thing must be so, there is
immense authority and custom in favor of its being so, it has been held
to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, "But
_is_ it so? is it so to _me_?" Nothing could be more really subversive
of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be
remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this order, no
persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt Goethe's influence
most deeply. If it is said that Goethe professes to have in this way
deeply influenced but a few persons, and those persons poets, one may
answer that he could have taken no better way to secure, in the end, the
ear of the world; for poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive,
and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.
Nevertheless the process of liberation, as Goethe worked it, though
sure, is undoubtedly slow; he came, as Heine says, to be eighty years
old in thus working it, and at the end of that time the old Middle-Age
machine was still creaking on, the thirty German courts and their
chamberlains subsisted in all their glory; Goethe himself was a
minister, and the visible triumph of the modern spirit over prescription
and routine seemed as far off as ever. It was the year 1830; the German
sovereigns had passed the preceding fifteen years in breaking the
promises of freedom they had made to their subjects when they wanted
their help in the final struggle with Napoleon. Great events were
happening in France; the revolution, defeated in 1815, had arisen from
its defeat, and was wresting from its adversaries the power. Heinrich
Heine, a young man of genius, born at Hamburg,[139] and with all the
culture of Germany, but by race a Jew; with warm sympathies for France,
whose revolution had given to his race the rights of citizenship, and
whose rule had been, as is well known, popular in the Rhine provinces,
where he passed his youth; with a passionate admiration for the great
French Emperor, with a passionate contempt for the sovereigns who had
overthrown him, for their agents, and for their policy,--Heinrich Heine
was in 1830 in no humor for any such gradual process of liberation from
the old order of things as that which Goethe had followed. His counsel
was for open war. Taking that terrible modern weapon, the pen, in his
hand, he passed the remainder of his life in one fierce battle. What was
that battle? the reader will ask. It was a lif