Chapter XI: Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas, Madame! (1)

But life is in reality so terribly serious, that it would be insupportable without such union of the pathetic and the comic; as our poets well know. The most harrowing forms of human madness Aristophanes exhibits only in the laughing mirror of wit; Goethe only presumes to set forth the fearful pain of thought comprehending its own nothingness in the doggerel of a puppet show; and Shakespeare puts the most deadly lamentation over the misery of the world into the mouth of a fool, who rattles his cap and bells in agony.

They have all learned from the great First Poet, who, in his World Tragedy in thousands of acts, knows how to carry humour to the highest point, as we see every day. After the departure of the heroes, the clowns and _graciosos_ enter with their baubles and wooden swords, and after the bloody scenes of the Revolution there came waddling on the stage the fat Bourbons, with their stale jokes and tender "legitimate" _bon mots_, and the old noblesse with their starved laughter hopped merrily before them, while behind all swept the pious Capuchins with candles, cross, and banners of the Church. Yes, even in the highest pathos of the World Tragedy, bits of fun slip in. The desperate republican, who, like Brutus, plunged a knife to his heart, perhaps smelt it first to see whether some one had not split a herring with it--and on this great stage of the world all passes exactly the same as on our beggarly boards. On it, too, there are tipsy heroes, kings who forget their part, scenes which obstinately stay up in the air, prompters' voices sounding above everything, danseuses who create astonishing effects with the poetry of their legs, and costumes which are the main thing. And high in Heaven, in the first row of the boxes, sit the dear little angels, and keep their _lorgnettes_ on us comedians here down below, and the blessed Lord himself sits seriously in his great box, and, perhaps, finds it dull, or calculates that this theatre cannot be kept up much longer because this one gets too high a salary, and that one too little, and that they all play much too badly.

_Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas, Madame!_ As I ended the last chapter, narrating to you how Monsieur Le Grand died, and how I conscientiously executed the _testamentum militaire_ which lay in his last glance, some one knocked at my door, and there entered a poor old lady, who asked if I were not a Doctor. And as I assented, she kindly asked me to go home with her and cut her husband's corns.

LAST WORDS (REISEBILDER).

Written 29th November 1830.

It was a depressed, an arrested time in Germany when I wrote the second volume of the _Reisebilder_, and had it printed as I wrote. But before it appeared something was whispered about it; it was said that my book would awaken and encourage the cowed spirit of freedom, and that measures were being taken to suppress it. When such rumours were afloat, it was advisable to advance the book as quickly as possible, and drive it through the press. As it was necessary, too, that it should contain a certain number of leaves, to escape the requisitions of the estimable censorship, I followed the example of Benvenuto Cellini, who, in founding his Perseas, was short of bronze, and to fill up the mould threw into the molten metal all the tin plates he could lay his hands on. It was certainly easy to distinguish between the tin--especially the tin termination of the book--and the better bronze; anyone, however, who understands the craft will not betray the workman.

But as everything in this world is liable to turn up again, so it came to pass that, in this very volume, I found myself again in the same scrape, and I have been obliged to again throw some tin into the mould--let me hope that this renewed melting of baser metal will simply be attributed to the pressure of the times.

Alas! the whole book sprang from the pressure of the times, as well as the earlier writings of similar tendency. The more intimate friends of the writer, who are acquainted with his private circumstances, know well how little his own vanity forced him to the tribune, and how great were the sacrifices which he was obliged to make for every independent word which he has spoken since then and--if God will!--which he still means to speak. Now-a-days, a word is a deed whose consequences cannot be measured, and no one knows whether he may not in the end appear as witness to his words in blood.

For many years I have waited in vain for the words of those bold orators, who once in the meetings of the German Burschenschaft so often claimed a hearing, who so often overwhelmed me with their rhetorical talent, and spoke a language spoken so oft before; they were then so forward in noise--they are now so backward in silence. How they then reviled the French and the foreign Babel, and the un-German frivolous betrayers of the Fatherland, who praised French-dom. That praise verified itself in the great week!

Ah, the great week of Paris! The spirit of freedom, which was wafted thence over Germany, has certainly upset the night-lamps here and there, so that the red curtains of several thrones took fire, and golden crowns grew hot under blazing night-caps; but the old catch-polls, in whom the royal police trusted, are already bringing out the fire-buckets, and now scent around all the more suspiciously, and forge all the more firmly their secret chains, and I mark well that a still thicker prison vault is being invisibly arched over the German people.

Poor imprisoned people! be not cast down in your need. Oh, that I could speak catapults! Oh, that I could shoot falarica from my heart!

The distinguished ice-rind of reserve melts from my heart, a strange sorrow steals over me--is it love, and love for the German people? Or is it sickness?--my soul quivers and my eyes burn, and that is an unfortunate occurrence for a writer, who should command his material, and remain charmingly objective, as the art school requires, and as Goethe has done--he has grown to be eighty years old in so doing, and a minister, and portly--poor German people! that is thy greatest man!

