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genre, one in which the poet was otherwise unpracticed. Thus it happens
that Heine is considered one of the pre-Revolutionary poets, the
Vormarzdichter,
with whom he had so little in common.
A true
Vormarzdichter
was Borne, just to name an example. Heine
called him an "agitator" and a "public caretaker full of bloodthirsty senti–
mentality," a man who, in Heine's account, ruined many of the poet's best
meals (a beloved time when Heine liked to forget about the troubles of the
world) with his revolutionary speeches. To put it anachronistically, we
could say that Heine was neither a '68-er nor a Green Party type. Borne
reproached him for this "sybaritic personality" and also claimed that the
only part of truth he loved was the beautiful. The pampered Heine, he said,
could be "stirred from sleep by the falling of a rose petal." Heine saw
Borne as a "boor of equality" who "gladly lolled around in plebeian
muck" and wanted thereby to take Heine down with him. What bothered
the poet about left-republican politics was not only the ill-bred behavior
of its adherents but also their ill-bred thought and poetry. Here was a sub–
ject close to his very essence, for he was a stylist of the highest order who
repeatedly emphasized that the purpose of art lay not in its substance but
in the manner of its treatment, and also that, should things come to such a
point, he should be attacked not for what he said, but for how he said it.
Perhaps he was left-leaning, but with propriety: not in rags, nor waving
banners, but, as it were, in silk and velvet, making his entrance to the rich
tones of strings playing. This had a confusing effect and was considered a
deceptive tactic.
Art
created to achieve practical ends was a contradiction
for Heine. "Let my song be fantastically aimless." Like Goethe, he identi–
fied high art with the greatest objectivity, and one may even see him
agreeing wi th Brecht, who saw bad
art
as an ill-honed weapon, as no art
at all.
He kept his weapon close by, and partly for its sake he often affirmed
that he was a monarchist, since he found that "society is republican by
nature." At the same time, "a great poet's laurels have always been as
detestable to our republicans as the purple mantle of a great king." Since
these "equality-boors" wished to annihilate the intellectual differences
among men, they ultimately declared an "equality of styles": "A fine style
was actually decried as aristocratic. One often heard the opinion that a
good democrat writes like the people, badly, with an honest straightfor–
wardness." For him, the supposedly democratic fad for naturalness,
contemptuous of form, was an abomination. In an article on the degener–
ation of French dramaturgy, Heine sounds like Goethe: "The theater is a
world as separate from our own as the stage from the pit." Between the–
ater and reality lay the orchestra, and "the fire-line of the stage apron, a
dazzling light and sound that strikes the prosaic public as unnatural, and yet
