Zusammenfassung
Heinrich Heine, the German-Jewish poet and author of such works as the »Buch der Lieder«, his witty travel accounts »Reisebilder« (»Tableaux de voyage«), and much eise of renown, has been received at times as the icon of German romanticism, of populär fame for his »Loreley« song, ousted in the years of German fascism, and re-instated thereafter for his powerful literary and critical voice amongst contemporaries and posterity alike. He was born in 1797 in Düsseldorf, Duchy Berg, grew up during Napoleonic rule and the introduction of civic equality (1811) and Jewish emancipation (1812), and by governmental decree of 1814 aquired the right to live in France. He gained a PhD in jurisprudence, whilst publishing a great deal of poetry and prose, attempted unsuccessfully to set up a solicitor’s practice in Hamburg, then to acquire a chair at the universities of Munich and Berlin. He moved to Paris in 1831 and in 1835 his name was added to a list of forbidden German authors »Junges Deutschland«1 by Prussia and subsequently by the German confederation of states, Deutscher Bund. The wish to improve conditions in feudal German states remained his critical concern whilst living and writing in exile for the next 25 years, publishing his work in both German and French. During the last eight years of his life he was almost completely paralysed, carrying on writing and proof-reading from his »mattress grave«.2
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Named in analogy to »Jeune France« and »Giovine Italia« initially by the writers Gutzkow, Laube and then Wienbarg (Aesthetische Feldzüge. Hamburg 1834).
»En vains les années ont elles suivi leur cours, en vain la souffrance, une souffrance affreuse, impitoyable, a-t-elle appesanti ses mains de plomb sur la fantaisie ailée […]. Voyez-le sur ce lit de douleur où un artiste eminent nous le représente ici, considérez cette tête fine et pensive […] ce qui éclate dans la délicatesse du visage, dans le sourire des lèvres, dans ce regard à demi fermé où ne pénètre plus qu’un dernier rayon de lumière, c’est la sérénité imperturbable, c’est la victoire de l’humour sur les plus cruelles souffrances« (Saint-Renè Taillandier: Poètes contemporains de l’Allemagne: Henri Heine. — In: Revue des deux Mondes. Nouvelle période. XIV, 1 avril 1852, p. 8).
In addressing Jane as ›K.‹, Arnold uses a family nickname.
William Edward Forster, his brother-in-law, Liberal M. P. for Bradford from 1861, Vice President of the Privy Council 1867–74, wno piloted the Education Act through Parliament in 1870. (Charles Arnold-Baker: The Companion to British History. Tunbridge Wells 1996, p. 529) From Arnold’s letters we learn that Forster was a member of the industral class of Victorian England and a Quaker, and thus represented aspects of contemporary society Arnold was much concerned with in his prose works, the new middle class and the religious and social critique of Nonconformism or Protestant Dissent from High Church Anglicanism.
George W E. Russell: Letters of Matthew Arnold. London 1895.1,49f. and Lang I, 33of. The latter is part of a new letter edition edited by Cecil Y. Lang: The Letters of Matthew Arnold. Vols I-VI, 1828–1888, Charlottesville 1996–2001. Lang annotates the Saint-Simon paraphrase as ›untraced‹.
No reference is given for this, but the context of the quotation and Heine’s own phrase in »Lutèce«, »mais, pour parler avec Saint-Simon« would suggest that Butler’s assumption is correct.
E. M. Butler: The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany. Cambridge 1926, p. 114.
Howard Foster Lowry / Karl Young / Waldo Hilary Dunn (ed.s): The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold. London 1952, p. 558.
Whilst ordering books in Britain in the age of electronic communication almost 150 years later has become a rather more complicated matter.
Note-Books [footnote. 8], p. 551.
A case in point was the American edition which was published by Weik in 1855 and which Heine did not approve of.
Heine’s friend Kolb pre-empted, as well as he could, the likely intervention of the Bavarian authorities in Heine’s articles, to which the »Allgemeine Zeitung« was subject like all other publications, be they periodicals or books, in the various German speaking states of the early 19th century. Heine was by no means happy with the alterations imposed on him but preferred to publish even in an adulterated form in a widely read paper of European stature to not being read at all, say in a paper less frequently targeted by the censorship authorities.
Despite the apparently negative evidence of Heine’s views on England at this point, this has to be seen in the context of Heine’s polemical method of singling out individual aspects for criticism whilst praising England elsewhere, e.g. in his admiration for Shakespeare, for the parliamentary system, for the brilliant rhetorics of parliamentary speeches and much else. See also J. P. Stern (p. iv) and S. S. Prawer: Coal-Smoke and Englishmen. London 1984. A more extensive treatment of Heine’s views of England is contained in S. S. Prawer: Frankenstein’s Island. Cambridge 1986.
A view Goethe may well have shared when he extrapolates to Eckermann: »Bei den Engländern ist es gut, dass sie alles practisch machen; aber sie sind Pedanten.« (Johann Peter Eckermann: Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Tagen seines Lebens. Teil I, 1823–1827. Hrsg. von Ernst Beutler. Zürich 1948, Bd. I, S. 190).
See footnote 5.