I still have a few octavo pages to fill, and I will therefore tell a story--it has been floating in my head since yesterday--a story from the life of Charles the Fifth.[8] But it is now a long time since I heard it, and I no longer remember its details exactly. Such things are easily forgotten, if one does not receive a regular salary for reading them every half-year from his lecture books. But what does it matter if places and dates are forgotten, so long as one holds their significance, their moral meaning, in his memory. It is this which stirs my soul and moves me even to tears. I fear I am getting ill.

The poor emperor was taken prisoner by his enemies, and lay in stern imprisonment. I believe it was in Tyrol. There he sat in solitary sorrow, forsaken by all his knights and courtiers, and no one came to his help. I know not if he had even in those days that cheese-yellow complexion with which Holbein painted him. But the misanthropic under-lip certainly protruded, even more then than in his portraits. He must have despised the people who fawned around him in the sunshine of prosperity, and who left him alone in his bitter need. Suddenly the prison door opened, and there entered a man wrapped in a cloak, and as he cast it aside, the emperor recognised his trusty Kunz von der Rosen, the court-fool. One brought him consolation and counsel--and it was the court-fool.

O, German Fatherland! dear German people! I am thy Kunz von der Rosen. The man whose real office was pastime, and who should only make thee merry in happy days, forces his way into thy prison, in time of need; here, beneath my mantle, I bring thee thy strong sceptre and the beautiful crown--dost thou not remember me, my emperor? If I cannot free thee, I will at least console thee, and thou shalt have some one by thee who will talk with thee about thy most pressing oppressions, and will speak courage to thee, and who loves thee, and whose best jokes and best blood are ever at thy service. For thou, my people, art the true emperor, the true lord of the land--thy will is sovereign and more legitimate than that purple _Tel est notre plaisir_, which grounds itself upon divine right, without any better guarantee than the quackery of shaven jugglers--thy will, my people, is the only righteous source of all power. Even though thou liest down there in fetters, thy good right will arise in the end, the day of freedom draws near, a new time begins--my emperor, the night is over, and the dawn shines outside.

"Kunz von der Rosen, my Fool, thou errest. Thou hast perhaps mistaken a bright axe for the sun, and the dawn is nothing but blood."

"No, my Emperor, it is the sun, though it rises in the west--for six thousand years men have always seen it rise in the east--it is high time that it for once made a change in its course."

"Kunz von der Rosen, my Fool, thou hast lost the bells from thy red cap, and it now has such a strange look, that red cap!"

"Ah, my Emperor, I have shaken my head in such mad earnest over your distress that the fool's bell fell from my cap; but it is none the worse for that!"

"Kunz von der Rosen, my Fool, what is that breaking and cracking outside there?"

"Hush! it is the saw and the carpenter's axe; the doors of your prison will soon be broken in, and you will be free, my Emperor!"

"Am I then really Emperor? Alas! it is only the Fool who tells me so!"

"Oh, do not sigh, my dear lord, it is the air of the dungeon which so dispirits you; when you have once regained your power, you will feel the bold imperial blood in your veins, and you will be proud as an emperor, and arrogant, and gracious, and unjust, and smiling, and ungrateful as princes are."

"Kunz von der Rosen, my Fool, when I am free again, what wilt thou be doing?"

"I will sew new bells on my cap."

"And how shall I reward thy fidelity?"

"Ah! dear master--do not let me be put to death!"

ENGLISH FRAGMENTS.

[The _English Fragments_, from which three chapters have been
selected for this volume, were published in 1828 in a German
magazine of which Heine was one of the editors. They were collected
and published with important additions (including the following
chapters) in 1831. Mr. Leland's translation, revised throughout,
has been here used.]

LONDON.

I have seen the greatest wonder which the world can show to the astonished spirit; I have seen it, and am more astonished then ever--and still there remains fixed in my memory that stone forest of houses, and amid them the rushing stream of faces, of living human faces, with all their motley passions, all their terrible impulses of love, of hunger, and of hate--I am speaking of London.

Send a philosopher to London, but no poet! Send a philosopher there, and stand him at a corner of Cheapside, he will learn more there than from all the books of the last Leipzig fair; and as the human waves roar around him, so will a sea of new thoughts rise before him, and the Eternal Spirit which moves upon the face of the waters will breathe upon him; the most hidden secrets of social harmony will be suddenly revealed to him, he will hear the pulse of the world beat audibly, and see it visibly--for, if London is the right hand of the world--its active, mighty right hand--then we may regard that that which leads from the Exchange to Downing Street is the world's radial artery.

But send no poet to London! This downright earnestness of all things, this colossal uniformity, this machine-like movement, this moroseness even in pleasure, this exaggerated London, smothers the imagination and rends the heart. And should you ever send a German poet thither--a dreamer, who stands staring at every single phenomenon, even a ragged beggar-woman, or a shining jeweller's shop--why, then he will find things going badly with him, and he will be hustled about on every side, or even be knocked over with a mild "_God damn!_" _God damn!_--the damned pushing! I soon saw that these people have much to do. They live on a large scale, and though food and clothes are dearer with them than with us, they must still be better fed and clothed than we are--as gentility requires. Moreover, they have enormous debts, yet occasionally in a vain-glorious mood they make ducks and drakes of their guineas, pay other nations to fight for their pleasure, give their respective kings a handsome _douceur_ into the bargain--and, therefore, John Bull must work day and night to get the money for such expenses; by day and by night he must tax his brain to discover new machines, and he sits and reckons in the sweat of his brow, and runs and rushes without looking about much from the Docks to the Exchange, and from the Exchange to the Strand, and, therefore, it is quite pardonable if, when a poor German poet, gazing into a print-shop window, stands in his way at the corner of Cheapside, he should knock him aside with a rather rough "God damn!"

