Gesammelte Werke

disillusioned world of early industrialism? He became conscious of the crisis of romanticism and gave account of this consciousness in his prose writings. He realized that the tradition of romanticism in which he grew up and of which he himself was in some respects the climax had begun to become hollow and rigid. He felt that this tradition was no longer adequate to the substance of experience, that it deteriorated into the crude cult of the Middle Ages, of Knights and Castles which found its last, ludicrous monuments in the »neo-Gothic« architecture of the second part of the nineteenth century. At the same time, he reacted against the ever-increasing alliance of German romanticism with the forces of political reaction during the
Vormärz
-era between 1815 and 1848.
    Incompatibility of the industrial era with romanticism has not to be understood in too naive a sense. It would be fallacious to assume that
reality
in Germany was quaint, »romantic« during earlier romanticism, and that the intrusion of factories and railways destroyed a Germany which looked and was like the Nuremberg later glorified in the stage settings of the
Mastersinger.
In fact, even earlier romanticism was a protest against the disappearance of a supposedly »organic« world which was to be conjured up by imagery rather than it manifested itself straight-forwardly. The works of the greatest German romanticists, such as Hölderlin and Novalis, denounce as strongly what would be called today business culture, as it ever was resented during a much later phase of economic development. What happened in the time span between them and Heine was not so much that romanticism had become no longer adequate to reality (which it never was), but rather that its substance had ceased to be a
protest
against reality and had become, as it were, apologetic. The imagery of earlier romanticism had been symbolic of philosophical motives, such as longing which transcends the world as it is, the infinite, the emancipation of subjectivity from alienated, congealed conventions. Of these motives only the
caput mortuum
remained. They degenerated into mere embellishments of the drabness of life. Heine's position may be characterized as being faithful to the primary impulses of romanticism – represented in his lyrical work by the desire for boundless, exuberant, unbridled love – while he sensed that the old symbols of romanticism did no longer carry those motives, and that just those who did not want to yield to the existent had to recognize its over-whelming impact if the manifestations of romanticism were not to become a piece of furniture in the
Biedermeier
household.
    Thus Heine's artistic situation was from the very beginning antagonistic in itself, that of a romantic poet set against romanticism. He expressed, through the material of his art, what the great social theorists of his era formulated on a discursive level: that only those take the Utopian dream seriously who try to make it become real and enter into a dialectical process with reality, while those who maintain the dream world in its aloofness are liable to surrender to the very reality from which they try to get away. All the more conspicuous traits of Heine's work, everything that is, as Louis Untermeyer put it, »paradoxial« in him, reflects this historical antagonism. To be sure, the antagonism itself, and its poetic objectification, are by no means novel. It may be said that there always was just as much romanticism as the awareness of its incompatibility with the world, and the great romantic poets have dwelt on this incompatibility rather than contenting themselves with the pattern of the blessed olden times. Here one has to think primarily of Byron, by whom Heine probably was influenced more strongly than by anybody else and to whom he owes the decisive poetic idea of
Weltschmerz,
the »sorrow of the world«. But the atmosphere of
Weltschmerz
has been reduced, in Heine, from the monumental, from the broad historical sweep of the tragic to much more intimate dimensions of the private individual of his own time, shunning everything grandiose and decorative as extraneous to the concrete world of poetic experience. Heine is, at least in German literature, the first poet who speaks essentially as a city dweller, and even his landscapes, the famous
Nordsee,
can be properly understood only through the contrast of the vastness of the sea to that of the big town. In this respect like in many others he