Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/132

 126 Heine's " Buck Le Grand" as true mystics, "und Mystiker werden es sein, die uns wieder vom neueren Wortdienst erlosen und wieder eine Naturreligion begriin- den, eine Religion, wo wieder freudige Gotter aus Waldern und Steinen liervorwachsen und auch die Menschen sich gottlich freuen" (VII, 251). Hegel is completely ignored in this connec- tion. We don't meet his name again till 1829, when Heine discusses the relative merits of Hegel and Schelling with the philosophical lizard on the crest of the Apennines. There both Hegel and Schelling are taken as exponents of the same philosophy. In con- trasting the methods of their philosophizing, however, Heine shows a marked preference for Schelling: "Diese (Schellings) Darstel- lungsart ist viel anmutiger, heiterer, pulsierend warmer, alles darin lebt, statt dass die abstrakt hegelschen Chiffern uns so grau, so kalt und tot anstarren" (III, 381-2). However, soon after Heine's return to North Germany, Men- zel's influence begins to wane. In the summer of 1830 Heine is again convinced of the paramount superiority of Hegel. In his 'Helgoland Letters' he goes so far as to style him "the prophet of the Occident" (VII, 46). But it was at Helgoland too that the first news of the July Revolution reached him. And this event, together with the English parliamentary reform bill, was to become the touch-stone for an authoritative interpretation of Hegel's dictum about the identity of the rational and the real. At anv rate, Hegel himself was now forced to range himself unequivocally on the side of either the conse native or the liberal forces of his day. Hegel came out openly and squarely in favor of the conservative elements. He had believed that the year 1815 marked the end of the epoch of revolution and that a period of uninterrupted peace- ful development was to follow. All the greater was his disappoint- ment when, with the outbreak of the revolution in Paris, all the institutions of Europe began to totter. On the English Reform Bill Hegel even wrote a memorial the last article from his pen in which he expressed his complete sympathy for Wellington, the Tory prime minister, and warned the English nation of the danger to which it would expose itself by entrusting the helm of state to theorists and doctrinarians instead of statesmen thoroly experienced in the routine of business. 11 Just two years earlier, in his ' Englische Fragmente ' Heine had left no doubt about his own attitude toward 11 Kuno Fischer: Geschichte der neueren Philosophic, vol. 8, II, 193-7.