Heine chose for himself the sword of the soldier rather than the poet's laurel, but he chose to fight alone, and the nineteenth century is not the age nor its society the field for single-handed combat. That he seems to have felt this himself, one of his latest poems from the _Romancero_ will show. I give it in Lord Houghton's admirable translation: it is called
In Freedom's war of "Thirty Years" and more A lonely outpost have I held in vain, With no triumphant hope or prize in store, Without a thought to see my home again.
I watched both day and night: I could not sleep Like my well-tented comrades far behind, Though near enough to let their snoring keep A friend awake if e'er to doze inclined.
And thus, when solitude my spirits shook, Or fear--for all but fools know fear sometimes-- To rouse myself and them I piped, and took A gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes.
Yes, there I stood, my musket always ready, And when some sneaking rascal showed his head My eye was vigilant, my aim was steady, And gave his brains an extra dose of lead.
But war and justice have far different laws, And worthless acts are often done right well: The rascals' shots were better than their cause, And I was hit--and hit again, and fell!
That outpost is abandoned: while the one Lies in the dust, the rest in troops depart. Unconquered, I have done what could be done, With sword unbroken and with broken heart.
This little poem represents rather pathetically, and in a certain sense the limitations of Heine's genius; for it is impossible not to feel that his genius never found its highest expression--that confined within a narrower channel its force would have been irresistible where now it is only brilliantly dispersive. It seems as if literature in its proper sense had lost something by Heine's personal enlistment in all the conflicts of his day--as if the man of ideas had tried to approach too closely and too curiously to the realities of life, and had only succeeded in bringing into glaring prominence the irreconcilable nature of the forces at work in the world and in ourselves; and never was reconcilement less possible between the real and the ideal than at the time of which we speak. This is the meaning of the _Weltschmerz_ and the _maladie du siècle_ of which we hear so much, and everything seemed to conspire to render Heine its chief representative.