In fact not until thirty years later: see »Note-Book« [footnote 8], p. 412, 417, 529. Arnold’s extracts from the »Mémoires« of Saint-Simon, which emerge from 1885, are dealing with an entirely different subject matter.
See Russell I, 195 and Lang III, 213 [footnote 5].
March 1866, to his mother; Russell I, 32if; Lang II, 19 fr. [footnote 5].
By then Arnold’s critique of England in the »Essays in Criticsm« had created a lively controversy: Fitzjames Stephen — as Secretary of the Education Commission from 1858–1861 Arnold’s superior, who was also a reformer and writer and, from 1879, a judge (Arnold-Baker [footnote 4], p. 1172) — responded to the publication of »The Function of Criticsm at the Present Time« (in: »National Review«, November 1864) in his article »Mr. Matthew Arnold and his Countrymen« in the »Saturday Review« of 3 December 1864. To this Arnold immediately planned a rebuttal (for March 1865; Russell I, 243; Lang II, 355 [footnote 5]) which was finally published in the »Cornhill« in February 1866 under the title »My Countrymen«. By this time, Stephen had published: »Mr. Mattew Arnold amongst the Philistines« (»Saturday Review« 19, February 25, 1865, p. 2.35 f.), using in its title one of the terms developed by Arnold from his Heine-reception. Arnold’s »My Countrymen« was followed by another article by Stephen, »Mr. Arnold on the Middle Classes« (»Saturday Review« 21, February 10, 1866; Lang [footnote 5], II, 355 and III, 10).
Later on collected under the title »Friendship’s Garland«.
Arnold’s subtitle for »Culture and Anarchy«. See J. Dover Wilson (ed.): Matthew Arnold. Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge 1979-
Thomas Arnold D.D. (1795–1842), butt of a satirical article by Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) in »Eminent Victorians« (1918), was well-known as headmaster of Rugby, and became Regius Professor of Modern History in Oxford in 1841. He was famous for his outspoken and often severe views and was hampered in his career by being seen, especially by his clerical contemporaries, as a High Church rebel.
March 1866; Russell I, 321; Lang III, 19 [footnote 5].
The novelist and critic George Eliot had, by 1861, in fact published three short scholarly articles on Heine. But, as she was using a different genre, Arnold would not have seen her as a competitor for his poem. Also, even in 1863, Arnold was not adopting a scholarly approach in his Heine-Essay but had an entirely different agenda, and was thus not likely to overlap with Eliot.
October 1863; Russell I, 199; Lang II, 233 t. [footnote 5].
E.g. over India after the Mutinies: »The fact is, that the demand for an electric link with India, generally of an urgent nature, had become, as it were, imperative to England since the sad and serious warning afforded by the Mutinies. […] The want was no longer confined to commercial and political interests: it was eminently national.« (Frederic John Goldsmid: Telegraph and Travel. London 1874).
Jeffrey Kieve: The Electric Telegraph, a Social and Economic History. Newton Abbot 1973, P-39-
With du Camp contributing even numbered, and Flaubert odd numbered chapters. I am indebted to the late Janine Dakyns, Flaubert specialist at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, for suggesting this travel journal for its images of contemporary telegraphy.
In the year of their visit to Brittany the telegraph wires and -poles the traveller would have seen would have been able to transmit news only within France, as the Paris-London telegraph link was not opened until November 1852. As the re-writing process carried on for some time Flaubert had the opportunity of referring to the availability of cross-channel communication later by including this future prospect in the artistic ensemble of a travel journal based on notes of a travel experience of 1847. Only fragments of the journal were published in the lifetime of both authors, i.e. by du Camp in 1852 and 1854, and by Flaubert in 1858. The poetic licence of this historical inaccuracy may, perhaps, be seen in the context of the unusual decision of a travel account on one’s own country, albeit the ancient land of Celtic lore and of prehistoric sites like Carnac. The area was held in high regard by English travellers like Arnold, as well as by Heine and also by French authors, amongst them Balzac, Stendhal, Michelet, Mérimée and Hugo, though very little had been published by the time Flaubert and du Camp undertook their journey, shortly before their well documented oriental travels (1849–51) with du Camp’s famous photographs of Egypt.
Gustave Flaubert / Maxime du Camp: Par les champs et par les grèves. Ed. p. Adrianne J. Tooke. Geneva 1967; from Chapter III, written by Flaubert, p. i66f.
See Wolf Lepenies: Die drei Kulturen. Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft. Reinbek 1988, and his comments on the influence of Heine and Arnold on Max Weber whom he counts amongst ›Webers Gewährsleute‹, with a somewhat different emphasis rendered as ›among Weber’s authorities‹ by R. J. Hollingdale, the translater of the English version: Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Cambridge 21992. Weber cites Heine and Arnold as authors who have understood the connection between Nonconformism and the expansion of English industry, on the basis of, as Weber puts it, the secularisation of monastic asceticism. (Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Tr. Talcott Parsons, intr. Anthony Giddens. London 71999.
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Boenisch, H. (2001). Heine, Arnold, Flaubert and the Cross-Channel Link: Implicit Connections Textual and Technological. In: Kruse, J.A. (eds) Heine-Jahrbuch 2001. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-02819-8_5
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