "mattress grave." These years of suffering—suffering which left his intellect as clear and vivacious as ever—seem to have effected a spiritual purification in Heine's nature, and to have brought out the better sides of his character. The lyrics of the Romanzero (1851) and the collection of Neueste Gediclite surpass in sincerity at least the poetry of the Buch der Lieder. Most wonderful of all are the poems inspired by Heine's strange mystic passion for the lady he called Die Mouche, a countrywoman of his own—her real name was Elise von Krientz, but she had written in French under the nom de plume of Camille Selden—who helped to brighten the last months of the poet's life. He died on Feb. 17, 1856, and lies buried in Montmartre.
Between 1833 and 1839 Heine published a collection of prose writings under the title Der Salon (1834-1840). It includes, be sides papers on French art and the French stage, Zur Geschichte der Religion and Philosophie in Deutschland, Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Sclinabelewopski, Der Rabbi von Bacherach and Florentinische Ndchte. Die romantische Schule (1836) is dis figured by an unpardonable personal attack on the elder Schlegel. In 1839 appeared Shakespeares Miidchen and Frauen, the text to a series of illustrations; and in 1840, the witty and trenchant satire on a writer, who, in spite of many personal disagreements, had been Heine's fellow-fighter in the liberal cause, Ludwig Borne. Of Heine's poetical work in these years, his most important pub lications were, besides the Romanzero, the two satirical poems, Deutschland, ein Winterrndrchen (1844), the result of his visit to Germany, and Atta Troll, ein Sommernachtstraum (1847), an attack on the politically inspired literature of the 'forties.
In the case of no other of the greater German poets is it so hard to arrive at a final judgment as in that of Heinrich Heine. In his Buch der Lieder he unquestionably struck a new lyric note, not merely for Germany but for Europe. No singer before him had been so daring in the use of nature-symbolism as he, none had given such concrete expression to the spiritual forces of heart and soul. At times, it is true, his imagery is exaggerated to the degree of absurdity, but it exercised, none the less, a fasci nation over his generation. His lyric appealed with particular force to foreign peoples, who had less understanding for the intangible, undefinable spirituality which the German people re gard as an indispensable element in their national lyric poetry. Thus his fame has always stood higher in England and France than in Germany itself, where his lyric method, his self-conscious ness, his cynicism in season and out of season, were less in harmony with the literary traditions. As far as the development of the German lyric is concerned, it was Heine's particular achieve ment to introduce a new and invigorating element, the poetry of the sea.
As a prose writer, Heine's merits were very great. His work, it may be, was journalism, but it was journalism of a high order. His light fancy, his agile intellect, his straightforward, clear style stood him here in excellent stead. The prose writings of his French period mark, together with Borne's Brie f e aus Paris, the beginning of a new era in German prose. Above all things, Heine was great as a wit and a satirist ; here his powers were of the highest order. He combined the holy zeal and passionate earnest ness of the "soldier of humanity" with the withering scorn and ineradicable sense of justice common to the leaders of the Jewish race. Heine felt that his real mission was to be a reformer, to restore, with instruments of war rather than of peace, "the inter rupted order of the world." The more's the pity that his magnif icent Aristophanic genius should have had so little room for its exercise, and have been frittered away in the petty squabbles of an exiled journalist.