The New Spirit

uthful and militant Knight of the Holy Ghost, tilting against the spectres of the past and liberating the imprisoned energies of the human spirit. His interest from this point of

things, whether he would or not, were always Hellenic—using that word in the large sense in which Heine himself used it—even while he was the first in rank and the last in time of the Romantic poets of Germany. He sought, even consciously, to m

ties of the aged Zeus of Weimar. And then the earnest Hebrew nature within him, liberated by Hegel’s favourite formula of the divinity of man, came into play with its large revolutionary thirsts. Thus it was that he appeared before the world as the mos

bold outline of the spiritual history of Germany and Germany’s great emancipators, Luther, Lessing, Kant, and the rest. It sets forth in a fresh and fascinating shape that Everlasting Gospel which, from the time of Joachim of Flora downwards, has always gleamed in dreams before the minds of men as the successor of Christianity. Heine’s vision of a democracy of cakes and ale, founded on the heights of religious, philosophical, and political freedom, may still spur and thrill us,—even now-a-days, when we have wearied of stately bills of fare for a sulky humanity that will not feed at our

world became the sport of his intelligence. The brain still functioned brilliantly in the atrophied body; the swift lightning-like wit still struck unerringly; it spared not even himself. The “Confessions” are full of irony, covering all things with laughter that is half reverence, or with reverence that is more than half laughter—and woe to the reader who is not at every moment alert! In the romantic, satirical poem of “Atta Troll,” written at the commencement of the last period, this, his final altitude, is most completely revealed. It needs a little study to-day, even for a German,[72] but it is well worth that study. The history of a dancing bear who escapes from servitude, “Atta Troll” is a protest against the radical party, with their narrow conceptions of progress, their tame ideal of bourgeois equality, their little watchwords, their solemnity, their indignation at the human creatures who smile “even in their enthu

fied love and reverence. By his later vindication of the rights of the spirit, not less than by his earlier fight for religious and political

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he cared little. She preferred logic to sentiment, and was careful of the precise value of words. Some letters written during her twenty-fourth year reveal a frank, brave, and sweet nature; she was a bright, attractive little person, and had many wooers. In the summer of 1796 Samson Heine, bearing a letter of introduction, entered the house of the[74] Van Gelderns. He was the son of a Jewish merchant settled in Hanover, and he had just made a campaign in Flanders and Brabant, in the capacity of commissary with the rank of officer, under Prince Ernest of Cumberland. He was a large and handsome man, with soft blonde hair and beautiful hands;

ony at the end of a school year, he came to grief; he was reciting a poem, when his eyes fell on a beautiful, fair-haired girl in the audience; he hesitated, stammered, was silent, fell down fainting. So early he revealed the extreme cerebral irritability of a nature absorbed in dreams and taken captive by visions. It was not long after this, at the age of seventeen, when his rich uncle at Hamburg was trying in vai

ol of which Schelling was the philosophic representative. Heine afterwards referred to this period as that in which he “herded swine with the Hegelians;” it is c

r (in childhood it was red, and he was called “Rother Harry”) framing the pale and beardless oval face, the bright, blue, short-sighted eyes, the Greek nose, the high cheek bones, the lar

ts of application at such moments as he realized that it was not good for him to depend on the generosity of his rich and kind-hearted uncle

on of the first volume of the “Reisebilder” gave him a reputation throughout Germany by its audacity, its charming and picturesque manner, its peculiarly original personality. The second volume, bolder and better than the first, was received with delight very much mixed with horror, and it was prohibited by Austria, Prussia, and many minor states. At this period Heine visited England; he was then disgusted with Germany and full of enthusiasm for the “land of freedom,” an enthusiasm which naturally met with many rude shocks, and from that time dates the bitterness

er, a keener cry of pain. He was now heartily welcomed by the extraordinarily brilliant group then living and working in Paris, including Victor Hugo, George Sand, Balzac, Michelet, Alfred de Musset, Gautier, Chopin, Louis Blanc, Dumas, Sainte-Beuve, Quinet, Berlioz, and he entered with eager delight into their manifold activities. For a time also he attached himself rather closely to the school of Saint-Simon, then headed by Enfantin; he was especially attracted by their religion of humanity, which seemed the realization of his

elationship. Mathilde could neither read nor write; it was decided that she should go to school for a time; after that they established a little common household, one of those ménages parisiens, recognized as almost legitimate, for which Heine had always had a warm admiration, because, as he said, he meant by “marriage” something quite other than the legal coupling effected by parsons and bankers. As in the case of Goethe, it was not until some yea

s pretty, laughter-loving grisette. It lay in her bright and wild humour, her childlike impulsiveness, not least in her charming ignorance. It was delightful to Heine

French Government, which has sometimes been a matter of concern to those who care for his fame. As years passed, the enmities that he suffered from or cherished increased[81] rather than diminished, and his bitterness found expression in his work. Even Mathilde was not an unalloyed source of joy; the charming child was becoming a middle-aged woman, and was still like a child. She could not enter into Heine’s interests; she delighted in theatres and circuses, to which he could not always accompany her: and he experienced the pangs of an unre

the shrine dedicated to “the goddess of beauty, our dear lady of Milo.” There he sat long at her feet; he was bidding farewell to his old gods; he had become reconciled to the r

He lay on a pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it seemed no bigger than a child under the sheet which covered him—hi

ed. “He is a wonderful man,” said one of his doctors; “he has only two anxieties—to conceal his condition from his mother, and to assure his wife’s future.” His literary work, though it decreased in am

hours or days at a time by the “mattress-grave” in the Rue d’Amsterdam, reading to him or writing his letters or correcting proofs. To the last the loud, bright voice of Mathilde, when he chanced to hear it, scolding the servants or in

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a Troll” he saw in the moonlight from the casement of Uraka’s hut—the Greek Diana, grown wanton, but with the noble marble limbs of old; Abunde, the blonde and gay fairy of France; Herodias, the da

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the poem called “Disputation” a Capuchin and a Rabbi argued before the King and Queen at Toledo concerning the respective merits of the Christian and Jewish religions. Both spoke at great length and with great fervour, and in the end the King appealed to the beautiful Queen by his side. She replied that she could not tell which of[85] them was right, but that she did not like the smell of either; and Heine was generally of the Queen’s mind. He sighed for the restoration of Barbarossa, the long-delayed German Empire, and his latest biographer asserts that he would have greeted the discovery of Barbarossa under the disguise of the King of Prussia, with Bismarckian

he vision of roses and myrtles and sugar-plums all round, say to this? B?rne answered, “I can be indulgent to the games of children, indulgent to the passions of a youth, but when on the bloody day of battle a boy who is chasing butterflies gets between my legs; when at the day of our greatest need, and we are calling aloud on God, the young coxcomb beside us in the church sees only the pretty girls, and winks and flirts—then, in spite of all our philosophy and humanity, we may well grow angry.... Heine, with his sybaritic nature, is so effeminate that the fall of a rose-leaf disturbs h

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his sword. It was only with the full development of his humour, when his spinal cord began to fail and he had taken up his position as a spectator of life, that Heine attained the only sort of unity possible to him—the unity that comes of a recognized and accepted lack of unity. In the lambent flames of this unequalled humour—“the smile of Mephistopheles passing over the face of Christ”—he bathed all the things he counted dearest; to its s

e vulgar Pisgah of his day, behind on an Eden that was for ever closed, before on a promised land he should never enter. While with clear sight he announced things to come, the music of the past floated up to him; he brooded wistfully over the vision of the old Olympian gods, dying, amid faint music of cymbals and flutes, for

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