But the picture at which I was gazing as I stood at the corner of Cheapside, was that of the passage of the French across the Beresina.

And when, jolted out of my gazing, I looked again on the raging street, where a parti-coloured coil of men, women, and children, horses, stage-coaches, and with them a funeral, whirled groaning and creaking along, it seemed to me as though all London were such a Beresina Bridge, where every one presses on in mad haste to save his scrap of life, where the daring rider stamps down the poor pedestrian, where every one who falls is lost forever; where the best friends rush, without feeling, over each other's corpses, and where thousands, weak and bleeding, grasp in vain at the planks of the bridge, and slide down into the ice-pit of death.

How much more pleasant and homelike it is in our dear Germany! How dreamily comfortable, how Sabbatically quiet all things glide along here! Calmly the sentinels are changed, uniforms and houses shine in the quiet sunshine, swallows flit over the flag-stones, fat court-councilloresses smile from the windows, while along the echoing streets there is room enough for the dogs to sniff at each other, and for men to stand at ease and chat about the theatre, and bow low--oh, how low!--when some small aristocratic scamp or vice-scamp, with coloured ribbons on his shabby coat, or some powdered and gilded court-marshal struts by, graciously returning salutations!

I had made up my mind not to be astonished at that immensity of London of which I had heard so much. But it happened to me as to the poor school-boy, who had made up his mind not to feel the whipping he was to receive. The facts of the case were, that he expected to get the usual blows with the usual stick in the usual way on the back, whereas he received a most unusually severe thrashing on an unusual place with a slender switch. I anticipated great palaces, and saw nothing but mere small houses. But their very uniformity and their limitless extent are wonderfully impressive.

These houses of brick, owing to the damp atmosphere and coal smoke, become uniform in colour, that is to say, of a brown olive green; they are all of the same style of building, generally two or three windows wide, three storeys high, and adorned above with small red tiles, which remind one of newly-extracted bleeding teeth; so that the broad and accurately-squared streets seem to be bordered by endlessly long barracks. This has its reason in the fact that every English family, though it consist of only two persons, must still have a house to itself for its own castle, and rich speculators, to meet the demand, build wholesale entire streets of these dwellings, which they retail singly. In the principal streets of the city, where the business of London is most at home, where old-fashioned buildings are mingled with the new, and where the fronts of the houses are covered with names and signs, yards in length, generally gilt, and in relief, this characteristic uniformity is less striking--the less so, indeed, because the eye of the stranger is incessantly caught by the new and brilliant articles exposed for sale in the windows. And these articles do not merely produce an effect because the Englishman completes so perfectly everything which he manufactures, and because every article of luxury, every astral lamp and every boot, every tea kettle and every woman's dress, shines out so invitingly and so "finished;" there is a peculiar charm in the art of arrangement, in the contrast of colours, and in the variety of the English shops; even the most commonplace necessaries of life appear in a startling magic light through this artistic power of setting forth everything to advantage. Ordinary articles of food attract us by the new light in which they are placed, even uncooked fish lie so delightfully dressed that the rainbow gleam of their scales attracts us; raw meat lies, as if painted, on neat and many-coloured porcelain plates, garlanded about with parsley--yes, everything seems painted, reminding us of the brilliant, yet modest pictures of Franz Mieris. Only the people are not so cheerful as in the Dutch paintings; they sell the most delightful playthings with the most serious faces, and the cut and colour of their clothes is as uniform as that of their houses.

At the opposite side of the town, which they call the West End, where the more aristocratic and less-occupied world lives, this uniformity is still more dominant; yet here there are very long and very broad streets, where all the houses are large as palaces, though outwardly anything but distinguished, unless we except the fact that in these, as in all the better class of houses in London, the windows of the first storey are adorned with iron-barred balconies, and also on the ground floor there is a black railing protecting the entrance to certain cellar apartments buried in the earth. In this part of the city there are also great squares, where rows of houses, like those already described, form a quadrangle, in whose centre there is a garden enclosed by a black iron railing, and containing some statue or other. In all of these squares and streets the eye is never shocked by the dilapidated huts of misery. Everywhere we are stared down on by wealth and respectability, while crammed away in retired lanes and dark, damp alleys poverty dwells with her rags and her tears.

