BOOKS
essential modernity, a sophisticated technique of cutting through con-
ventions. The past is always with them, but only to throw into relief
their sense of the present; coal barges now ply the Thames where once
Elizabeth and Leicester rode in state. Heine is fond of graves and visions,
of spooks and poltergeists, but in no Keats-like dedication to the spirit
of romance. He is always spoiling the Grimm fairy-tale and showing up
the Wagnerian stage-machinery. Consider his most obvious success,
Die
Grenadiere,
where he creates a legend out of the stuff of contemporary
politics by the striking adaptation of folklore
motifs
and tricks of bal-
ladry. Remember the portentous rhythms that make his song of the
Silesian weavers a kind of witches' incantation for textile-workers. By
Heine the doubts and decisions of the nineteenth century are orchestrated
to the horns of Elfland.
Heine, in other words, is a counter-romanticist. His relation to the
romantic school is like that of Feuerbach to the Hegelian philosophy.
The continuity is complete, but the direction has been reversed. Marx
and Engels saw this, and for Heine's wayward career as a soldier in the
Befreiungskrieg
they had little but indulgence and admiration. Byron,
Pushkin, and Stendhal are also paradoxes, men who were so psycholog-
ically enfranchised that their work is a contradiction of their time. Like
Heine, they professed the culture of the enlightenment, the cult of Na-
poleon, and the pretensions of a dandy. In contradistinction to the
romanticists, they preferred cosmopolite liberalism to nationalistic reac-
tion, rationalistic irony to mystical sentiment. Byron was a club-footed
peer as Heine was a paralyzed Jew, and what is extraordinary is what
they shared. Wit and radicalism are complexities that cannot be exor-
cizedby the application of a Jewish label, any more than literary achieve-
ment can be set forth in other terms than its own.
Heinrich Heine:
Paradox and Poet
is the cruellest of Louis Untermeyer's well-known
parodies. It is a Heinesque irony that, for all his good intentions, he
should give us a caricature which Julius Streicher could hardly fail to
approve-the grotesquely crooked nose, the bestially slobbering lips, and
an unmistakable suggestion of garlic.
HARRY LEVIN
POPULIST REALISM
AN
ARTIST IN AMERICA.
By Thomas Benton. McBride. $3.75.
Benton's autobiography is a manifesto addressed to abstractionists,
radicals and true Americans. He tells how he grew up in a philistine
Missouri community at the end of the last century, became an artist
from sheer bravado, fled to Chicago and then to Paris and New York,
and painted abstractions until the war when he turned to objects and
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