Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/112

 106 Heine's "Buck Le Grand" intentional contrast to 'Vernunft' or 'verniinftig' expressed or implied. Nothing shows so clearly as Heine's letters of May 26, 1825, to Christiani, and of July 1, 1825, to Moser, how Heine was strug- gling even at that time to compress two diametrically opposed philosophies of life into the terms 'Vernunft' and 'Narrheit.' As usual, Heine here grapples not with philosophy in the abstract but with a personality of symbolic significance. Put concretely, the issue is: Heine versus Goethe. In these letters ' Vernunft ' and ' Vernlinftigkeit' are used to designate Goethe's philosophy of life, as interpreted by Heine. Overshadowing all other qualities are Goethe's "sense of the practical" and "his art of enjoying life to the full. " It is Goethe's success in every sense which Heine feels as 'verniinftig': success in a worldly sense; success in avoiding the rocks of life; success in shaping his life into a veritably harmon- ious work of art; success in the attainment of objectivity, modera- tion, tranquillity, inward peace. It is this success Heine admires, but at the same time success in every sense of the term is felt by the pessimistic, unbalanced Romanticist as a taint. Success means the renunciation of Titanism. Contrasting himself with Goethe, Heine feels the most out- standing trait of his own temperament to be his lack of balance, his love of being completely swept off his feet, his "enthusiasm for the idea," his " Schwarmerei " qualities later all summed up in the word 'Narrheit, ' which, tho absent here, is found over and over again a few years later, most pregnantly in his frequent identifica- tion of himself with Don Quixote. What a vast fringe of associations the terms 'Narrheit' and ' Vernunft' possessed for Heine is strikingly instanced in the introductory sentences of 'Die Bader von Lucca,' a later product of the same general period as 'Le Grand.' Mathilde, that femi- nine incarnation of wit, apostrophizing Heine as ' Wahnsinnigster der Sterblichen, " philosophizes as follows: "Narren und Dumm- kopfe gibt es genug, und man erzeigt ihnen oft die Ehre, sie fur verriickt zu halten; aber die wahre Verriicktheit ist nichts anderes als Weisheit, die sich geargert hat, dass sie alles weiss, alle Schand- lichkeiten dieser Welt, und die deshalb den weisen Entschluss gefasst hat, verriickt zu werden" (III, 293). 3 8 Elster's edition is quoted thruout this essay.