The stranger who wanders through the great streets of London, and does not chance right into the regular quarters of the people, sees little or nothing of the misery there. Only here and there, at the mouth of some dark alley, stands a ragged woman with a suckling babe at her wasted breast, and begs with her eyes. Perhaps if those eyes are still beautiful, one glances into them and shrinks back at the world of wretchedness within them. The common beggars are old people, generally blacks, who stand at the corners of the streets cleaning pathways--a very necessary thing in muddy London--and ask for "coppers" in reward. It is in the dusky twilight that Poverty with her mates, Vice and Crime, glide forth from their lairs. They shun daylight the more anxiously, the more cruelly their wretchedness contrasts with the pride of wealth which glitters everywhere; only Hunger sometimes drives them at noonday from their dens, and then they stand with silent, speaking eyes, staring beseechingly at the rich merchant who hurries along, busy and jingling gold, or at the lazy lord who, like a surfeited god, rides by on his high horse, casting now and then an aristocratically indifferent glance at the mob below, as though they were swarming ants, or, at all events, a mass of baser beings, whose joys and sorrows have nothing in common with his feelings. Yes, over the vulgar multitude which sticks fast to the soil, soar, like beings of a higher nature, England's nobility, who regard their little island as only a temporary resting-place, Italy as their summer garden, Paris as their social saloon, and the whole world as their inheritance. They sweep along, knowing nothing of sorrow or suffering, and their gold is a talisman which conjures into fulfilment their wildest wish.

Poor Poverty! how agonising must thy hunger be where others swell in scornful superfluity! And when some one casts with indifferent hand a crust into thy lap, how bitter must the tears be wherewith thou moistenest it! Thou poisonest thyself with thine own tears. Well art thou in the right when thou alliest thyself to Vice and Crime. Outlawed criminals often bear more humanity in their hearts than those cold, blameless citizens of virtue, in whose white hearts the power of evil is quenched; but also the power of good. I have seen women on whose cheeks red vice was painted, and in whose hearts dwelt heavenly purity. I have seen women--I would I saw them again!----

WELLINGTON.

This man has the bad fortune to meet with good fortune wherever the greatest men in the world were unfortunate, and that angers us, and makes him hateful. We see in him only the victory of stupidity over genius--Arthur Wellington triumphant where Napoleon Bonaparte was overwhelmed! Never was a man more ironically gifted by Fortune, and it seems as though she would exhibit his empty littleness by raising him high on the shield of victory. Fortune is a woman, and perhaps, in womanly wise, she cherishes a secret grudge against the man who overthrew her former darling, though the very overthrow came from her own will. Now she lets him conquer again on the Catholic Emancipation question--yes, in the very fight in which George Canning was overwhelmed. It is possible that he might have been loved had the wretched Londonderry been his predecessor in the ministry; but he is the successor of the noble Canning, of the much-wept, adored, great Canning--and he conquers where Canning was overwhelmed. Without so unlucky a luck, Wellington would perhaps pass for a great man; people would not hate him, would not measure him too accurately, at least not with the heroic measure with which a Napoleon and a Canning is measured, and consequently it would never have been discovered how small a man he is.

He is a small man, and less than small. The French could say nothing more sarcastic of Polignac than that he was a Wellington without celebrity. In fact, what remains when we strip from a Wellington the field-marshal's uniform of celebrity?

I have here given the best apology for Lord Wellington--in the English sense of the word. My readers will be astonished, however, when I honourably confess that I once clapped on all sail in praise of this hero. It is a good story, and I will tell it here.

My barber in London was a radical named Mr. White, a poor little man in a shabby black dress, worn until it almost shone white; he was so lean that even his full face looked like a profile, and the sighs in his bosom were visible before they rose. These sighs were caused by the misfortunes of Old England, and by the impossibility of paying the National Debt.

"Ah!" I often heard him sigh, "why need the English people trouble themselves as to who reigns in France, and what the French are doing at home? But the nobility, sir, and the Church were afraid of the principles of liberty of the French Revolution, and, to keep down these principles, John Bull must give his gold and his blood, and make debts into the bargain. We've got all we wanted out of the war--the revolution has been put down, the French eagles of liberty have had their wings cut, and the Church may be quite sure that none of them will come flying over the Channel; and now the nobility and the Church ought to pay for the debts which were made for their own good, and not for any good of the poor people. Ah!--the poor people!"

Whenever Mr. White came to the "poor people," he always sighed more deeply than ever, and the refrain then was, that bread and beer were so dear that the poor people must starve to feed fat lords, stag-hounds, and priests, and that there was only one remedy. At these words he was wont to whet his razor, and as he drew it murderously up and down the strop, he muttered grimly to himself, "Lords, priests, hounds."

But his radical rage boiled most fiercely against the Duke of Wellington; he spat gall and poison whenever he alluded to him, and as he lathered me, he himself foamed with rage. Once I was fairly frightened, when he, while barbering just at my neck, burst out against Wellington, murmuring all the while, "If I only had him so under my razor, I'd save him the trouble of cutting his own throat, as his brother in office and fellow-countryman, Londonderry, did, who killed himself that way at North Cray, in Kent--God damn him!"

