For many years after he made Heine's literary and personal acquaintance, Börne's feeling towards that author was a friendly one; he spoke of him with affection, gave him his full due as a poet, and more especially appreciated him as a great power in the service of universal emancipation. But their natures were too unlike to permit of his judgment being quite unprejudiced. From 1831 onwards we come upon spiteful references to Heine in the Letters. Although Börne was devoid of petty vanity, the frequent comparisons made between Heine and himself rankled in his mind, especially as, in the matter of ability and gifts, they were often to his disadvantage. And Heine's Französische Zustände ("The Situation in France") offended and wounded him; its perusal roused in him a feeling of ill-humour to which he gave vent (in the last volume of the Letters from Paris) in cutting satire, which struck Heine as it were from above, and, in the eyes of many readers, stamped him with the brand of political untrustworthiness.
It was in reality the deep-seated antagonism between the natures of the two fellow-combatants that found vent on this occasion. Börne did not understand the real nature of the difference between himself and Heine. To him it seemed to be the difference between manly earnestness and boyish frivolity, or, taken in its highest aspect, between devotion to truth and devotion to form, to art. With accurate perception he detected and exposed some of the small puerilities and snobberies of which Heine, when dazzled by the tinsel of life, could at a time be guilty, and also some of his unjust mockeries of ideal endeavour clothed in clumsy or naïvely popular form. Börne detested the Rothschilds, by whom Heine was impressed and fascinated. Börne, who felt out of his element in drawing-rooms, was quite at home among democratic artisans, and in gatherings of German emigrants, no matter how wild the schemes they planned, or how unpractical the undertakings for which they collected money; Heine, on the contrary, was annoyed by the constant solicitations to support this or that democratic undertaking, was quite unsuited to be a member of the democratic fraternity, preferred, in spite of his revolutionary leanings, to keep himself to himself, and had no intention whatever of being on terms of hail fellow well met with any chance band of emigrant fellow-countrymen.
In a letter dated the 25th of February 1833, Börne jeers at Heine for various things, amongst others for writing of the inhuman policy pursued by Austria for the last three hundred years as "sublime perseverance"; for calling King Louis of Bavaria, whom he afterwards so unmercifully satirised, "one of the noblest and most intellectual monarchs that ever sat upon a throne"; and for declaring it to be "courageous and admirable" of the Messrs. Rothschild to remain in Paris during the cholera, while he, at the same time, casts ridicule on the unpaid exertions of the German patriots. On these points, and others, Börne is right, but nevertheless he shows no delicate discernment or profound comprehension of Heine's real character.
In the case of Heine, as in the case of Goethe, he stood face to face with a genius he was unable to judge impartially, though he by no means wronged his restless contemporary to the same extent or in the same manner as he did his great predecessor.
[1] Stock expressions: "O, es ist zum Rasendwerden! (it is maddening!) O, ich habe eine Wuth! (I am in a transport of rage!)." On the subject of the encyclopædia: "Eine starke halbe Stunde musste ich das Schreiben unterbrechen, und meine Wuth war grenzenlos." (I had to stop writing for a good half hour, and was infuriated beyond all bounds.)
[2] "Was, wo, worauf, womit soll ich schreiben? Der Boden zittert, es zittert der Tisch, das Pult, Hand und Herz zittern, und die Geschichte, vom Sturme bewegt, zittert selbst.... Prophet wollte ich sein zwölf Bände durch."—What, where, upon what, with what am I to write? The ground, the table, the desk, hand and heart tremble, shaken by the hurricane, history itself trembles.... A prophet I would be, throughout twelve volumes.
[3] Börne, iii. 75, 86, 172; 43, 99, 267.
[4] Börne, iii. 159, 160.
[5] Börne, 98, 39, 270.