HEINE'S RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.'

work under notice

was originally

THE substance of the woes to the Revue des deux mally contributed These articles were afterwards republished in a German dress by Hoffmann and Campe, of Hamburg, in 1835, but in so mutilated a form, owing to the action of the Censor of the Press, that a second German edition was necessitated. This second German edition was, however, never revised by the author; while the French work was probably, judging from the practice of Heine in other cases, not the sole and unassisted work of Heine himself. The problem, therefore, presented itself to the translator, which edition should form the basis of the English version. He has practically solved the problem as follows. He has used the French version, finally revised by the author, as decisive in cases of discrepance in regard to the question, what was the definitive form in which he desired the work to appear, but the actual translation in all other cases has been made rather from the German than from the French. Whatever opinion may be held as to the justice and wisdom of this course, the result is one of the raciest and most amusing volumes that have for a ong time appeared on the most serious of all questions that could engage the human mind.

Another circumstance lends interest to the book. Between 1835 and 1852 Heine had recanted his atheism (if that be the term which properly describes his negative attitude towards the popular Deism of his day), and announces himself a Deist. But all the same ὃ γέγραφα γέγραφα is still his motto, and beyond a warning word in the preface, nothing in the second German edition of his work appears to intimate his recantation. Perhaps he was dimly conscious that his strength lay after all rather in his criticisms than in his affirmations; that Heinrich Heine was Heinrich Heine, and that his personality was of far more value than his particular opinions. And this is probably the truth. Heine's judgment may be often at fault; his wit is never so. The good things which cram this volume would admit of being diluted to the advantage of many hundred ordinary books. Let the following extracts suffice as examples:

By France I mean Paris, and not the provinces; for what the provinces think is of as little consequence as what one's legs think. It is the head that is the seat of our thoughts. I have been told that the French of the provinces are good Catholics. I can neither affirm nor deny it. The men of the provinces with whom I have conversed have impressed me like milestones bearing inscribed on their foreheads the distance, more or less great, from the capital. . In Paris itself Catholicism ceased, in fact, to exist at the Revolution, and long previous to that event it had lost all real importance. It still lay in wait in the recesses of the Churches, crouching like a spider in its web, ready to spring precipitately from its retreat, whenever it had a chance of seizing a child in its cradle or an old man in his

Religion and Philosophy in Germany: A Frigment. By HEINRICH HEINE. Translated by John Snodgrass. Trübner and Co. 1882.

coffin. It was only at these two periods of life, on arriving in the world and on quitting it, that a Frenchman fell into the hands of the Christian priest. During all the intermediate period of his existence he was the servant of reason, and laughed at holy-water and consecrated oil.

This is in the preface to the first French edition. At its close Madame de Staël is dismissed as the "grandmother of doctrinaires." Some people hold that the true wit never makes a pun, but surely when Heine wrote in German "Feige Feigenblätter," which we presume to be the original of Mr. Snodgrass' "cowardly figleaves," on p. 11, be meant a pun, and not a bad one either, as such things go. The language in which he describes his conversion to Deism is so redolent of his own inimitable humour, for Heine was humorous as well as witty, that we cannot forbear quoting it at some length:

This fine-spun Berlin dialectic (he means the Kantian philosophy) is incapable of enticing a dog from the fireside. It has not power to kill a cat, how much less a God. I have in my own body experienced how slight is the danger of its killing. It is continually at its work of killing, and yet folk remain alive.

The doorkeeper of the Hegelian school-the grim Ruge-once obstinately claimed that he had slain me with his porter's staff in the Halle Chronicle, though at that very time I was strolling along the Boulevards of Paris healthy and gay, and more unlike dying than ever. Poor worthy Ruge! He himself, at a later period, could not restrain the most honest outburst of laughter when I made him the confession here in Paris that I had never so much as seen that terribly homicidal journal, the Halle Chronicle; and my full, ruddy cheeks, as well as the hearty appetite with which I swallowed oysters, convinced him how little like a corpse I looked. In fact, in those days I was still healthy and sleek. I stood in the zenith of my fat, and was as arrogant as Nebuchadnezzar before his fall. Alas! a few years later & physical and mental change began to take place. How often since those days have I thought of the history of the Babylonian king, who esteemed himself no less than God, but who, having miserably fallen from the summit of his infatuation, crawled like an animal on the ground, eating grass, which would, no doubt, be salad! This story is to be found in the grandiose and splendid book of Daniel-a story which I recommend to the edifying contemplation not only of the worthy Ruge, but to that of my far more unregenerate friends, those godless self-gods, Feuerbach, Daumer, Bruno Bauer, Hengstenberg, and whatever else be their names.

