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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: HEG-HIG |
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HEIM, FRANCOIS JOSEPH (1787-1865) , French painter, was born at Belfort on the 16th of December 1787. He early distinguished himself at the Ecole Centrale of Strassburg, and in 1803 entered the studio of Vincent at Paris. In 1807 he obtained the first prize, and in 1812 his picture of "The Return of Jacob " (Musee de Bordeaux) won for him a gold medal of the first class, which he again obtained in 1817, when he exhibited, together with other works, a St Johnbought by. Vivant Denon. In 1819 the " Resurrection of Lazarus " (Cathedral Autun), the " Martyrdom of St Cyr " (St Gervais), and two scenes from the life of Vespasian (ordered by the king) attracted attention. In 1823 the " Re-erection of the Royal Tombs at St Denis," the " Martyrdom of St Laurence " (Notre Dame) and several full-length portraits increased the painter's popularity; and in 1824, when he exhibited his great canvas, the " Massacre of the Jews " (Louvre), Heim was rewarded with the legion of honour. In 1827 appeared the " King giving away Prizes at the Salon of .1824 " (Louvreengraved by Jazet)the picture by which Heim is best knownand " Saint Hyacinthe." Heim was now commissioned to decorate the Gallery Charles X. (Louvre). Though ridiculed by the romantists, Heim succeeded Regnault at the Institute in 1834, shortly after which he commenced a series of drawings of the celebrities of his day, which are of much interest
Heine 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, at whose house he frequently met such men as the Humboldts, Hegel himself and Schleiermacher; he made the acquaintance of leading men of letters like Fouque and Chamisso, and was on a still more familiar footing with the most distinguished of his co-religionists in Berlin. Under such favourable circumstances his own gifts were soon displayed. He contributed poems to the Berliner Gesellschafter, many of which were subsequently incorporated in the Buch der Lieder, and in December 1821 a little volume came from the press entitled Gedichte, his first avowed act of authorship. He was also employed at this time as correspondent of a Rhenish newspaper, as well as in completing his tragedies Almansor and William Ratcliff, which were published in 1823 with small success. In that same year Heine, not in the most hopeful spirits, returned to his family, who had meanwhile moved to Luneburg. He had plans of settling in Paris, 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 Hamburg were sufficient to awaken a new passion in Heine's breastthis 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. It was on the latter of these journeys that he had the interview with Goethe which was so amusingly described by him in later years. A few weeks before obtaining his degree, he took a step which he had long meditated; he formally embraced Christianity. This " act of apostasy," which has been dwelt upon at unnecessary length both by Heine's enemies and admirers, was actuated wholly by practical considerations, and did not arise from any wish on the poet's part to deny his race. The summer months which followed his examination Heine spent by his beloved sea in the island of Norderney
In the spring of the following year Heine paid a long planned visit to England, where he was deeply impressed by the free and vigorous public life, by the size and bustle of London; above all, he was filled with admiration for Canning, whose policy had realized many a dream of the young German idealists of that age. 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 aspects of English life left a deeper mark on his memory than the bright side. In October Baron Cotta, the well-known publisher, offered Heinethe second volume of whose Reisebilder and the Buch der Lieder had meanwhile appeared and won him fresh laurelsthe joint-editorship of the Neue allgemeine politische Annalen. He gladly accepted the offer and betook himself to Munich. Heine did his best to adapt himself and his political opinions to the new surroundings, in the hope of coming in for a share ofthe good things which Ludwig I. of Bavaria was so generously distributing among artists and men of letters. 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, the professorship on which he had set his hopes being still not forthcoming, 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. A blow more serious than the Bavarian king's refusal to establish him in Munich awaited him on his return to Germanythe death of his father. In the beginning of 1829 Heine took up his abode in Berlin, where he resumed old acquaintanceships; in summer he was again at the sea, and in autumn he returned to the city he now loathed above all others, Hamburg, 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 disturbed by constant friction, and for a time he was even seriously ill. His only consolation
Heine's first impressions of the " New Jerusalem of Liberalism " were jubilantly favourable; Paris, he proclaimed, was the capital of the civilized world, to be a citizen of Paris the highest of honours. 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 newspapers. Two series of his articles were subsequently collected and published under the titles Franzosische Zustande (1832) and Lulezia (written 1840-1843, published in the Vermischle Schriften, 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 members of that coterie; the name of Heine, who had been stigmatized as the leader of the movement
