Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/137

 Weigand 131 a whole philosophy of life, the seriousness of which, to spite the reader, is purposely veiled by apparent nonsense and buffoonery. The last part of 'Le Grand ' is a unit as distinct as the preceding ones. Its substance is almost intangible, for it is a weird sequence of lyrical and dramatic moods. The Veronika motif, twice before delicately sounded, returns again, and even now it vibrates with the faintness of a dream melody. The portrait of ' Madame ' with her little dog and the poet at her feet transforms a mere name into a lovely picture. The poet's second love tragedy breaks in upon these idyllic reveries like a studied dissonance. The present melts into the past, and consciousness reels in that weird vision of the Hindostanese seraglio of three thousand years ago. Finally, all these emotions, wrought up to a pitch of screaming hysteria, spend themselves and give way to a mood of utter desolation, a sombre tranquillity of hopeless despair upon which the 'Berlin Letters,' immediately appended, break in with their flippant jests. Let it be at once conceded that, in spite of a fascinating beauty of detail, a perfection of the technique of suggestion soon after developed to excess in 'Die Bader von Lucca, ' the book as a whole fails to create the impression of an aesthetic unity. There are no ties of association in the outer world between the diverse subjects treated in this small compass of some hundred pages. Yet a cer- tain unity at once becomes apparent when we recall that 'Le Grand' is in substance an autobiography. In these pages Heine does not discuss persons or events: he relates experiences that stirred him to his depths. His childhood experiences, university life, his double love tragedy, the atmosphere of political oppression, the sordid commercialism of Hamburg, Napoleon, Hegel all these were experiences that claimed a major share in the molding of Heine's personality. The time when Heine wrote the 'Le Grand' was indeed the psychological moment for an autobiographical confession. Student life was just ended, and with it the possibility of longer depending on his uncle's at times indulgent, usually grudging and always humiliating charity. A very uncertain future was ahead of him. He had just bowed his head^it the baptismal font with suppressed indignation, hoping thereby to remove the barrier blocking his chances of a political career; but, contrary to his expectation, this step did not improve his material outlook in the least. The time