beggarly all arguments appear before a defiant deed!" cried Walt
Whitman. "Every man," said Ruskin, "feels instinctively that all the
beautiful sentiments in the world count less than a single lovely
action." The powerlessness of the word--that, as I said, has been the
burden of speakers and writers. That is what drove Dante to politics,
and Byron to Greece, and Goethe to the study of bones.

But Heine laid himself open more than most to such scorn as Boerne's.
There was little of the active revolutionist in his nature. About the
revolutionist hangs something Hebraic (if we may still use Heine's own
distinction, never very definite, and now worn so thin), but Heine
prided himself upon a sunlit cheerfulness that he called Greek. He loved
the garish world; he was in love with every woman; but the true
revolutionist must be the modern monk. It is no good asking the
revolutionist out to dinner; he will neither say anything amusing, nor
know the difference between chalk and cheese. But Heine's good sayings
went the round of Parisian society, and he loved the subtleties of wine
and the table. "That dish," he said once, "should be eaten on one's
knees." Only on paper, and then rarely, was his heart lacerated by
savage indignation. Except for brief periods of poverty, in the Zion of
exile he lived very much at ease, nor did the zeal of the Lord ever
consume him. Did it not seem that a true revolutionist was justified in
comparing him to a boy chasing butterflies on the battle-field? Here, if
anywhere, one might have thought, was one of those charming poets whom
the Philosopher would have honoured, and feasted, and loaded with
beautiful gifts, and then conducted, laurel-crowned, far outside the
walls of the perfect city, to the sound of flutes and soft recorders.

To such scorn Heine attempted the artist's common answer. He replied to
Boerne's revolutionary scorn of the mere poet, with a poet's fastidious
scorn of the smudgy revolutionist. He tells us of his visit to Boerne's
rooms, where he found such a menagerie as could hardly be seen in the
Jardin des Plantes--German polar bears, a Polish wolf, a French ape. Or
we read of the one revolutionary assembly he attended, and how up till
then he had always longed to be a popular orator, and had even practised
on oxen and sheep in the fields; but that one meeting, with its dirt,
and smells, and stifling tobacco smoke, sickened him of oratory. "I
saw," he writes,

"I saw that th