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    Siecle , says : —" All our books of any repute at present have beer written by Democracy . Yesterday it was Reystaud , to-day it is Quinet , to-morrow it will be Michelet , another day some one else . What would you have ? We are reduced to the < rlory of thought : and we endeavour to do honour to our condition . " The French press is beginning to speak out a little .

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    HENRI HEINE . Of far deeper interest than Madame Sand ' s Autobiography—woman of genius and of European fame as she is—is a little autobiographic fragment of another notability in the literary world—the German poet Heise . This extraordinary fragment appeared the other day , in French , in the Revue des Deux Monde . ? , under the title of Les Avevx < Tun Poete , in anticipation of its publication in German , as a preface to the first volume of a collection of Heine ' s miscellaneous writin gs , on the point of being issued by a Hamburg firm . ^ The fragment seems to have escaped notice in this country , notwithstandin g its appearance in the first of French periodicals ; but it is worth

    much more than a passing remark . It has been known for some time that a singular mental transformation has come over this most remarkable of the poets of Young G-ermany , now in the fifty-fifth year of his age , and living , the poor bed-ridden victim of a painful form of disease , in Paris . Rumours of his con-version from the utter Hegelian scepticism which he had formerly professed , and in th e spirit of which he had worked both as a poet and as a politician , have long been going about—some saying he had become a Protestant Evangelical of the Berlin school , and others that he had joined the Romish communion . The present fragment clears up , or at least throws light upon , the facts of the case . It is a most curious paper—full of brilliant and eccentric thought on various subjects ; and exhibiting a strange mixture of the speculative , the humorous , the sarcastic , and the poetical . It is not milike some of De Quince y ' s papers , but far more biting and fervid in its spirit . It is specially with reference to his work De I'Allemagne , published some years ago , and in which he expounded the nature of the newest German philosophy to the French , in a manner most original and striking , that he makes his present revelations . He tells what led to the preparation of that work , and how it dissipated the ideas till then entertained ia France of the German philosophy . " As regards the German philosophy , I divulged without reserve the secret of the school which , enveloped in scholastic formulas , was then only known , to tlie highest of the initiated . My Revelations excited in France the greatest astonishment , iand I remember that some eminent thinkers of this country told m « frankly they had

    always regarded the German philosophy as a mystic confusion , in which the Divinity was concealed at the back as in a sanctuary of clouds . They added , that the German philosophers had always appeared to them to be visionaries in a state of ecstasy , breathing nothing but piety and the fear of God . It is not my fault if it -was otherwise , and if the German philosophy is just the contrary of what people have been in the habit of calling , up to the present , piety and the fear of God . The most logical of these terrible sons of philosophy , our modem Porphyry , who bears really the name of Firejlood ( Jeuerbacli ) , proclaims , with his friends , the most radical atheism as the last word of our metaphysics . With the frenzy of Bacchantes , these impious fanatics have torn off the blue -veil from the German heaven , crying : ' Look I all the Divinities have fled , and on high there resides no longer aught but an old woman with iron hands and a desolate heart—Necessity . '"

    Of this philosophy M . Heine was once a votary , as far as it 'was in the nature of a poet to be . As a young man in Germany he had known Hegel himself—had " seen him , " as he says , " sitting in his woeful way , like a hen , on his terrible eggs , and heard his clucking . " He thus sketches the philosopher from memory : — " Hegel ' s conversation was never anything but a species of mosiologuc ; he seemed always to be speaking to himself , and I was often struck with tlie sepulchral sound of his wooden voice , as well as with the rough vulgarity of his images , of which many remain daguerreotyped in my memory . One evening at his house , taking coffee after dinner , I found myself by his side in a window recess , and youth as I was of twenty years , I looked with ecstasy at the star-lit heaven , and called tho stars the abode of the blessed . The master then muttered to himself : ' The stars , lnim ! hum ! the stars are but a scab shining on the sky ' s face . ' ' In God ' s name , ' I cried , ' is there then no place of happiness up above for the reward of -virtue after death ? ' Hegel , regarding me fixedly with his wan eyes , said to me in a dry tone : ' So then you look in tho end for something extra , above your fare , for having taken cares of your worthy mother when she was ill , and for not having poisoned your brother . ' Ho then turned away , alarmed at what lie had said , but appeared re-assured when he saw that his words had been heard only by Henry B- . " When Hkink came to Paris in 1831 he was an exulting sceptic , carrying n . personal adaptation of ITogelinnism about with him , if tho essential doctrine had not pierced his poetical heart . " I never was a great metaphysician , and I had accepted without examination tho synthesis of the Hegelian philosophy , the consequences of which tinkled my vanity . I was young and proud , and my prido was not n little flattered with the idea that I was a god . I had never oared to believe that God had become man ; I taxed this sublime doctrine with superstition ; but I latterly took Hegel ' s word for it when I heard him affirm that Man is Ciod . . Such an idea plcascil mo , I took it Hcriously , and I acted my part of ( Jod as honourably as possible . I wus myself the living and moral law ; 1 was infallible . "