I felt already that the man's hand trembled, and fearing lest he might imagine in his excitement that I really was the Duke of Wellington, I endeavoured to allay his violence, and in an underhanded manner, to soothe him, I called up his national pride, I represented to him that the Duke of Wellington had advanced the glory of the English, that he had always been an innocent tool in the hands of others, that he was fond of beefsteak, and that he--but the Lord only knows what fine things I said of Wellington as that razor tickled my throat.

What vexes me most is the reflection that Arthur Wellington will be as immortal as Napoleon Bonaparte. It is true that in like manner the name of Pontius Pilate is as little likely to be forgotten as that of Christ. Wellington and Napoleon! It is a wonderful phenomenon that the human mind can at the same time think of both these names. There can be no greater contrast than these two, even in their external appearance. Wellington, the dull ghost, with an ashy grey soul in a buckram body, a wooden smile on his freezing face--and by the side one thinks of the figure of Napoleon, every inch a god!

That figure never disappears from my memory. I still see him, high on his horse, with eternal eyes in his marble, imperial face, gazing down calm as destiny on the Guards defiling past--he was then sending them to Russia, and the old grenadiers glanced up at him, so terribly devoted, so consciously serious, so proud in death--

"Te, Cæsar, morituri salutant!"

There often steals over me a secret doubt whether I ever really saw him, if we were really his contemporaries, and then it seems to me as if his portrait, torn from the little frame of the present, vanished away more proudly and imperiously in the twilight of the past. His name even now sounds to us like a word of the early world, as antique and heroic as those of Alexander and Cæsar. It has become a rallying word among races, and when the East and the West meet, they fraternise through that single name.

How significant and magical that name can sound I once felt in the deepest manner in the harbour of London, at the India Docks, as I stood on board an East Indiaman just arrived from Bengal. It was a giant-like ship, fully manned with Hindoos. The grotesque forms and groups, the singularly variegated dresses, the enigmatical expressions, the strange gestures, the wild and foreign ring of their language, their shouts of joy and their laughter, and the seriousness ever rising and falling on certain soft, yellow faces, their eyes like black flowers which looked at me as with melancholy woe--all this awoke in me a feeling like that of enchantment; I was suddenly as if transported into Scheherezade's story, and I thought that broad-leaved palms, and long-necked camels, and gold-covered elephants, and other fable-like trees and animals, must forthwith appear. The supercargo who was on the vessel, and who understood as little of the language as I myself, could not, in his genuine English narrowness, narrate to me enough of what a ridiculous race they were, nearly all Mahometans collected from every land of Asia, from the limits of China to the Arabian sea, even jet black, woolly-haired Africans.

To one whose whole soul was weary of the spiritless West, and who was as sick of Europe as I then was, this fragment of the East which moved cheerfully and changingly before my eyes was a refreshing solace, my heart enjoyed at least a few drops of that draught which I had so often longed for in gloomy Hanoverian or Prussian winter nights, and it is very possible that the foreigners saw how agreeable the sight of them was to me, and how gladly I would have spoken a kind word to them. It was also plain from the depths of their eyes that I pleased them well, and they would also have willingly said something pleasant to me, and it was a vexation that neither understood the other's language. At length a means occurred to me of expressing to them with a single word my friendly feelings, and stretching forth my hands reverently, as if in loving greeting, I cried the name, "Mahomed!" Joy suddenly flashed over the dark faces of the foreigners; they folded their arms reverently in turn, and greeted me back with the exclamation, "Bonaparte!"

THE LIBERATION.

Should the time for leisurely research ever return to me, I will prove in the most tiresomely fundamental manner that it was not India, but Egypt which originated that system of castes which has for two thousand years disguised itself in the garb of every country, and has deceived every age in its own language, which is now perhaps dead, yet which, counterfeiting the appearance of life, wanders about among us evil-eyed and mischief-making, poisoning our blooming life with its corpse vapour--yes, like a vampire of the Middle Ages, sucking the blood and the light from the heart of nations. From the mud of the Nile sprang not merely crocodiles which well could weep, but also priests who understand it far better, and that privileged hereditary race of warriors, who in their lust of murder and ravenous appetites far surpass any crocodiles.

Two deeply-thinking men of the German nation discovered the soundest counter-charm to the worst of all Egyptian plagues, and by the black art--by gunpowder and the art of printing--they broke the force of that spiritual and worldly hierarchy which had formed itself from the union of the priesthood and the warrior caste--that is to say, from the so-called Catholic Church, and from the feudal nobility, which enslaved all Europe, body and spirit. The printing-press burst asunder the dogma-structure in which the archpriest of Rome had imprisoned souls, and Northern Europe again breathed free, delivered from the nightmare of that clergy which had indeed abandoned the form of Egyptian inheritance of rank, but which remained all the truer to the Egyptian priestly spirit, since it presented itself, with greater sternness and asperity, as a corporation of old bachelors, continued not by natural propagation, but unnaturally by a Mameluke system of recruiting. In like manner we see how the warlike caste has lost its power since the old routine of the business is worth nothing in the modern methods of war. For the strongest castles are now thrown down by the trumpet-tones of the cannon as of old the walls of Jericho; the iron harness of the knight is no better protection against the leaden rain than the linen blouse of the peasant; powder makes men equal; a citizen's musket goes off just as well as a nobleman's--the people rise.

