Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/141

 Weigand 135 snatches from a popular rag. Our interpretation has revealed 'Le Grand' to be intended as an Aristophanic comedy in form as well as in content. Needless to say, I would not be misunderstood for a moment to imply that the chapters on the clowns (12-15) owed their existence to a mood in which Heine felt overwhelmed by a sense of the tragic. They are products of a mood of reckless, boisterous satire, goodhumored in part and in part malignant. Heine's sense of the tragic must not be taken so seriously as all that. We can be sure that he never felt more keenly that optimism accompanying a sense of power than when lashing his foolish and ridiculous contempor- aries with his triumphant satire. Simply by an act of calculating reflection, in order to build up his comedy on the principles of his Aristophanic philosophy, did he insert those satirical chapters directly after the pathos of the Napoleonic tragedy. Now it is easy to show why the reader cannot, without the aid of a commentary, elevate himself to a point where he can survey 'Le Grand' from the author's Aristophanic perspective. The reader expects, and has a right to expect a unity of subject matter more intimate than the general unity of all phenomena as parts of the same universe. He demands a sequence of connected images. He takes the images thrown on the screen of his inner eye at their face value, and his interest follows the individual persons, things and happenings which they represent. He cannot take them as mere symbols or types of the tragic or comic side of existence. Moods, feelings and emotions can quickly pass from one extreme to its opposite only when a connected series of images warrants such a transition, or when our feelings are played upon as such, without the aid of any concrete images at all, as in music. Heine's Aristophanic perspective fails because his angle of vision is taken from without instead of from within the comedy itself, because it is purely intellectual instead of aesthetic. The poet's intention misses its aim because there is too much method in this madness. More than once I have felt tempted to talk entirely in terms of musical analogies. If we imagine 'Le Grand' translated into a symphonic poem say, by Hoffmann's Johannes Kreisler we find it easy to put ourselves into the Aristophanic spirit of the poet. With 'Le Grand' put into music, all the chaotic heterogeneity of the subject matter would be disposed of. From the first plaintive