HEINE, hī'ne, (1797-1856). The
greatest lyric poet of modern Germany, born in
Düsseldorf, December 13, 1797 (some authorities, 1799). He was called by himself the last of the Romanticists, and by Matthew Arnold the continuator of Goethe, and was the only writer of primary importance in German literature since Goethe's death. “Your grandfather,” he says he was told, “was a little Jew, and had a big beard.” He had shrewd sons, for all of them won a competence, and Heine's uncle Salomon became one of the wealthiest bankers of Hamburg. His father had but small part in his life. His mother (named von Geldern), to whom he showed a constant devotion till his death, gave to his fantastic and romantic nature a joy of life and a spirit of naturalism that make him akin to Goethe. He was a precocious boy, educated in a desultory way by Roman Catholic monks and French ‘philosophes,’ with the result that he became a skeptic before he had any faith to lose. He seems to have suffered little from race prejudice in youth, and for that he was grateful to France and to Napoleon, for whom he retained a kind of hero-worship, and so had little sympathy with the War of Liberation (1813-14), that ‘contracted the heart so that men learned to hate what was foreign and in ceasing to be citizens of the world became only narrowly German.’ No reproach belongs to him
that he found small inspiration to patriotism
in the thirty years that followed Waterloo.
While preparing himself to become a merchant
and learning English, French, and Italian, he
began to write poetry under the inspiration of
a child-love for ‘Veronica,’ probably also the
‘Reseda’ of early poems. He conceived a passing
affection, too, for an executioner's daughter, Josepha, the subject of several poems, of his “Dream Pictures,” and of the most exquisite passage in his memoirs. She was, he says, his ‘love's purgatory’ before he fell into love's hell in his unrequited affection for his cousin Amalie at Hamburg, whither he went in 1816. He tried to set up a business there in 1818, but he liked neither the business nor the city. For Amalie, under the names Ottilie, Maria, Clara, Evelina, Agnes, Juliana, he voiced his passion in many beautiful songs, and it has since been made the subject of two novels, Zianirtza's Heinrich Heine der Liederdichter (1864). and Dietz's Heinrich Heines erste Liebe (1870). He failed in business, and at the expense of his uncle and Amalie's father, who aided him generously through life, he went in 1819 to study law at Bonn, where he came under the influence of A. W. Schlegel, and the Romantic School, in so far as it stood for the reawakening of the poetic spirit of the Middle Ages. He shared with them also a gift of irony, though in him this sprang from the incompatibility of two elements in his nature, a Greek joy of life inherited from his mother, and fostered by the influence of Goethe, and a congenital Hebrew earnestness. There was never harmony between these antinomies of his character, and from their jarring came a mocking spirit that he possessed in higher degree than any writer of the century. At Bonn under this new influence Heine wrote more lyrics and had begun a tragedy, Almansor, when he left Bonn for Göttingen, and being soon suspended from the university there for participation in a frustrated duel he went to Berlin, where he came under the philosophic influence of Hegel and associated with Grabbe, Immermann, Willibald Alexis, Gans, Moser, Zunz, Chamisso, Fouqué, and particularly with Varnhagen and his Rahel, who led him to a juster appreciation of Goethe, though he never became one of his unqualified admirers.