Heine was also fortunate in having access to the chief
literary circles of the capital; he was on terms of intimacy
with Varnhagen von Ense and his wife, the celebrated Rahel,
at whose house he frequently met such men as the Humboldts,
Hegel himself and Schleiermacher; he made the acquaintance
of leading men of letters like Fouqué and Chamisso, and was
on a still more familiar footing with the most distinguished
of his co-religionists in Berlin. Under such favourable circumstances
his own gifts were soon displayed. He contributed
poems to the Berliner Gesellschafter, many of which were subsequently
incorporated in the Buch der Lieder, and in December
1821 a little volume came from the press entitled Gedichte, his
first avowed act of authorship. He was also employed at this
time as correspondent of a Rhenish newspaper, as well as in
completing his tragedies Almansor and William Ratcliff, which
were published in 1823 with small success. In that same year
Heine, not in the most hopeful spirits, returned to his family,
who had meanwhile moved to Lüneburg. He had plans of
settling in Paris, but as he was still dependent on his uncle,
the latter’s consent had to be obtained. As was to be expected,
Solomon Heine did not favour the new plan, but promised to
continue his support on the condition that Harry completed
his course of legal study. He sent the young student for a six
weeks’ holiday at Cuxhaven, which opened the poet’s eyes to
the wonders of the sea; and three weeks spent subsequently
at his uncle’s county seat near Hamburg were sufficient to
awaken a new passion in Heine’s breast—this time for Amalie’s
sister, Therese. In January 1824 Heine returned to Göttingen,
where, with the exception of a visit to Berlin and the excursion to
the Hartz mountains in the autumn of 1824, which is immortalized
in the first volume of the Reisebilder, he remained until his
graduation in the summer of the following year. It was on the
latter of these journeys that he had the interview with Goethe
which was so amusingly described by him in later years. A few
weeks before obtaining his degree, he took a step which he had
long meditated; he formally embraced Christianity. This
“act of apostasy,” which has been dwelt upon at unnecessary
length both by Heine’s enemies and admirers, was actuated
wholly by practical considerations, and did not arise from any
wish on the poet’s part to deny his race. The summer months
which followed his examination Heine spent by his beloved
sea in the island of Norderney, his uncle having again generously
supplied the means for this purpose. The question of his future
now became pressing, and for a time he seriously considered the
plan of settling as a solicitor in Hamburg, a plan which was
associated in his mind with the hope of marrying his cousin
Therese. Meanwhile he had made arrangements for the publication
of the Reisebilder, the first volume of which, Die Harzreise,
appeared in May 1826. The success of the book was instantaneous.
Its lyric outbursts and flashes of wit; its rapid
changes from grave to gay; its flexibility of thought and style,
came as a revelation to a generation which had grown weary of
the lumbering literary methods of the later Romanticists.
In the spring of the following year Heine paid a long planned visit to England, where he was deeply impressed by the free and vigorous public life, by the size and bustle of London; above all, he was filled with admiration for Canning, whose policy had realized many a dream of the young German idealists of that age. But the picture had also its reverse; the sordidly commercial spirit of English life, and brutal egotism of the ordinary Englishman, grated on Heine’s sensitive nature; he missed the finer literary and artistic tastes of the continent and was repelled by the austerity of English religious sentiment and observance. Unfortunately the latter aspects of English life left a deeper mark on his memory than the bright side. In October Baron Cotta, the well-known publisher, offered Heine—the second volume of whose Reisebilder and the Buch der Lieder had meanwhile appeared and won him fresh laurels—the joint-editorship of the Neue allgemeine politische Annalen. He gladly accepted the offer and betook himself to Munich. Heine did his best to adapt himself and his political opinions to the new surroundings, in the hope of coming in for a share of the good things which Ludwig I. of Bavaria was so generously distributing among artists and men of letters. But the stings of the Reisebilder were not so easily forgotten; the clerical party in particular did not leave him long in peace. In July 1828, the professorship on which he had set his hopes being still not forthcoming, he left Munich for Italy, where he remained until the following November, a holiday which provided material for the third and part of the fourth volumes of the Reisebilder. A blow more serious than the Bavarian king’s refusal to establish him in Munich awaited him on his return to Germany—the death of his father. In the beginning of 1829 Heine took up his abode in Berlin, where he resumed old acquaintanceships; in summer he was again at the sea, and in autumn he returned to the city he now loathed above all others, Hamburg, where he virtually remained until May 1831. These years were not a happy period of the poet’s life; his efforts to obtain a position, apart from that which he owed to his literary work, met with rebuffs on every side; his relations with his uncle were unsatisfactory and disturbed by constant friction, and for a time he was even seriously ill. His only consolation in these months of discontent was the completion and publication of the Reisebilder. When in 1830 the news of the July Revolution in the streets of Paris reached him, Heine hailed it as the beginning of a new era of freedom, and his thoughts reverted once more to his early plan of settling in Paris. All through the following winter the plan ripened, and in May 1831 he finally said farewell to his native land.
Heine’s first impressions of the “New Jerusalem of Liberalism” were jubilantly favourable; Paris, he proclaimed, was the capital of the civilized world, to be a citizen of Paris the highest of honours. He was soon on friendly terms with many of the notabilities of the capital, and there was every prospect of a congenial and lucrative journalistic activity as correspondent for German newspapers. Two series of his articles were subsequently collected and published under the titles Französische Zustände (1832) and Lutezia (written 1840–1843, published in the Vermischte Schriften, 1854). In December 1835, however, the German Bund, incited by W. Menzel’s attacks on “Young Germany,” issued its notorious decree, forbidding the publication of any writings by the members of that coterie; the name of Heine, who had been stigmatized as the leader of the movement headed the list. This was the beginning of a series of literary feuds in which Heine was, from now on, involved; but a more serious and immediate effect of the decree was to curtail considerably his sources of income. His uncle, it is true, had allowed him 4000 francs a year when he settled in Paris, but at this moment he was not on the best of terms with his Hamburg relatives. Under these circumstances he was induced to take a step which his fellow-countrymen have found it hard to forgive; he applied to the French government for support from a secret fund formed for the benefit of “political refugees” who were willing to place themselves at the service of France. From 1836 or 1837 until the Revolution of 1848 Heine was in receipt of 4800 francs annually from this source.
In October 1834 Heine made the acquaintance of a young Frenchwoman, Eugénie Mirat, a saleswoman in a boot-shop in Paris, and before long had fallen passionately in love with her. Although ill-educated, vain and extravagant, she inspired the poet with a deep and lasting affection, and in 1841, on the eve of a duel in which he had become involved, he made her his wife. “Mathilde,” as Heine called her, was not the comrade to help the poet in days of adversity, or to raise him to better things, but, in spite of passing storms, he seems to have been happy with her, and she nursed him faithfully in his last illness. Her death occurred in 1883. His relations with Mathilde undoubtedly helped to weaken his ties with Germany; and notwithstanding the affection he professed to cherish for his native land, he only revisited it twice, in the autumn of 1843 and the summer of 1847. In 1845 appeared the first unmistakable signs of the terrible spinal disease, which, for eight years, from the spring of 1848 till his death, condemned him to a “mattress grave.” These years of suffering—suffering which left his
