h
bettered; for it grows clearer every year that educating will not
accomplish this, or medicine, or penalties, or perhaps even preaching.
But Heine was no theorist in these matters: he was poet before all,
and he was too absolutely, too completely a poet for the justest
thought, or for his own good. Heine's nature lacked that tonic bent
toward accurate knowledge, toward dispassionate observation and
thought, which was the salvation, for instance, of Goethe, and which
has been the salvation of all great natures who have sought to excel
in character as well as in art. The spring of clear, untroubled
intelligence did not flow for Heine, the stream which should flow upon
the homestead of every poet, the _fons Baudusiae splendidior vitro_.
In those invigorating waters he seldom refreshed his spirit as
the greatest poets have done--in meditation, in discipline, in
dispassionate inquiry. These are the spiritual antiseptics that are
needful at least for the more carnal poetic temperaments. Am I using
fanciful metaphors? I mean that the poet who may undertake to put
forth a new gospel of conduct, must first think long and strictly. But
Heine did not think strictly, and his critical theory of life need not
detain us. Heine thought of pleasure, for instance, as Mr. Ruskin
thinks of work, that it is a thing to be had for the asking; the fact
being in any state of society yet established inexorably the
reverse--namely, that neither work nor pleasure is commonly to be had
on demand.

But it was a part of the new creed that enjoyment was to be had for the
asking, and the _propaganda_ already existed. "There was a little
society of devotees, if I may call them so--Michel Chevalier, Olinde,
Enfantin, and others--who were zealously preaching the rehabilitation
of the flesh"; and Heine devoted himself with assiduity to the pleasing
cultus--with all the more assiduity, we may fairly suppose, as being a
stranger in Paris. I fear that his labors were in the main of a carnal
and unscientific sort; certainly they never won him any reputation for
religious zeal. Nor was Paris the field before all others where
laborers of this sort were needed. In Paris, indeed, the doctrine and
practice of pleasure had been attended to, with no lack of zeal, for at
least three centuries before the time of Heine's arrival there. Would
that Heine had taken up his creed with somewhat more of reserve; that
he had been content with a less many-sided experience of