The earlier efforts of which we read in the history of the Lombard and Tuscan republics, of the Spanish communes, and of the free cities in Germany and other countries, do not deserve the honour of being classed as movements on the part of the people; they were not efforts to attain liberty, but merely liberties; not battles for right, but for municipal rights; corporations fought for privileges, and all remained fixed in the bonds of gilds and trades unions.

Not until the days of the Reformation did the battle assume general and spiritual proportions, and then liberty was demanded, not as an imported, but as an aboriginal right; not as inherited, but as inborn. Principles were brought forward instead of old parchments; and the peasants in Germany, and the Puritans in England, fell back on the gospel whose texts then were of as high authority as the reason, even higher, since they were regarded as the revealed reason of God. There it stood legibly written that men are of equal birth, that the pride which exalts itself will be damned, that wealth is a sin, and that the poor are summoned to enjoyment in the beautiful garden of God, the common Father.

With the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, the peasants swept over South Germany, and announced to the insolent burghers of high-towered Nuremberg, that in future no house should be left standing which was not a peasant's house. So truly and so deeply had they comprehended equality. Even at the present day in Franconia and in Suabia we see traces of this doctrine of equality, and a shuddering reverence of the Holy Spirit creeps over the wanderer when he sees in the moonshine the dark ruins of the days of the Peasant's War. It is well for him, who, in sober, waking mood, sees naught besides; but if one is a "Sunday child"--and every one familiar with history is that--he will also see the high hunt in which the German nobility, the rudest and sternest in the world, pursued their victims. He will see how unarmed men were slaughtered by thousands: racked, speared, and martyred; and from the waving corn-fields one will see the bloody peasant-heads nodding mysteriously, and above one hears a terrible lark whistling, piping revenge, like the Piper of Helfenstein.

The brothers in England and Scotland were rather more fortunate; their defeat was not so disgraceful and so unproductive, and even now we see there the results of their rule. But they did not obtain a firm foundation for their principles, the dainty cavaliers ruled again just as before, and amused themselves with merry tales of the stiff old Roundheads, which a friendly bard had written so prettily to entertain their leisure hours. No social overthrow took place in Great Britain, the framework of civil and political institutions remained undisturbed, the tyranny of castes and of corporations has remained there till the present day, and though drunken with the light and warmth of modern civilisation, England is still congealed in a mediæval condition, or rather in the condition of a fashionable Middle Age. The concessions which have there been made to liberal ideas, have been with difficulty wrested from this mediæval rigidity, and all modern improvements have there proceeded, not from a principle, but from actual necessity, and they all bear the curse of that halfness system which inevitably makes necessary new exertion and new conflicts to the death, with all their attendant dangers. The religious reformation in England is consequently but half completed, and one finds himself much worse off between the four bare prison walls of the Episcopal Anglican Church than in the large, beautifully-painted, and softly-cushioned spiritual dungeon of Catholicism. Nor has the political reformation succeeded much better; popular representation is in England as faulty as possible, and if ranks are no longer distinguished by their coats, they are at least divided by differences in legal standing, patronage, rights of court presentation, prerogatives, customary privileges, and similar misfortunes; and if the rights of person and property depend no longer upon aristocratic caprice, but upon laws, still these laws are nothing but another sort of teeth with which the aristocratic brood seizes its prey, and another sort of daggers wherewith it assassinates people. For in reality, no tyrant upon the Continent squeezes, by his own arbitrary will, so many taxes out of his subjects as the English people are obliged to pay by law; and no tyrant was ever so cruel as England's Criminal Law, which daily commits murder for the amount of one shilling, and that with the coldest formality. Although many improvements have recently been made in this melancholy state of affairs in England; although limits have been placed to temporal and clerical avarice, and though the great falsehood of a popular representation is, to a certain degree, occasionally modified by transferring the perverted electoral voice of a rotten borough to a great manufacturing town; and although the harshest intolerance is here and there softened by giving certain rights to other sects, still it is all a miserable patching up which cannot last long, and the stupidest tailor in England can foresee that, sooner or later, the old garment of state will be rent asunder into wretched rags.

"No man seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment; else the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred; but new wine must be put into new bottles."

The deepest truth blooms only out of the deepest love, and hence comes the harmony of the views of the elder Preacher in the Mount, who spoke against the aristocracy of Jerusalem; and those later preachers of the mountain, who, from the summit of the Convention in Paris, preached a tri-coloured gospel, according to which, not merely the form of the State, but all social life should be, not patched, but formed anew, newly founded; yes, born again.

I speak of the French Revolution, that epoch of the world in which the doctrines of freedom and of equality rose so triumphantly from those universal sources of knowledge which we call reason, and which must, as an unceasing revelation which repeats itself in every human head, and founds a distinct branch of knowledge, be far preferable to that transmitted revelation which makes itself known only in a few elect, and which, by the multitude, can only be _believed_. The privileged aristocracy, the caste-system with their peculiar rights, were never able to combat this last-mentioned sort of revelation (which is itself of an aristocratic nature) so safely and surely as reason, which is democratic by nature, now does. The history of the Revolution is the military history of this strife, in which we have all taken a greater or lesser part; it is the death-struggle with Egyptianism.

