Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/660

Rh 626 HEINE only laid Heine open to contumely while alive, but has provoked adverse criticism of special severity since his death. That he was guilty of &quot; apostasy &quot; is no doubt verbally true ; but there are two circumstances in this con nexion which should always be remembered. The one is that Heine was wholly wanting in the religious sense that he never was a Jew save nominally and by the accident of birth so that he cannot, with any real propriety, be said to have forsaken the creed of his race; the other, that his family, by encouraging him to adopt a profession which could not be catered except by the gateway of &quot;apostasy,&quot; tacitly left him free to take that step. In short, Heine s &quot; apostasy &quot; was a purely secular act ; and, although there will doubtless be found many to stigmatize him all the more blackly for this very reason, candour appears rather to require that this change of faith, if such it can be called, should be classed as one of his most venial offences, being the plainly outward act of one who throughout life made himself peculiarly ob noxious to the imputation of malice and bad-heartedness. Heine seems never to have made any serious attempt to practise law. His life from the year 1826 until his death was devoted entirely to literature, and more especially to journalism, which alone indeed was the main source of his income for many years. At first he lived in Hamburg, and then it was that, besides the Buck der Lieder, the earlier portions of the Reisebilder appeared, both of which, but particularly the latter, at once created an immense sensation throughout Germany, not only among the youthful and enthusiastic, who found their own sentiments expressed by the new writer with the happiest audacity, but amongst such dignified and ranycs personages as Metternich and Gentz. In 1827 Baron Cotta, the Bavarian publisher, offered Heine, who had risen at a bound into celebrity, the joint-editorship of the Allgemeine Politische Annalen. The young author accepted the offer, and betook himself to Munich in the winter of that year, after having paid a visit to London, where he found every person and everything detestable save Canning and his policy and it may be said here in passing that a most violent hatred of England forms a marked feature of all Heine s writings. He remained for a considerable period in the South-German capital, and it was owing, not to any disagreement with his employer, but to the demands of the court of Prussia, which was not long of taking umbrage at his freedom of opinion, that his editorial function ceased so abruptly as it did. What the secret history of the next two or three years of his life was whether from the very first he really was an object of especial disfavour at Berlin, or whether, as is quite as likely, taking his vanity and love of publicity into account, he exaggerated his powers of offence beyond the endurance of the Government there, and forced it into what seemed a petty persecution he presently perceived that he must either quit Germany altogether or prepare for a life-time perhaps of fortress-imprisonment. He did not long hesi tate between these two alternatives; and on the 1st of May 1831 Heinrich Heine left his native land for Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life, only once recrossing the Rhine, in 1843. Just as his adoption of Christianity has led to Heine s being pronounced &quot;apostate,&quot; so has his self-expatriation caused German writers to denounce him as &quot; renegade.&quot; But the one accusation is as groundless as the other. In the first place Heine was a Jew, in spite of his Christian- ization, and cannot therefore rightly be called a &quot; rene gade &quot; against Germany least of all when the degraded social and political status of his race in that country at the date of his emigration is recollected. Then again his writings were systematically subjected to the cruellest mutilations, and it is tolerably certain that had he remained in the &quot; Fatherland,&quot; he would sooner or later have been deprived of all power of public speech. Was it any wonder, seeing that he had adopted the profession of letters, that he should have turned his back upon such a prospect? He at any rate was the best judge ; and it ill becomes Germans to call him &quot; renegade,&quot; when, had he continued to tarry among them, their literature would probably have suffered an irreparable loss. At the same time, and for the same reasons, it is equally inept to assert that he was in the essential qualities of his mind a Frenchman who gravitated towards Paris by a sort of intellectual necessity. The necessity (to use that word) was physical. Heine would never have left Germany could he have freely expressed his opinions there. After settling in his new home, where Ins life for many years must have been as gay and brilliant as latterly it was sad and sombre, and where he speedily became more or less intimate with such writers as Balzac, Dumas the elder, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Theophile Gautier, Heine devoted himself more exclusively than ever to journalism; and from 1831 until 1847, he Avas an active and indefatigable publicist. The two series of papers entitled Franzosische Zustdnde and Lutetia contain a selec tion from his press-contributions during these years ; and even at this date they well repay perusal, not only by the brilliancy of wit and elegance of style which they possess in common with almost all his writings, but also by the remarkable sagacity of their political aperfus. Alongside of this main stream of journalism, he also kept up a subsidiary current of literature in its more proper sense although it may be said that all his writings are of an occasional nature and to this we owe the Salon (1833-39), which comprises among other pieces a series of articles, &quot; Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophic in Deutschland,&quot; which had originally appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes, and in which Heine came forward as the introducer of German thought to the reading world of Paris. The Salon also contains several admirable papers in art-criticism, and a strange, fragmentary medley of sentiment and satire, iu its author s most characteristic vein &quot; Die Florentinische Nachte.&quot; To this period, too, belongs Die Romantische Schule, to which reference has already been made, and the substance of which is sufficiently indicated by its name. In 1839 Shakespeare s Mddchen und Frauen appeared Heine acting in this slight work as cicerone through a gallery of Shakespeare s heroines. The year 1840 was signalized by the publication of Heinrich Heine iiber Ludivig Borne, a brochure of the wittiest and most trenchant satire, in which the German refugees in Paris a fraternity whom Heine always anxiously avoided were far more severely handled than was the defunct agitator whose name it bore, and who, it may be noted, was himself a Jew. In 1844 Deutschland, ein Wintermarchen, came forth the result of the visit to Germany which has been alluded to as the sole journey of the kind which Heine undertook; and this effu sion maybe ranked, along with a similar performance, Atta Troll (1846), as belonging to his most inferior writings. It was in 1848 that Heine, in the very hey-day of his activity, and with gigantic projects seething within him for the foundation of a journal, was suddenly prostrated by the disease which finally carried him off, though not before it had confined him for seven years upon the &quot;mattress-grave&quot; of mournful notoriety. His sufferings throughout that time are reported to have been frequently excruciating, and he at length grew so habituated to the use of opium that the very largest doses failed to afford him relief. But when his malady a softening of the spinal cord allowed him a respite, his intellect was as clear and vivacious as ever ; and it is to these closing years of his life, harassing as they were, that we are indebted for the finest and most finished of all his poems for the two collections, that is to say,