Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/140

 134 Heine's " Buck Le Grand " barsten Stoffe, zum 'Faust* die Puppenspielform gewahlt, darum hat auch der noch grossere Poet (der Urpoet, sagt Friederike), nemlich unser Herrgott, alien Schreckensszenen dieses Lebens eine gute Dosis Spasshaftigkeit beigemischt. " Almost these identical words recur in chapter 11 of 'Le Grand,' and this same 'Weltanschauung' pervades 'Le Grand' from begin- ning to end. 13 Tragedy is the prevailing mood of the introductory portion, dwelling on the lover's despair; and the gloom of a much more sombre tragedy hovers over the concluding portion. The relative tragedy of an individual experience has deepened into an absolutely tragic conception of life as such. The tragedy of love has grown into 'Weltschmerz.' But in both cases, when face to face with tragedy, the poet does not stop at its serious expression; on both occasions the intolerable tension is relieved by extravagant irony: In the first instance the poet, on the brink of suicide, quotes his own handy monologue from 'Almansor' instead of the over- worked 'To be or not to be' of Hamlet; in the second instance the trivial tra la la of the most popular song hit from 'Der Freischutz' breaks in upon his moody reveries. But whereas, at the beginning and at the end, the poet is engrossed with his own personality, the central portion of the Book deals with typical phenomena of tragic and comic, sublime and ridiculous import in the life of the human race. The sublimity and tragedy of human existence are symbolized by the meteoric career of Napoleon. Once again, when the pathos of utterance is strained to the breaking point, the tension suddenly snaps: the poet's voice, choked with emotion, breaks into peals of ringing laughter "Nach dem Abgang der Helden kommen die Clowns und Graziosos mit ihren Schellenkappen und Pritschen. " His paean on the sublimity of genius is followed by his mirthful raillery at censorship, pedantry and Folly. Viewed from this Aristophanic perspective, the heterogeneous elements of 'Le Grand' range themselves into an aesthetic whole of symmetry and balance. We begin to perceive that there is method in this madness which makes the would-be suicide lover parody his agony; which ranges the clowns alongside the superman; and cuts short the dirge chanted at the grave of man's hopes by 13 Hessel has pointed out the identity between the thought expressed in the letter to Friederike and chapter 11 of 'Le Grand, ' without, however, making a thorogoing application of these theories to either the substance or the form of 'Le Grand' as a whole.