As a political poet, Heine is considered to be revolutionary, and so he was. But his political animosity is exclusively aroused by medieval conditions, medieval beliefs. He is anti-clerical in good earnest, but not democratic in good earnest. His longest political poem, Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen, ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), gives abundant evidence of this. It rises to real passion only where the poet's invisible companion, the lictor with the terrible axe, breaks up the skeletons of the Three Kings in the Cathedral of Cologne, "the miserable skeletons of superstition." But it is in this great poem, Heine's most important work, that we have the clearest expression of the political feelings and principles which animated him, the element, new to German poetry, of warlike challenge and hand-to-hand struggle. Nothing of the kind is to be found in Goethe. In the end, indeed, Goethe was persuaded of "the absolute pitiableness of the time," but he feared that the overthrow of existing authorities would only make things worse. Not even in Schiller can we find any direct reference to the politics of the day. His political feeling finds a vent in dramas whose theme is liberty. But in Heine, from 1830 onwards, we have always this direct expression of the faith that was in him. His soul was in politics. And in politics he was honest, even in cases where his honesty was misunderstood.
Turn to that passage in the Reisebilder which is most frequently cited as an expression of his boastfulness and affectation, the passage following on the description of his visit to the battlefield of Marengo: "'This will be a fine day,' called my travelling companion.—Yes, it will be a fine day, silently echoed my heart, uplifted in prayer, trembling with sadness and joyfulness. Yes, it will be a fine day, and the sun of liberty will gladden the earth. A new generation will spring up and flourish, begotten in free embrace, not in a prison bed, under the control of clerical warders; and this free birth will generate free thoughts and feelings, of which we born serfs have not even a presentiment ..." then at the end these words: "I know not if I deserve that a laurel wreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it; has always been to me but a divine plaything, or a weapon consecrated to divine purposes.... But lay on my coffin a sword, for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity."
This political warfare of Heine's is spoken of with the utmost contempt by German historians of literature, historians proper, and literary critics; not only by Menzel, but by such men as Goedeke, Treitschke, Grisebach (Heine's imitator and denouncer), and Hehn, whose perception in other cases is so remarkably acute. Even Scherer is cold and depreciatory. When the Italian poet Carducci some years ago celebrated Heine in an ode as a hero in the struggle of liberty, even Karl Hillebrand, the best literary critic in Germany, who had at one time been Heine's secretary, and had always spoken of him with reverence and admiration, made a sort of protest, declaring that Heine himself had never taken the thing so seriously. This disfavour and distrust is not surprising. The frivolity in Heine's character led in his youth to repellent political vacillation. In 1827, in the hope of being appointed to a professorship at Munich, he was ready to disown his previous principles to please King Louis, but gained nothing by it. He offered at the same time to defend the wretched Duke of Brunswick, the diamond-Duke, in return for a Brunswick order; but in this case also he was disappointed. It was not till 1830 that he began to show political strength of character.
We must also remember that in Heine's writings there is an absence of all "pathetic gesture." He was too proud to employ it. Germans cannot understand this. But grievous wrong is done him. The pathos was in his soul. His whole soul is in the little poem Enfant Perdu, with which one of the divisions of Romancero concludes, and which he wrote when he was no longer young. He really was what he here calls himself, an advanced and forgotten outpost, left to be shot down. And when, in his posthumous prose hymn, he cries: "I am the sword, I am flame," it is but the truth. The light of his flame, the sparks of his sword-blows, still shine bright. Many still warm themselves at his fire.
As already mentioned, Börne, in his Letters from Paris, calls Heine an inconsistent, vacillating, characterless politician. He does not so much reproach him with overrating himself personally as with overrating the influence of the individual human being. For it is Börne's opinion that the individual is no longer of much importance. Even a Voltaire or a Rousseau would not be a powerful influence nowadays. Individuals are now merely the heralds of the people. This Heine forgets. Then, in his desire to please the democrats, he declares that the Jesuitic-aristocratic party in Germany malign him because he makes a bold stand against absolutism; but almost at the same time, in order to curry favour with the aristocrats, says that he has made a stand against Jacobinism, and that he is, and always will be, a good monarchist.
Börne does not always understand a joke. Heine gives a droll account of a Paris millinery establishment which he frequented the summer before he writes, where he, as a royalist, was one against sixteen, the eight young shop-girls and their eight lovers being all violently aggressive republicans. Elsewhere he writes: "God knows I am no Republican. I know that when the Republicans are victorious, they will cut off my head ... a piece of foolishness for which I am quite ready to forgive them." Börne adds: "Not I. A lunatic asylum would be the proper place for Republicans that were such fools as to suppose that it was necessary to get rid of Heine in order to attain their aims."
In spite of their jesting tone, there is something in these and similar utterances of Heine's which puzzles the reader. Intermittent outbursts of violent Radicalism, everywhere an undertone of the most pronounced revolutionary feeling—and these constantly recurring assurances that he is not a Jacobin, not even a Republican.
An explanation is required, an explanation which no one has yet offered.
For to say that Heine was characterless, characterless to such a degree, that in the most serious matters, and with the eyes of two great nations upon him, he perpetually contradicted himself, is no explanation at all. The vagueness, the contradiction must lie in his principles.
Remember his faithful, boundless devotion to Napoleon, which once more and for the last time finds expression in the Winter's Tale, in the dirge of the dead emperor, brought in his coffin from St. Helena to Paris: