622
PARTISAN REVIEW
Heine apparently had no taboos, not even those typical of the Left.
Hence when he explains, in good Saint-Simonistic style, that the issue was
not to destroy the old Church, but rather to build a new one, and that "far
from wanting to destroy the priesthood, we want to make ourselves
priests," he did not shun the old images and concepts, only infused them
with new content. The worldly religion of the followers of Saint-Simon
struck him as a "great springtime notion full of the joy of God."
It
was
partly this sensual streak of Heine's that held him away from Communism.
In this regard, he was better (and earlier) educated than his fellow poets,
since he was in contact with the young exiles Marx and Engels. He was
astonished by the rigidity of their thought and feared its consequences.
Although he considered Marx one of the great minds of the century, he
was nonetheless too short on patience, and possibly also on theoretical
knowledge, to have engrossed himself in thick tomes of economics like
those of Marx, who sent Heine one of his early works,
The Holy Family.
At
the time of Heine's death, this book was found with only one-fourth of its
pages cut. The man who had so thoroughly comprehended the laws of his
century saw himself as no abstract thinker. This may explain why the last
volume of a series on German philosophy, on Hegel (whose colleague
Heine had visited in Berlin), unfortunately never saw the light of day.
Heine was well aware of his debt to Hegel, whom he called his "great
teacher," but of whose work he nonetheless said that "the most meager
hospital-broth of Christian charity injects more life into languishing
humanity than the cooked gray spider web of Hegelian dialectic." Marx
had the greatest understanding for Heine's eccentricities, knowing that
poets are " oddballs" that cannot be measured "by the standards of usual
men or even unusual ones."
But there were also other reasons for Heine's abhorrence of commu–
nist rule, of the "dark iconoclasts." "The pure and sensitive nature of a
poet," he thought, bristles at "any personally close contact with the peo–
ple." This is a surprising confession, which must have taken some courage
to express. Almost all poets feel this way, but Heine actually says so. The
delicate poet now truly saw how the proletariat, these "dreary fellows,"
burst forth from "the ruins of the present regime like rats." He was quite
proud of himself for having spoken so early about this "dangerous actor."
It was still too early to know the Communists completely; they were
ridiculed as the first Galileans were, but he had recognized that these
Galileans were destined for power on a world scale. The otherwise deri–
sive Heine, it appears, took the coming change so seriously that all his
irony left him. He describes the change with an almost solemn pathos:
'''Communism' is the secret name of the dire antagonist that sets the rule
of the Proletariat, and all that goes with it, against the present bourgeois
