Metternich had enough literary taste to admire Börne, and Gentz was a fanatical Heine enthusiast. Before the Revolution of July it was still possible to look upon Heine as essentially the poet of unhappy love and the poetical humorist, with a touch of blasphemy and frivolity.
In the summer of 1830 Heinrich Heine was at Heligoland, dreaming on the shore, gazing out to sea, listening to the plash of the waves. He had given up all hope of better times. He occupied himself with reading the few books he had taken with him—Homer, the Bible, the history of the Lombards, and some old volumes on witches and witchcraft. He could hardly himself believe that he had quite lately been the editor of the Politische Annalen in Munich. Two days after the Revolution of July had taken place, but before the news of it had reached Heligoland, he wrote, in one of his letters from that island, that he had now determined to let politics and philosophy alone, and to devote himself entirely to the observation of nature and to art; that all this torture and trouble was to no purpose; that however great sacrifices he might make in the general cause, they would be of little or no avail; the world, doubtless, did not stand still, but it moved in a circle, with no result whatever; when he was young and inexperienced, he had believed that even if the individual perished in the war of human liberation, the great cause would be victorious in the end; now he recognised the fact that humanity, like the ocean, moved according to fixed laws of ebb and flow.
Even if these expressions have been strung together at a later period, even if the letters are not genuine, but a fragment of memoir inserted later, for the sake of contrast, in the book on Börne[6], they will undoubtedly give us a correct picture of Heine's mental attitude at that time.
On the 6th of August he writes: "I was sitting reading Paul Warnefried's History of the Lombards, when the thick packet of newspapers, with the warm, glowing-hot news, arrived from the mainland. Each item was a sunbeam, wrapped in printed paper, and together they kindled my soul into a wild glow. I felt as if I could set the whole ocean, to the very North Pole, on fire, with the red heat of enthusiasm and mad joy that glowed within me." It was all like a dream to him; the name Lafayette especially was like the echo of one of the stories of his earliest childhood; he could hardly believe that the man who had ridden in front of the grandfathers of the present generation in the American War of Independence was once more on horseback, the hero of the nation. He felt as if he must go to Paris and see it for himself.
He writes with a passionate fervour, which he soon feels obliged to temper with a touch of self-contempt: "Lafayette, the tri-colour flag, the Marseillaise.... It intoxicates me. Bold, ardent hopes spring up, like trees with golden fruit and with branches that shoot up wildly, till their leaves touch the clouds.... My longing for rest is gone. I know once more what I desire, what I ought to, what I must, do.... I am the son of the Revolution, and again I take into my hand the charmed weapons, over which my mother spoke the magic spell.... Flowers, flowers! that I may crown my head for the death struggle. And the lyre, too; give me the lyre! that I may sing a song of battle.... Words like flaming stars, that shoot down from the sky, set palaces on fire, and illuminate huts.... Words like burnished javelins, that whirr up into the seventh heaven and transfix the pious hypocrites who have insinuated themselves into the holy of holies.... I am all gladness and song, all sword and flame, and quite possibly mad."
Among other things, he tells how the fisherman who some days later rowed him out to the sandbank from which they bathed, told him the news smilingly, with the words: "The poor people have won the victory." Heine expresses his astonishment at the correct instinct of the common man. And yet the exact opposite was the real state of matters; it was the rich people who in the end were and remained the victors.
But an utterance such as the last quoted suffices to show the light in which German authors regarded the Revolution of July. It inspired in them the same religious emotion with which forty years previously the leading spirits of the Germany of that day had regarded the great Revolution. It was not to them the result of the strength of the Liberal bourgeoisie, and of their ability to persuade the lower classes to work and shed their blood for them; it was the general signal for the political, economical, and religious emancipation of humanity. It was the great deed that with one blow freed all nations from the yoke, all minds from oppression.
In 1847 one of the foremost of the Radical writers of the Forties, Robert Prutz (at the time of the Revolution only fourteen), gave an excellent reproduction of the impression it created. "For fifteen years," he says, "it had seemed as if the eternal generative power of the world's history were paralysed. For fifteen years they had been building and cementing, holding congresses, forming alliances, spreading the net of police supervision over the whole of Europe, forging fetters, peopling prisons, erecting gallows—and three days had sufficed to overturn one throne, and make all the others tremble. It was not true then, after all, what the sovereigns had boasted, what the court romanticists had said and sung."[7] The millennial reign of the Holy Alliance had lasted fifteen years. It seemed as if a new spring must be at hand in the political and intellectual life of the German people.
[1] Karl Gutzkow: Das Kastanienwäldchen in Berlin. —Rückblicke auf mein Leben, p. 7.