Though the swords of the enemies grow duller day by day, and though we have already conquered the best positions, still we cannot raise the song of victory until the work is perfected. We can only during the night, when there are armistices, go forth with the lantern on the field of death to bury the dead. Little avails the short burial service! Calumny, the vile insolent spectre, sits upon the noblest graves.

Oh, that the battle were only with those hereditary foes of truth who so treacherously poison the good name of their enemies, and who even humiliated that first Preacher of the Mount, the purest hero of freedom; for as they could no longer deny that he was the greatest of men, they made of him the least of gods. He who fights with priests may make up his mind to have his poor good name torn and befouled by the most infamous lies and the most cutting slanders. But as those flags which are most rent by shot, or blackened by powder-smoke, are more highly honoured than the whitest and soundest recruiting banners, and as they are at last laid up as national relics in cathedrals, so at some future day the names of our heroes, the more they are torn and blackened, will be all the more enthusiastically honoured in the holy St. Geneviève of Freedom.

The Revolution itself has been slandered, like its heroes, and represented as a terror to princes, and as a popular scare-crow, in libels of every description. All the so-called "horrors of the Revolution" have been learned by heart by children in the schools, and at one time nothing was seen in the public fairs but harshly-coloured pictures of the guillotine. It cannot be denied that this machine, which was invented by a French physician, a great world orthopædist, Monsieur Guillotin, and with which stupid heads are easily separated from evil hearts, this wholesome machine has indeed been applied rather frequently, but still only in incurable diseases, in such cases, for example, as treachery, falsehood, and weakness, and the patients were not long tortured, not racked and broken on the wheel as thousands upon thousands of _roturiers_ and _vilains_, citizens and peasants were tortured, racked, and broken on the wheel in the good old time. It is, of course, terrible that the French, with this machine, once even amputated the head of their State, and no one knows whether they ought to be accused, on that account, of parricide or of suicide; but on more thorough reflection, we find that Louis of France was less a sacrifice to passion than to circumstances, and that those men who forced the people on to such a sacrifice, and who have themselves, in every age, poured forth princely blood far more abundantly, should not appear solely as accusers. Only two kings, both of them rather kings of the nobility than of the people, were sacrificed by the people, and that not in a time of peace, or to subserve petty interests, but in the extremest needs of war, when they saw themselves betrayed, and when they least spared their own blood. But certainly more than a thousand princes were treacherously slain, on account of avarice or frivolous interests, by the dagger, by the sword, and by the poison of nobility and priests. It really seems as though these castes regarded regicide as one of their privileges, and therefore bewail the more selfishly the death of Louis the XVI. and of Charles I. Oh! that kings at last would perceive that they could live more safely as kings of the people, and protected by the law, than under the guard of their noble body-murderers.

But not only have the heroes of our revolution and the revolution itself been slandered, but even our entire age has been parodied with unheard-of wickedness; and if one hears or reads our vile traducers and scorners, then he will learn that the people are the _canaille_--the vile mob--that freedom is insolence, and with heaven-bent eyes and pious sighs, our enemies complain and bewail that we were frivolous and had, alas! no religion. Hypocritical, sneaking souls, who creep about bent down beneath the burden of their secret vices, dare to vilify an age which is, perhaps, holier than any of its predecessors or successors, an age that sacrifices itself for the sins of the past and for the happiness of the future, a Messiah among centuries, which could hardly endure its bloody crown of thorns and heavy cross, did it not now and then trill a merry vaudeville, and crack a joke at the modern Pharisees and Sadducees. Its colossal pains would be intolerable without such jesting and persiflage! Seriousness shows itself more majestically when laughter leads the way. And the age in this shows itself exactly like its children among the French, who have written very terribly wanton books, and yet have been very strong and serious when strength and seriousness were necessary, as, for instance, Laclos, and even Louvet de Couvray, who both fought for freedom with the self-sacrifice and boldness of martyrs, and yet who wrote in a very frivolous and indecent way, and, alas! had no religion!

As if freedom were not as good a religion as any other! And since it is ours, we may, meeting with the same measure, declare its contemners to be themselves frivolous and irreligious.

Yes, I repeat the words with which I began these pages: freedom is a new religion, the religion of our age. If Christ is not the God of this religion, he is still one of its high-priests, and his name shines consolingly in the hearts of its children. But the French are the chosen people of the new religion, the first gospels and dogmas were penned in their language. Paris is the New Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan which separates the land of Freedom from the land of the Philistines.

JAN STEEN.

[This fragment--newly translated--is taken from the _Memoiren des
Herrn von Schnabelwopski_, which was written in 1831, and published
in 1834, in the first volume of the _Salon_. The _Memoirs of
Schnabelwopski_ consist simply of the hero's light sketches of
Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Leyden, and his experiences in those towns;
they have generally excited the anger of Heine's German critics and
biographers, who appear to detect a tone of irreverent levity about
them, which they attribute to Parisian influences. Wagner obtained
the story of his _Flying Dutchman_ from a chapter of
_Schnabelwopski's Memoirs_.]

