es, it is gracious
and compliant to the Troubadours. But as these same ladies were often
crusty and repulsive to their unmusical mates, so the German language
generally appears awkward and unmanageable in the hands of prose writers.
Indeed, the number of really fine German prosaists before Heine would
hardly have exceeded the numerating powers of a New Hollander, who can
count three and no more. Persons the most familiar with German prose
testify that there is an extra fatigue in reading it, just as we feel an
extra fatigue from our walk when it takes us over ploughed clay. But in
Heine's hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull,
becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic,
brilliant; it is German in an _allotropic_ condition. No dreary
labyrinthine sentences in which you find "no end in wandering mazes
lost;" no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no
digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and
clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision, all
those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest order
of prose. And Heine has proved--what Madame de Stael seems to have
doubted--that it is possible to be witty in German; indeed, in reading
him, you might imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit,
so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his management.
He is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth
and repose, and the calm development which belong to Goethe's style, for
they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in
susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over
its effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow: he
alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion,
and daring piquancy; and athwart all these there runs a vein of sadness,
tenderness, and grandeur which reveals the poet. He continually throws
out those finely chiselled sayings which stamp themselves on the memory,
and become familiar by quotation. For example: "The People have time
enough, they are immortal; kings only are mortal."--"Wherever a great
soul utters its thoughts, there is Golgotha."--"Nature wanted to see how
she looked, and she created Goethe."--"Only the man who has known bodily
suffering is truly a _man_; his limbs have their Passion history, they
are spiritualized." He calls Rubens "this Flem