Scarcely less charming than the above extraordinary collocation of men like Feuerbach and Hengstenberg, in which there is as much truth as satire, is the following:

Besides this one there are, indeed, many other beautiful and noteworthy narratives in the Bible, as, for example, just at the beginning there is the story of the forbidden tree in Paradise and of the serpent, that little private tutoress [we suppose Privat-docentin is the word] who lectured on Hegelian philosophy six thousand years before Hegel's birth. This blue stocking without feet demonstrated very ingeniously how the absolute consists in the identity of being and knowing; how man becomes God through cognition, or, what is the same thing, how the God in man thereby attains self-consciousness. This formula is not so clear as the original words: When ye eat of the tree of knowledge ye shall be as God. Mother Eve understood only one thing in the whole demonstration-that the fruit was forbidden, and because it was forbidden the good woman ate of it. .. O Paradise! Strange that as soon as woman attains reasoning self-consciousness her first

thought is of a new dress! Pious souls thirsting after a miracle have desired to know whether, like Saul on the way to Damascus, I had seen a light from heaven, or whether, like Balaam, the son of Beor, I was riding on a restive ass, that suddenly opened its mouth and began to speak as a man. No, ye credulous believers; I never journeyed to Damascus, nor do I know anything about it, save that lately the Jews there were accused of devouring aged Franciscans; and I might never have known even the name of the city had I not read the Song of Solomon, wherein the wise king compares the nose of his beloved to a tower that looketh towards Damascus. Nor have I ever seen an ass-at least, any four-footed one-that spake as a man, though I have often met men who, whenever they opened their mouths, spake as asses. . . I owe my conversion simply to the reading of a book.

This book, it is needless to say, was the Bible, and we recommend to the British and Foreign Bible Society an expurgated account of this wonderful conversion from atheism. It is pretty plain that Heine had never read the Bible before, and that for him, in his unregenerate condition, it had at all events the rare charm of novelty. So, too, we think has his subsequent treatment of the sacred narrative for his readers. Equally curious is the fact that previous to his conversion Heine would appear to have read almost everything except the Bible, and conducts his French readers in a most edifying manner through the entire course of ecclesiastic history down to the time of the publication of Kant's Critic of Pure Reason.' We have only space for Heine s brilliant characterisation of the relation of Kant's "Practical Reason" to the rest of his philosophy :—

You fancy, then, that we may now go home! By my life, no! There is yet a piece to be played. After the tragedy comes the farce. Up to this point Immanuel Kant has pursued the path of inexorable philosophy. He has stormed heaven and put the whole garrison to the edge of the sword. The theological, cosmological, and physico-theological bodyguards lie there lifeless. Deity itself, deprived of demonstration, has succumbed. There is now no all-mercifulness, no fatherly kindness, no other-world reward for renunciation in this world. The immortality of the soul lies in its last agony-you can hear its groans and its death-rattle-and old Lampe [Kant's famulus] is standing by with his umbrella under his arm, an afflicted spectator of the scene, tears and sweat-drops of terror dropping from his countenance. Then Immanuel Kant relents, and shows that he is not merely a great philosopher, but also a good man. He reflects and, half good-naturedly, half ironically, he says: "Old Lampe must have a God, otherwise the poor fellow can never be happy. Now, man ought to be happy in this world. Practical reason says so does it, according to Kant?]. -well, I am quite willing that practical reason should also guarantee the existence of God."

After this Heine is unkind enough to suggest that Kant brought about this resurrection not merely for the sake of old Lampe, but also through fear of the police.

Reading Heine's estimate of Schelling in his later development, we are forcibly reminded of the hackneyed proverb about glass houses and throwing stones. When Heine accuses Schelling of having "slunk back to the religious kennels of the past," and goes on to say that his conversion proves nothing but that man "turns to religion for support when

he is old and weary, when his physical and intellectual powers fail him, when he can no longer enjoy or reason," one wonders how he could have the face to write his second preface to the German edition of this work, in which he glories in his own recantation of atheism.

