Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/122

 116 Heine's "Buck Le Grand" ment of 'Vernunft' has been very small, that possibly they were overlooked altogether in its distribution. They can't refrain, however, from protesting that 'Vernunft' is very "sour and at bottom of little value. " They have invented all kinds of substi- tutes for 'Vernunft' Feeling (das Gemiit), Faith, Inspiration. These newly discovered powers are said to be even more efficacious in certain emergencies than 'Vernunft' itself. Heine has thrown together in this category, as we recognize without difficulty, all sorts of emotionalists, pietists, mystics -Romanticists men of the type of F. H. Jacobi, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling and Fouque; and included in this class, trailing on the heels of these leaders, are the thousands of satellites and sycophants who, for material and selfish reasons, find it opportune to profess a cult of emotion tinged with piety. So the Romanticists, broadly speaking, are here satirized as the second class of 'Narren,' and Heine means to do anything but compliment them by applying the epithet in this connection. This need not surprise us, for, tho a Romanticist himself by tempera- ment and literary tradition, a pupil of A. W. Schlegel, Heine had begun emancipating himself even in his student days from the re- ligious cult and the reactionary political philosophy of the Roman- ticists. The chapter we are analyzing is not the first instance of Heine's setting the champions of reason over against the champions of feeling, comparing their respective merits and covering them both with his ridicule. The 'Harzreise' and the 'Nordsee' as well present a similar classification. In these somewhat earlier passages the members of the second class of 'Narren' are referred to as 'Mys- tics,' and the 'isms' opposed to each other are Rationalism and Mysticism. 7 Wherever Heine alludes to this contrast we can't help observing that he is in sympathy with the imaginative atti- tude of the Mystics but is impatient of their reverence for political and religious tradition; and that he relishes the revolutionizing criticism of the Rationalists against decaying institutions, while he abhors their worship of the practical and the useful. We have identified the two classes of fools of a higher order with the obsolete Rationalists and the reactionary Romanticists. By the principle of elimination this brings us nearer to an identifica- 7 See vol. Ill, p. 39, and especially the variants ib. 515, 523 and 536.