"Farewell, my shepherd dear!"
Perhaps Herr Uhland himself fared no better than ourselves. Perhaps his temperament has changed since then. With a few exceptions, he has produced no new poems in twenty years. I cannot believe that this beautiful poet soul was so stingily endowed by Nature, and had but one spring-time. No, I explain Uhland's silence as the result of the contradiction between the tendencies of his muse and his political position. The elegiac poet, in whose ballads and romances the praises of the Catholic-feudal past were sung so beautifully; the Ossian of the middle ages has since then become a member of the assembly of notables in Wurtemburg, a zealous champion of popular rights, and a bold advocate of the equality of all citizens, and of freedom of opinion. Herr Uhland has proved the absolute sincerity of his democratic and Protestant convictions by the great personal sacrifices that he has made in their behalf. In his earlier days he fairly earned the poet's laurels, and now he has also won the bays of civic virtue. But just because he was so honest in his sympathy for the modern epoch, he could no longer sing the olden songs of the olden time with the former fervour. His Pegasus was a knightly steed that gladly trotted back to the past, but obstinately refused to budge when urged forward into modern life; and so our worthy Uhland smilingly dismounted, quietly unsaddled the unruly steed, and led it back to the stable. There it remains to this very day; like its colleague, the famous war-horse Bayard, it possesses all possible virtues, and only one fault; it is dead.
It will not have escaped keener eyes than mine, that the stately war-horse, decked with its brilliant coat of arms and proudly-waving plumes, was never rightly suited to its bourgeois rider, who, instead of boots with golden spurs, wore shoes with silk stockings; and who, instead of helm, wore the hat of a Tübingen professor. Some claim to have discovered that Herr Ludwig Uhland never was wholly in sympathy with his theme; that in his writings, the naïve, rude, powerful tones of the middle ages are not reproduced with idealised fidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, sentimental melancholy. It is claimed that Uhland has taken up into his temperament the strong, coarse strains of the heroic legends and folk-songs, and boiled them down, as it were, to make them palatable to our modern public. And in truth, when we closely observe the women in Uhland's poems, we find that they are only beautiful shadows, embodied moonshine; milk flows in their veins, and sweet tears in their eyes; that is, tears which lack salt. If we compare Uhland's knights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to us as if the former were composed of suits of leaden armour, which were entirely filled with flowers, instead of flesh and bones. Hence Uhland's knights are more pleasing to delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts, who wore heavy iron trousers, and were huge eaters, and still greater drinkers.
But that is no reason for finding fault with Herr Uhland; he did not seek to give an exact copy of the German past; perhaps he only wished to please us with a fanciful reflection, and so he mirrored a flattering picture by the crepuscular lights of his genius. This perhaps lends an especial charm to his poems, and wins for them the admiration and affection of many gentle and worthy persons. The pictures of the past cast some of their magic glamour over us, even in the feeblest conjuration. Even the men who have warmly espoused the cause of modernism always retain a secret sympathy for the heritages of the olden time. Those ghostly voices of the past, no matter how faint their re-echo, marvellously stir our souls. Hence it is to be readily understood that the ballads and romances of our worthy Uhland not only received the most cordial applause from the patriots of 1813, from pious youths and sentimental maidens, but also from more powerful and more modern minds.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.
[A considerable portion of this, which is one of Heine's most important works, marked by luminous exposition and bold and brilliant ideas, is here presented. It was published in French, under the title De l'Allemagne depuis Luther, in the Revue des Deux Mondes for 1834, and shortly afterwards it appeared in German, terribly mutilated by the censor, like nearly everything that Heine wrote. It was written at the suggestion of Prosper Enfantin, and dedicated to him, as at that time, in Heine's opinion, the foremost champion of human progress. The translation here given is Mr. Fleishman's; it has been revised and brought closer to the original.]
Preface To Second Edition (1852).
...THE book which lies before you is a fragment, and shall remain a fragment. To be candid, I would prefer to leave the book wholly unprinted; for since its first publication my views concerning many subjects, particularly those which relate to religious questions, have undergone a marked change, and much that I then asserted is now in opposition to my better convictions. But the arrow belongs not to the archer when once it has left the bow, and the word no longer belongs to the speaker when once it has passed his lips, especially when it has been multiplied by the press.... At that time I was yet well and hearty; I was in the zenith of my prime, and as arrogant as Nebuchadnezzar before his downfall.
Alas! a few years later, a physical and spiritual change occurred. How often since then have I mused over the history of that Babylonian king who thought himself a god, but who was miserably hurled from the summit of his self-conceit, and compelled to crawl on the earth like a beast, and to eat grass (probably it was only salad). This legend is contained in the grand and magnificent book of Daniel; and I recommend all godless self-worshippers to lay it devoutly to heart. There are, in fact, in the Bible many other beautiful and wonderful narrations, well deserving their consideration; for instance, the story of the forbidden fruit in Paradise, and the serpent which already six thousand years before Hegel's birth promulgated the whole Hegelian philosophy. This footless blue-stocking demonstrates very sagaciously how the absolute consists in the identity of being and knowing; how man becomes God through knowledge, or, what amounts to the same thing, how God arrives at the consciousness of himself through man. To be sure, this formula is not so clear as in the original words: "If ye eat of the tree of knowledge, ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Dame Eve understood of the whole demonstration only this—that the fruit was forbidden; and because it was forbidden she ate of it. But no sooner had she eaten of the tempting apple than she lost her innocence, her naïve guilelessness, and discovered that she was far too scantily dressed for a person of her quality, the mother of so many future kings and emperors, and she asked for a dress—truly, only a dress of fig-leaves, because at that time there were as yet no Lyons silk fabrics in existence, and because there were in Paradise no dressmakers or milliners—oh, Paradise! Strange, that as soon as a woman arrives at self-consciousness her first thought is of a new dress!