624 



HEINE 



to England and Italy ; he had worked on the 

 editorial stafl' of Cotta's newspapers in Bavaria; 

 and, besides Das Buck der Lieder, he wrote four 

 volumes in all of Die Reisebilder, the last two 

 ( 1830-31 ), however, inferior to the others. - 



In Paris Heine, whose intellectual character 

 and intellectual sympathies were always more 

 French than German, soon made himself at home. 

 He secured a patron in the minister Thiers, and 

 consorted with the greatest writers and chief 

 celebrities then living in Paris ; and yet he often x 

 longed to return to the Philistines of Germany. 

 For, in spite of the fact that he railed at his Jewish 

 descent and poured scorn upon his German com- 

 patriots, he was always a German at heart and 

 had a secret admiration for the persecuted people 

 from whom he was sprung. Nor was this by 

 any means the only inconsistency in his nature. 

 Though he scoffed at religion, yet was there a 

 deeply religious vein in his composition the Bible 

 was always a favourite book with him ; though 

 he was deplorably lax in his ideas and practices 

 of morality, he was not insensible to the beauty 

 of purity ; and though he ridiculed the vagaries of 

 the romantic school, he cherished a lingering fond- 

 ness for its ideals. 



The July revolution seems to have awakened in 

 Heine the first stirrings of manly seriousness. He 

 turned from poetry to politics, with which he had 

 always coquetted ever since he began to write. 

 He entered Paris glowing with the inspiration of 

 the revolution. He assumed the role of a tribune 

 of tlie people, a leader of the cosmopolitan demo- 

 cratic movement, the object of which was to 

 effect the union of the peoples of all nations in a 

 brotherhood of liberty and progress. It was under 

 the inspiration of this ideal that he greeted with 

 acclamation the socialistic doctrines of the St 

 Simonists, at all events in so far as economics 

 and religion were concerned. One of the chief 

 aims of his life was to make the French and the 

 Germans acquainted with one another's intellectual 

 and artistic achievements. This was the ground 

 out of which sprang the Franzosische Zustdnde 

 (1833), a collection of papers on affairs in France, 

 first printed in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung ; 

 De I Allemagne (1835), the French version of Die 

 Romantische Schule (1836) of Germany, that is; 

 and Philosophic und Literatur in Deutschland, 

 forming part of the second of the four volumes of 

 miscellaneous writings entitled Der Salon (1835- 

 40). Heine was always an Ishmael, not only of 

 literature but also of politics he would fight 

 under nobody's flag but his own ; and hence, with 

 his aristocratic instincts and refined taste, he 

 refused to make common cause with the revolu- 

 tionary fugitives from Germany who found an 

 asylum in Paris. Yet he seems not to have been 

 altogether above the suspicion, if not of insincerity, 

 at least of desiring to win the crown of the 

 political martyr without undergoing the pains of 

 political martyrdom. At all events, his ambigu- 

 ous attitude brought down upon him the spiteful 

 enmity of his revolutionary compatriots ; and their 

 hostility was greatly embittered by the publica- 

 tion of Heine's ungenerous attack upon his former 

 friend and political associate Borne (1840). Nor 

 did he enjoy any better savour of grace from the 

 governments of Germany because of his personal 

 aversion to their dreaded enemies. In 1835 his 

 writings, past and prospective together, had been 

 condemned, along with those of the Young Germany 

 school, by the Confederation parliament at Frank- 

 fort, and this measure was not repealed until 

 1842. 



Although Heine loved liberty with his whole 

 soul, and lived and suffered for it, it seems never 

 to have been anything more to him than a 



romantic ideal. The truth is he stood on the con- 

 tinental watershed of two wholly different Weltan- 

 schauungen ( ' world-conceptions ' ), the old world of 

 romantic feudalism and the new world of scientific 

 inquiry and individual freedom. He had nothing 

 but scorn for the tyrannous era of priestcraft and 

 aristocracy, and nothing but sarcasm ,and ridicule 

 for the inert mass of commonplace Philistines, with 

 their intellectual apathy and self-satisfied somno- 

 lence. Respecting the future he cherished the most 

 sanguine hopes. He foresaw in imagination the 

 glorious regeneration of the peoples ; and Germany 

 was, he believed, the agent of promise destined to 

 effect this great change. Nor must it be imputed 

 to him for blame that he never grasped the problem 

 of the practical realisation of his ideal, that he 

 never thought of the means and forms by and in 

 which this romanticism of the revolution of pro- 

 gress was to be converted into the concrete realism 

 of accomplished fact. For, though he criticised 

 the past and projected his hopes into the future, 

 his heart was knit to the past with the tenderest 

 associations of feeling, and his sceptical intellect 

 would not allow him to remain blind to the imper- 

 fections of his prospicient dreams. It need not 

 therefore excite surprise to find traces of the senti- 

 mental declaimer in Heine's war-song of liberty, 

 despite his evident earnestness in the cause. For, 

 after all, his love for humanity was beyond all 

 suspicion warm and deep, and his zeal for intel- 

 lectual freedom unquestionably sincere. 



His last years, from 1844 onwards, were years of 

 great pain and suffering. His book on Borne pro- 

 voked a kind of hornet's nest about his ears. On 

 the eve of a duel, which it ultimately cost him, he 

 married in due legal form Mathilde Mirat, a Paris 

 grisette, with whom he had been living some years 

 in free love. Then came his uncle Solomon's 

 death, and a quarrel with the family, because of 

 their refusal to continue the annuity he had re- 

 ceived from his uncle from the year he settled in 

 Paris. A compromise was effected early in 1847 : 

 the payment of the annuity was resumed, Heine 

 pledging himself not to publish anything reflecting 

 on the family. For this reason his Memoiren, which 

 he anticipated would be his greatest work, was 

 withheld from publication. The fate of the manu- 

 script is a mystery. Heine speaks of having 

 destroyed it. Yet it is both asserted and denied 

 that it passed into the possession of his brother 

 Gustav. At all events the fragmentary Memoiren 

 published in 1884 can scarcely be part of the 

 original work ; it is in all probability a portion of 

 the new version begun by Heine. The revolution 

 of 1848, unlike that of 1830, failed to awaken any 

 enthusiasm in him. Since 1837 his eyes had caused 

 him much pain, and since 1844 he had been con- 

 fined to his bed by spinal paralysis. He lingered 

 on in excruciating pain, borne with heroic patience 

 and endurance, until 17th February 1856. But 

 no amount or intensity of bodily suffering could 

 break his spirit or impair his creative power ; he 

 jested and wrote to the last. During these years 

 he published Neue Gedichte and Deutschland, a 

 satirical political poem, m 1844; Atta Troll, the 

 'swan-song of romanticism,' in 1847; a collection 

 of poems, Bomancero, in 1851 ; and three volumes 

 of Vermischte Schriften, in 1854. 



Complete editions of Heine's works have been edited 

 by Strodtmann (21 vols. 1861-66), Karpeles (12 vols. 

 1885 and 9 vols. 1886-87), and Elster (5 vols. 1887), and 

 in French by himself, assisted by Gerard de Nerval and 

 others (14 vols. 1852 et seq.}. The best biographies of 

 Heine are those by Proelss ( 1886 ) and Strodfcmann ( 3d 

 ed. 2 vols. 1884). See also Heines Autobiographic (a 

 mosaic ) by Karpeles ( 1888 ), and Lives by W. Sharp ( 1888 ) 

 and Stigand (1875). Heine's poetry has a fatal fascina- 

 tion for translators. Versions have been essayed by 