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In October 1834 Heine made the acquaintance of a young Frenchwoman, Eugenie Mirat, a saleswoman in a boot-shop in Paris, and before long had fallen passionately in love with her. 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 had become involved, he made her his wife. " Mathilde," as Heine called her, was not the comrade to help the poet in days of adversity, or to raise him to better things, but, in spite of passing storms, he seems to have been happy with her, and she nursed him faithfully in his last illness. Her death occurred in 1883. His relations with Mathilde undoubtedly helped to weaken his ties with Germany; and notwithstanding the affection he professed to cherish for his native land, 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 sufferingsuffering which left his intellect as clear and vivacious as everseem to have effected what might be called a spiritual purification in Heine's nature, and to have brought out all the good sides of his character, whereas adversity in earlier years only intensified his cynicism. The lyrics of the Romanzero (1851) and the collection of Neuesle Gedichte (18J3-1854) surpass in imaginative depth and sincerity of purpose the poetry of the Buck 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 ownher real name was Elise von Krienitz, but she had written in French under the nom de plume of Camille Seldenwho helped to brighten the last months of the poet's life. He died on the 17th of February 1856, and lies buried in the cemetery of Montmartre. Besides the purely journalistic work of Heine's Paris years, to which reference has already been made, he published a collection of more serious prose writings under the title Der Salon (1833-1839). In this collection will be found, besides papers on French art and the French stage, the essays " Zur Geschichte der Religion and Philosophie in Deutschland," which he had written for the Revue des deux mondes. Here, too, are the more characteristic productions of Heine's genius, Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski, Der Rabbi
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 Buck 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 is he, none had given such concrete and plastic expression to the spiritual forces of heart and soul; in this respect Heine was clearly the descendant of the Hebrew poets of the Old Testament. At times, it is true, his imagery is exaggerated to the degree of absurdity, but it exercised, none the less, a fascination over his generation. Heine combined with a spiritual delicacy, a fineness of perception, that firm hold on reality which is so essential to the satirist. His lyric appealed with particular force to foreign peoples, who had little understanding for the intangible, undefinable spirituality which the German people regard as an indispensable element in their national lyric poetry. Thus his falhe has always stood higher in England and France than in Germany itself, where his lyric method, his self-consciousness, his cynicism in season and out of season, were little in harmony with the literary traditions. As far, indeed, as the development of the German lyric is concerned, Heine's influence has been of questionable value. But he introduced at least one new and refreshing element into German poetry with his lyrics of the North Sea; no other German poet has felt and expressed so well as Heine the charm of sea and coast. As a prose writer, Heine's merits were very great. His work was, in the main, journalism, but it was journalism of a high order, and, after all, the best literature of the " Young German " school to which he belonged was of this character. Heine's 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 Briefe aus Paris, the beginning of a new era in German journalism and a healthy revolt against the unwieldly prose of the Romantic period. Above all things, Heine was great as a wit and a satirist. Hislyric may not be able to assert itself beside that of the very greatest German singers, but as a satirist he had powers of the highest order. He combined the holy zeal and passionate earnestness of the " soldier of humanity " with the withering scorn and ineradicable sense of justice common to the leaders of the Jewish race. It was Heine's real mission to be a reformer, to restore with instruments of war rather than of peace " the interrupted order of the world." The more's the pity that his magnificent Aristophanic genius should have had so little room for its exercise, and have been frittered away in the petty squabbles of an exiled journalist. The first collected edition of Heine's works was edited by A. Strodtmann in 21 vols. (1861-1866), the best critical edition is the Sdmtliche Werke, edited by E. Elster (7 vols., 1887-1890). Heine has been more translated into other tongues than any other German writer of his time. Mention may here be made of the French translation of his Euvres completes (14 vols., 1852-1868), and the English translation (by C. G. Leland and others) recently completed, The Works of Heinrich Heine (13 vols., 1892-1905). For biography and criticism see the following works: A. Strodtmann, Heines Leben and Werke (3rd ed., 1884); H. Hueffer, Aus dem Leben H. Heines (1878); and by the same author, H. Heine: Gesammelte Aufsdtze (1906); G. Karpeles, H. Heine and seine Zeilgenossen (1888), and by the same author, H. Heine: aus seinem Leben and aus seiner Zeit (1900); W. Biilsche, H. Heine: Versuch einer dsthetischkritischen Analyse seiner Werke and seiner Weltanschauung (1888); G. Brandes, Det unge Tyskland (1890; Eng. trans., 1905). An English biography by W. Stigand, Life, Works and Opinions of Heinrich Heine, appeared in 1875, but it has little value; there is also a short life by W. Sharp
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