    And so ho lod his brilliant , wild life , tho literary fruits of which are before the world . His first shock Avns on finding that his philosophy was no longer the exclusive possession of men of culture and genius liko himself , but was petting down among the " masses . " On theso " masses and his own sentimental rotations to '' them he has u curious passage . Ho avows that though theoretically an ardent friend of the people , yet in i ' lust ho bad alwsvys had ai horror of everything done by their uponcy , mid a dislike to personal ontnet with them . So long as he and his Iriunus hud "hlnsplioincd among themselves att their little ) philosophical suppurs , " ho wus contented ; but , whon " ¦ 1 . 1 uj Hinnu themes begun to bo discussed in tho low symposiums , " when " iitliuisin begun to ttnuill of tallow , ami scIuki / js , and tobacco , " ho vriia Mnrtlod . This leads him to way soiucthiny oi' tho workiiig-cliiKsen in Germnny . Tho passage is striking : —

    " Tho Oerinnn workmen form tho eentni ( if an army of prolntnircH voll irxloctrlnntttd if not disciplined . TIip . hu Orrmnn workmen almost , all profit nilicinm , nnd , to toll tho truth , thoy cannot , avoid thus flispoiiHintf with nil Urn roHjrioim id « nn of tho pant , without , contradicting Uialr principle and liuuouiiuu iioworliittri , Those coliortf ) of

    destruction , these terrible sappers , whose axe threatens every edifice of the old society are much superior to the Chartists of England and the levellers and equaliterian 3 of other lands . The English Chartists are pushed on by hunger , not by an idea . . . . The chiefs , moie or less occult , of the German Communists , are great logicians of -whom the ablest have coma of Hegel ' s school ; and they are , without doubt , the best heads , the most energetic characters in Germany . These teachers of revolution , and their disciples , remorselessly bent on carrying out their principles , are the only men m Germany who have lif < e , and it is to them , I believe , that the future belongs . } r-, J ; P arties and their representatives are corpse-dead , and buried under the vault of St . Paul ' s Church at Frankfort . " It was the French Revolution of February 1848 , however , tlat worked the real change in Heine : —

    " The events of those foolish days of February , in which one saw hitman wisdom at a discount , and the elect of idiotcy carried in triumph , were so extraordinary , so tabulous , that they turned things and ideas upside down . Had 1 been a man of sense , my intelligence would have given way ; but , fool as I was , the contrary occurred , and , strangely enough ., it was precisely at a moment of general lunacy that I returned to reason . " . Poverty and paral ysis were the more immediate agents of Ms disenchantment . 1 overty , apparently , did a good deal , bat paralysis did more . Here is a touch of Heine ' s irony—almost ghastl y on such a subject : — " Besides my financial deficiencies , I have not been in the enjoyment of brilliant health ; I am even affected with an indisposition , slight , it is true , according to what my physicians say , but which has now kept me more than five years in bed . In such a position it is a great comfort to me to have some one in heaven to whom I can

    address any groans and lamentations during the night , after my wife has gone to sleep . " In this strange , mocking way , Heine announces his recantation of scepticism , Hegelianisrn , and atheism , and his conversion—to Aviat ? This is the question ¦ ¦ and he answers it in a roundabout and characteristic Tvay . First , he tells us o > f his great . and sudden comfort in reading the Bible , out of which he derived as much , though not precisel y the same in kind , as Uncle Tom did . Fhis _ leads him into a dissertation on the teligion and institutions of Judaism , in the course of which . he breaks out into a singularly eloquent descant on the cliaracter of Moses—the greatest of human beings ; as he thinks—mixed , in an odd manner , with sneers at the present King of Prussia

    . Then , resuming ; the autobiographic thread , he announces that , on the whole , his conversion has neither been to lioman Catholicism , nor to Prussian Evangelical Protestantism , but , if we may so express it , to a kind of Biblical Deism , formed by himself for his own uses . The rumour of his having become a Catholic arose , he says , from the fact of his having consented to be married in a Catholic church to a Catholic lady . In connexion with , this there is introduced a strange discussion—in part serious , in part ironical—of the merits of Roman Catholicism , wound up by an ideal vision of Hees'e himself as Pope ; which , he says , he might have been , had he studied for the Church . Not having done so , however , he remains only a Po « t .