In the house I lodged at in Leyden there once lived Jan Steen, the great Jan Steen, whom I hold to be as great as Raphael. Even as a sacred painter Jan was as great, and that will be clearly seen when the religion of sorrow has passed away, and the religion of joy has torn off the thick veil that covers the rose-bushes of the earth, and the nightingales dare at last to sing joyously out their long-concealed raptures.

But no nightingale will ever sing so joyously as Jan Steen painted. No one has understood so profoundly as he that there shall be an eternal festival on the earth; he comprehended that our life is only the pictured kiss of God, and he felt that the Holy Ghost is revealed most gloriously in light and in laughter.

His eye laughed into the light, and the light mirrored itself in his laughing eye. And Jan remained always a dear, good child. The stern old Pastor of Leyden sat near him by the hearth, and delivered a lengthy discourse concerning his jovial life, his laughing, unchristian conduct, his love of drinking, his disorderly domestic affairs, his obdurate gaiety; and Jan listened quietly for two long hours, and betrayed not the slightest impatience at the lengthy sermon; only once he broke in with the words--"Yes, Domine, that light is far better; yes, Domine, I beg of you to draw your stool a little nearer to the fire, so that the flame may cast its red gleam over your whole face, and leave the rest of the figure in shade----"

The Domine stood up wrathful and departed. But Jan seized his palate and painted the stern old man, just as in that sermon on vice he had unconsciously furnished a model. The picture is excellent, and hung in my bed-room at Leyden.

Now that I have seen so many of Jan Steen's pictures in Holland, I seem to know the whole life of the man. I know all his relations, his wife, his children, his mother, all his cousins, his enemies, his various connections--yes, I know them all by sight. These faces greet us out of all his pictures, and a collection of them would be a biography of the painter. He has often with a single stroke revealed the deepest secrets of his soul. As I think, his wife reproached him far too often about drinking too much. For in the picture which represents the bean-feast, where Jan and his family are sitting at table, we see his wife with a large jug of wine in her hand, and eyes beaming like a Bacchante's. I am convinced, however, that the good lady never indulged in too much wine; only the rogue wanted us to believe that it was his wife, and not he, who was too fond of drinking. That is why he laughs so joyously out of the picture. He is happy; he sits in the midst of his family; his little son is bean-king, and, with his tinsel crown, stands upon a stool; his old mother, with the happiest smirk of satisfaction in the wrinkles of her countenance, carries the youngest grandchild upon her arm; the musicians play their maddest dance melodies; and the frugal, sulky housewife is painted in, an object of suspicion to all posterity, as though she were inebriated.

How often, during my stay at Leyden, did I think myself back for whole hours into the household scenes in which the excellent Jan must have lived and suffered. Many a time I thought I saw him bodily, sitting at his easel, now and then grasping the great jug, "reflecting and therewith drinking, and then again drinking without reflecting." It was no gloomy Catholic spectre that I saw, but a modern bright spirit of joy, who after death still visited his old work-room to paint merry pictures and to drink. Only such ghosts will our children sometimes see, in the light of day, while the sun shines through the windows, and from the spire no black, hollow bells, but red, exulting trumpet tones, announce the pleasant hour of noon.

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL.

[_The Romantic School_, one of Heine's chief works, of which the
most interesting portions are here given, was published in 1833. It
was first written in French, as a counterblast to Madame de Staël's
_De l'Allemagne_, forming a series of articles in the _Europe
Littéraire_. Notwithstanding many errors of detail, and some
occasional injustice, it remains by far the best account of the
most important aspect of German literature. Indirectly Heine wished
to lay down the programme of the future, for he regarded himself as
the last of the Romantic poets, and the inaugurator of a new
school. The following translation is Mr. Fleishman's; it has been
carefully revised.]

Madame de Staël's work, _De l'Allemagne_, is the only comprehensive account of the intellectual life of Germany which has been accessible to the French; and yet since her book appeared a considerable period has elapsed, and an entirely new school of literature has arisen in Germany. Is it only a transitional literature? Has it already reached its zenith? Has it already begun to decline? Opinions are divided concerning it. The majority believe that with the death of Goethe a new literary era begins in Germany; that with him the old Germany also descended to its grave; that the aristocratic period of literature was ended, and the democratic just beginning; or, as a French journal recently phrased it, "The intellectual dominion of the individual has ceased,--the intellectual rule of the many has commenced."

So far as I am concerned, I do not venture to pass so decided an opinion as to the future evolutions of German intellect. I had already prophesied many years in advance the end of the Goethean art-period, by which name I was the first to designate that era. I could safely venture the prophecy, for I knew very well the ways and the means of those malcontents who sought to overthrow the Goethean art-empire, and it is even claimed that I took part in those seditious outbreaks against Goethe. Now that Goethe is dead, the thought of it fills me with an overpowering sorrow.