The close of the book is at once the most eloquent and the most prophetic, but as with all truly prophetic visions, the seer's perspective is somewhat confused. This fact, if the authorship were ever to become doubtful, would save it from suspicion of being a vaticinium post eventum. Heine evidently looked forward to a great democratic upheaval as the prelude or the accompaniment, rather than the sequel, to the renewal of German nationality. But this twist in the perspective of his forecast, so far from divesting it of interest, rather suggests the question, May we not well look forward, perhaps at no distant date, to the fulfilment of so much of his prophecy as yet remains unfulfilled, seeing that the rest has been realised in so remarkable a manner? We will conclude this notice with one more extract, which, for splendour and force of diction, ranks, even in Mr. Snodgrass' translation (which, as far as we can judge in the absence of the original, seems exceedingly well done), among the finest specimens cf modern prose.

Christianity-and this is its fairest merit-subdued to a certain extent the brutal warrior ardour of the Germans; but it could not entirely quench it, and when the cross-that restraining talisman-falls to pieces, then will break forth again the ferocity of the old combatants. The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins, and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries; and Thor, with his giant hammer, will arise, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals. When ye hear the trampling of feet and the clashing of arms, ye neighbours' children, ye French, be on your guard, and see that ye mingle not in the fray going on amongst us at home in Germany. It might fare ill with you. Smile not at my counsel -at the counsel of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, Philosophers of Nature. Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intellect. The thought precedes the deed, as the lightning the thunder. German thunder is of true German calibre. It is not very nimble, but rumbles along somewhat slowly. But come it will, and when ye hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then know that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen. At this commotion the eagles will drop dead from the skies, and the lions in the farthest wastes of Africa will bite their tails and creep into their royal lairs. There will be played in Germany a drama compared to which the French Revolu tion will seem but an innocent idyl. At present, it is true, everything is tolerably quiet, and though here and there some few men create a little stir, do not imagine these are to be the real actors in the piece. They are only little curs chasing one another round the empty arena, barking and snapping at one another, till the appointed hour, when the troop of gladiators appear to fight for life and death. Take heed then! I mean it well with you. Therefore it is, I tell you the bitter truth. Ye have more to fear from a free Germany than from the entire Holy Alliance, with all its Croats and Cossacks.

Is not, however, the converse equally true, that Germany has more to fear from Republican France than from either Czars or Napoleons ?

E. M. G.

TE

LEOPARDI'S ESSAYS AND DIALOGUES.

HE seventeenth volume of the English and Foreign Philosophical Library' is an eminently readable book, and likely to suit the taste of the day, but whether this fact is to our credit, and whether many people can possibly be the better for reading the book, are altogether different questions. It is a bright and lively exposition of pessimism, set forth with all the inventive fancy and vivid colouring of one of Italy's really great poets. His conclusions are sufficiently dark and depressing: "The universe is an enigma, totally insoluble. The sufferings of mankind exceed all the good that men experience, estimating the latter in compensation for the former. Progress, or, as we call it, civilisation, instead of lightening man's sufferings, increases them, since it enlarges his capacity for suffering, without proportionately augmenting his means of enjoyment." Such are the results arrived at by one who distinguished. himself alike as a philologist, a philosopher, and a poet. We naturally want to know something of the life of the man, to see if it will at least partially explain his beliefs, and we are grateful to Mr. Edwardes for the biographical sketch he has prefixed to the present volume, and only complain that it does not give us more detailed information.

In the character of Arthur Schopenhauer, with its impetuous impulses continually overpowering his better judgment, it was easy to find the origin of his philosophy. The temperament and the career of Byron go a great way towards explaining the one-sidedness of his views of life; and if people will ask the question, "Is life worth living?" we are inclined to think no better answer will ever be found than "It all depends upon the liver." Certainly in Leopardi's case there is no difficulty in connecting his pessimism with his character and fortune. His family was very noble and very poor; his father was a martinet of the "old school;" his mother a shrewd housekeeper; neither of them appreciated the brilliant powers of their son, who was made miserable by being forbidden to leave the obscure country town in which the family resided. He early began to study hard, setting himself when eight years of age to read in chronological order the Greek authors in his father's library. In 1815, when seventeen years of age, he wrote a long "Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients," in which he quotes more than 400 authors; he shows how the various philosophers opposed and contradicted one another, "while the truly wise laughed at them all. The people, left to themselves during this hubbub, were not idle, but laboured silently to increase the vast mound of human error." He ends this essay with the declaration that "To live in the true Church is the only way to combat superstition." But for him the true Church meant the Church of Rome, in Italy, in the early part of the present century; and we do not wonder Translated by Charles

Essays and Dialogues of Giacomo Leopardi. Edwardes. London: Trübner. 1882.