    "But I will not for all that abandon myself to a hypocritical humility , and depreciate this fine name of Poet . It is a good deal to be a Poet , especially when one is a great lyric poet in Germany , among that people which in two things—philosophy and lyric poetry—has surpassed all other nations . I shall not , with false modesty , deny my glory . None of my colleagues gained the poetic laurel at so curly an age as I did , and if my compatriot , "Wolfgang Goethe , was pleased to think that the Chinese , with a trembling haold , painted Werther and Charlotte on glass , I can , on my side , oppose to this Chinese reputation one still more fabulous—a reputation in Japan . " Heine ' s poems , it seems , have been translated into Japanese—the first European book so honoured . The following concluding passages of the-Aveux are strangely touching and bitter , and show that , whatever religion M . Heine may luive embraced , his style of speech is still rather out of keeping with the usual forms of the pious :-

    —" What serves it mo that people drink to my health at feasts from gold cups and with the moat exquisite wines , if , during these ovations , fur away mu \ isolated from till the pleasures of the world , I can only wet my lips with thin barley-water ? What serves it me that all the roses of Shiraz bloom and glow foT me , radiant with tenderness ? Alas ! Shirasr . is two thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam , where , in the sad solitude of my sick chamber , tho only perfumes arc those of hot napkins . Alus ! God's mockery has fallen on ir » e . The great author of tlie universe , tho Aristophanes of Heaven , has chosen to let it . be keenly felt by thn little terrestrial author , culling himself the German Aristoplianes , how truly bin most refined sarcasms arc after all but pitiful pin-priclcings , compared with tho lightning strokes which His divine humour enn launch agjiinst poor mortals . Yes , the bitter flood of millcry which . great Muster turns against mo is terrible , and his epigrams make me wince cruelly . . . All humbly I vdnturo to observe , in the first place , that the atrocious liluiisantry which

    he is perpetrating af * ninst me is being carried too far ; it has now lusted more than nix years , and is beginning to grow awkward . I would also , in all humility , remark tlmfc this pleasantry is not . now , nnd that the great Aristophanes ban cm ployed it on many other occasions , ho that he in committing a plagiarism on himself . The Chronicle <> J Limbiiv ;/ relates that in tho year 1480 , people played and sang , over the whole of Germany , songs more sweet and charming than had ever boon known before in thn ( Jcrinun lands , nnd that young and old , especially tho women , were so d <) lirio > unly fond of them that they were to bo hc > nrd sinking them from morning till night . Only , those song * , adds tho Cfironick , luid been composed by u youn # clurk , alUieted with leprosy , and . living . separated from all the world , in a desert place . . . . S 3 oimitmn : n , in niy soinbru visions of the night , I think I see before me the poor leprous clerk i > f the ( Jhrunwtit of f . imburif , my brother in Apollo , his suffering eyes regarding mo from uudur hi .- » fJ re 3 hood , with a fixed iand strange look .

    Unhappy IImn-i ; ! It w-as he , we think , who , when ho wns asked what was his reason for joining in the attacks and depreciations to which ( joktiib was subjected during tho rise of tho literary school of Young U < trmiuiy , answered Unit hia reiiMon -was " envy— sheer envy . " Ilu lius always Ihjcu a strange mocking iimn , and this lust change which ho ivcords and avows seems , ultur all , to have left him much as ha was . W ' u lmve laid it . hoforo our readers as a psychological curiosity of tluidiiy , without . conumMit , and cjmi onl y refer lliuiu to tin : forthcoming collircUni ksins of IIkink ' h works ( which is to appciir . simiilt'iineou . sly , in Fnincli and ( Jcnnuri , in Paris and in MunilHii-fr ) for tho full history of liin lifu . Tut ; eililimi i » to In ; interspersed wi ( h Es . ^ nys from the now point , of viow , corrective ; of the " utter falsehood" of much of the previous writings , and among lliusu is to ha a scries of Unsays on tho social Mid intellectual life of Fninut ; under Louisi'hilippu .

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    November 4 , 1854 . ] THE LEADER . 1047

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 4, 1854, page 1047, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2063/page/15/