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PARTISAN REVIEW
is more natural than nature in the usual sense: a nature elevated by art to
the most fertile godliness." Poets, alas, must pass together with kings. No
great poet could thrive without a firm faith in authority. Hence, says
Heine, when Dante passed through the streets of Verona, people pointed
to him and whispered, "He has been through Hell!" The conclusion:
"When democracy takes over, all poetry is finished."
But his decided opposition to the revolutionary unrest of 1848 in
Germany, on which he wrote deprecatory verses, was not exclusively aes–
thetically based. He saw it as a premature revolution, and therefore
ridiculous. For Heine, a revolution should spring from anger and compul–
sion, not from the people's sympathetic feelings and sentimental
misapprehensions. "The people, this poor king in tatters, has found its flat–
terers, court lackeys ever gushing praise for its virtues, crying out 'How
beautiful is the people! How good is the people! How intelligent is the
people! '" But this, says Heine, is a lie, for the people in reality is ugly and
ill-willed if it cannot find enough to fill its stomach. Indeed, Heine has less
in common with the champions of the people, whom he called "dema–
gogues" (using Metternich's insult without a trace of irony). He felt that he
had very real reasons to be cautious with them: "Although I am a radical in
England, and a Carbonari in Italy, still I am not one of the Demagogues in
Germany because of a simple coincidence: when these celebrated a victo–
ry, several thousand of the finest Jewish throats were cut." This was
ultimately what repulsed
him.
The "army of German revolutionaries"
swarmed with the "maniacs of Germanness," who had made life difficult
for him even in his student association days. Their Wartburg festival, at
which the most progressive writings were burned with the Napoleonic
Code at the top of the list, he termed a "barbaric revel" and "ghastly." At
such events the past croaked out its "dark raven-song" and "idiocies wor–
thy of the most inane moments of the Middle Ages" were said and done
by torchlight. His fateful pronouncement that "where they burn books,
soon they will burn men," was his presentiment of the darker days of more
recent German history that were yet to come. Even former friends like
Venedey, returned from exile and elected to the Church of St. Paul, now
landed in the "black, red, and gold of Old German rubbish," and demand–
ed the return of Alsace-Lorraine from France. He saw St. Paul's as an odd
"menagerie," that only a "boor" would be capable of describing fully. But
he was most deeply shaken by his old friend Laube, who "betrayed reason
and truth" by becoming a student ofJahn, and "concocted the most asinine
dreams of Germanhood,
Volkstum,
and ancient-acorn-smut-dom."
He detested the Black, Red, and Gold as much as the Black Eagle, but
not because these were German emblems. He was much more fearful of
the manner in which the "Romantic" Friedrich Wilhelm IV used them in
